Limiting the Proliferation of Weapons: The Role of Supply-Side Strategies

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

The global trade in arms is enormous and there are no signs that the end
of the Cold War will slow it down. The Gulf War led to Middle Eastern
countries’ getting into the market in an even bigger way, and the wars
in Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union have all provided a boon for
the sellers. So vast is this trade that it is estimated to amount to
almost $500 billion a year, or almost half of the world’s total
military expenditures of $1 trillion. That amount would provide a heap
of medicine and food for babies in the Third World—and just under 80
percent of arms are imported by developing states. The African, South
American, and Asian countries that buy the arms are threatened, for the
most part, by no one, at least no one external to their borders, so it
is clear that most arms are bought to cow the poor and hungry. And all
this is aided and abetted by the developed nations, including, in its
small way, Canada. This book, the product of a Canadian Institute for
International Peace and Security conference in 1991, examined the
situation at the end of the Cold War. The prospects are far from
pleasing, for almost any state can afford bacteriological and chemical
weapons—and there are producers willing to supply them.