Political Implications of Illegal Arms Exports from the United States

Abstract

The study of international arms trade has come in bursts. In the 1930s the proliferation of studies coincided with the international attention given the merchants of death and their alleged responsibility for World War I. As the League of Nations and eventually most arms producing nations debated the negative consequences of the private trade in arms, a great deal of light was shed on the patterns, purposes, and effects of this trade.' In the 1970s, as the rise in oil prices and the end of the colonial era led to major changes in the arms trade, academicians, journalists, and policy analysts responded with an outpouring of studies and analyses of governmental arms trade.2 By the mid-1980s, attention was once again drawn to the international trade in arms, but this time to those transactions termed illicit or illegal. Headlines in the United States regularly disclosed indictments for the illegal export of significant military equipment from the United States to the USSR, Eastern bloc countries, Iran, South Africa, the Irish Republican Army, or some other country on the prohibited list. Congres-