The arms bazaar

Need for strict regulation

Many poor countries of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa spend 2 or 3 times as much on arms as on education or health.

 While the necessary corrective action in the latest arms purchase scandal is being hotly debated, there is also a need to look beyond individual defence deals to focus on the wider need to regulate the international arm industry. Worldwide military expenditure is of around $1,650 billion in a year. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the arms trade is responsible for 40 per cent of all corruption in global transactions. About 62 per cent of total arms sales is now cornered by 10 largest companies.

The sheer enormity of the arms industry as a whole as well as the operations of the top companies within this industry indicates the need for careful regulation at the international level. After all, this is a unique industry whose products are aimed not at satisfying any need but instead at killing people; and they will a bigger market and a higher price if they can kill more people and cause greater destruction. The more its power to destroy, the more profit a product brings.

Due to this unique characteristic of the arms industry as well as its huge size and high concentration, there is clearly a big need for transparency and accountability on the part of this industry. There is a very clear need for regulation. Yet the arms industry is known to be highly secretive and is known for its clandestine activities.

The national governments tend more often to collude with their armament giants instead of limiting or regulating their activities.

In this situation, it is likely that the vested interests of the arms industry will try to accentuate greatly the conflicts. As the Human Development Report pointed out some time back, “Arms dealers continue to ship weapons to potential trouble spots, showing little concern about fanning the flames of conflict. Much of the pressure for international sales comes from producers promoting overseas sales to recoup overheads and maximise profits.”

Further this report said, “Several industrial countries, fearing job losses in defence industries, have increased their subsidies to arms exporters and encouraged them to increase sales to developing countries. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the heads of some industrial countries take a keen interest in promoting international arms sales.”

The extreme distress caused by the arms industry keeps increasing with the destructive capacity of its weapons.  William Safire wrote, “The largest conventional bomb in the US arsenal contains 10 tonnes of high explosives. It outweighs the BLU-82, nicknamed the ‘daisy cutter’  and used to destroy caves in Afghanistan, by 3,000 pounds. It is said to obliterate everything in a 1,000-yard radius.” This weapon is officially called the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB). Keeping in view its explosive capacity, however, many people are already re-interpreting this abbreviation as the ‘Mother of All Bombs.’

Terrible death

Cluster bombs explode in the air just before touching ground. Each cluster bomb contains about 200 ‘bomblets.’ John Pilger, a distinguished British journalist, reported, “I have seen the victims of cluster bombs. From many snapshots, here is one. Two children writhe on a dirt floor, their bodies displaying hundreds of small open wounds. They have been showered with tiny plastic objects from an American ‘pellet bomb,’ the prototype of the cluster bomb. As the darts move through their vital organs, they die a terrible death the equivalent of swallowing acid.” Many of these bomblets contained in a cluster bomb do not explode immediately. They continue to cause a lot of civilian deaths later.

Although more attention is generally devoted to heavy weapons, in practice frequently even more destruction is caused by small arms and light weapons, a technical term (generally abbreviated to ‘small arms’) which covers revolvers, pistols, rifles, carbines, machine-guns, ammunition, shells, grenades, landmines and explosives.

Amnesty International and Oxfam say in a recent report titled Shattered Lives, “More injuries, deaths, displacements, rapes, kidnappings and acts of torture are inflicted or perpetrated with small arms than with any other type of weapon...There are approximately 639 million small arms in the world today. Nearly 60 per cent of small arms are in civilian hands. And 8 million new weapons are produced every year.”

The high-powered sales efforts of the arms industry are backed more or less routinely with corrupt practices, involving persons occupying (or having occupied) senior official positions. These high-pitch sales divert resources from meeting the basic needs of people.

According to a report of the UNDP, “Many poor countries of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa now spend two or three times as much on arms as on education or health. Such spending often comes from unrepresentative regimes that invoke spurious threats to national security as a justification for such spending. In reality, those regimes are usually more interested in using the hardware to suppress their own people. Even moderate cuts in military expenditure can lead to significant achievements in meeting the basic needs of people.”

Military activities and weapons have emerged as a major polluter and destroyer of environment. It is said that military-related activities may be responsible for 10 to 30 per cent of all global environment degradation.
Clearly it is extremely important to regulate and control the arms industry at the international level. This will help to make conflicts less  destructive, release more funds for meeting real needs of people and also check corruption to a significant extent. Unless such wider efforts at international regulation and control are made, the world will merely move from one arms scandal to the next.