Moratorium on Weapons Sales

While the call for a one-year moratorium on weapons sales to the Middle East (“Close Down the Weapons Bazaar,” by Andrew Pierre, Commentary, March 28) was right on target, its logic should be applied much more broadly: The United States should lead the way to ending all arms sales worldwide.

Even if weapons sales to the Middle East were cut off for one year, as Pierre suggests, or permanently, as common sense suggests, that would not be enough. It is dangerously shortsighted not to apply the lessons of the Gulf War beyond that one region.

Ending weapons sales worldwide should be a principal objective of American foreign policy, and it will require that the Bush Administration spend as much time, energy and commitment putting together an anti-arms sale coalition as it did in constructing the anti-Saddam coalition.

Sales of sophisticated weapons, from which we profit, fuel regional warfare all over the world. Arms sales no longer serve any foreign policy objectives that cannot be achieved through safer means; we no longer need to keep other nations more loyal to us than to the Soviets.

Nonetheless, in addition to the $20 billion worth of proposed sales to Middle Eastern customers, the U.S. has weapons deals pending to dozens of other countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia--for a total this year of more than $13 billion in arms sales outside the Middle East. In recent years, we have sold tens of millions of dollars worth of weapons to such impoverished nations as Somalia, Senegal and Niger.

We need to encourage leaders in developing countries to spend their money more productively than on buying weapons. Since 1960, the developing world has increased its military expenditures more than twice as fast as its living standards. Many of the most impoverished countries in the world spend more on armaments than they do on education and health care for their own people.

Even the Soviet Union is realizing that arming the world damages everyone’s long-term interests. Over the past few decades the Soviets have engaged in far greater levels of arms transfers to Third World nations than has the U.S. or anyone else. Yet now, as Pierre correctly points out, the Soviets are circulating proposals to achieve supplier-instituted controls on the sales of offensive weapons.

Real progress toward halting arms sales, however, will also require the support of Germany, China, France, Great Britain, both Koreas, Israel, Brazil and others. We must convince these nations that there are better ways to provide gestures of friendship and assistance than to supply sophisticated tools of destruction. We should ban international arms sales and end the escalation of regional arms races.

REP. ANTHONY C. BEILENSON

D-Los Angeles