
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 9, 1995                   TAG: 9504130017
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SMALL-WEAPON SPREAD

AS THE WORLD watches former Cold War powers reduce their nuclear armaments, the spread of another kind of danger has gone largely unremarked.

Fueling the small-scale but murderous warfare popping up across the globe is a worldwide glut of light weaponry - military rifles, grenades, anti-tank and anti-aircraft rockets, mines, and so on.

Unlike high-tech weapons systems, light weapons are easy to use and affordable to virtually any faction anywhere (including warring gangs in American cities) that wants to make the effort. According to a report last week in The Christian Science Monitor, estimates of the size of the international trade in light weapons now run as high as $10 billion annually.

Controlling this traffic would pose practical difficulties in any event. It's harder to keep track of, and thus easier to smuggle, crates of Russian AK-47 clones than, say, a fighter jet. Moreover, millions of light weapons are floating around the world, leftovers from the Cold War when both sides sought to win friends and influence people by supplying their every armaments need. But the general lack of interest in trying to get a handle on the trade doesn't help.

Since early in the Reagan administration, for example, the United States has required disclosure only of major arms transfers to foreign countries; no longer must the quantity and value of every transfer, official or commercial, be reported. The Clinton administration, says its critics, is less interested in small-arms control than in making America as dominant in international light-weapons sales as it already is in high-tech weaponry.

According to the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, as cited in The Monitor report, nearly 300 companies in more than 50 countries now make small arms and related equipment, 25 percent more than a decade ago. China, with at least 16 factories, is believed to rank first; the United States ranks fifth.

War is not caused by munitions makers alone, of course. Neither, however, is the world lacking for people with an economic interest in maintaining the munitions markets that wars help sustain.

by CNB