ABSTRACT: It is now more than a year since the Gulf War ended, and the possibility of controlling and reducing international arms trafficking seem to be steadily diminishing.

The two summits attended by the permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, Russia, France, the UK and China), which were held in July and October of 1991 in Paris and London respectively, achieved virtually nothing.

(THE PARTY new - n. 6 - march 1992)

Last year, China continued to resist US diplomatic pressure to curb its exports of military technology and weapons: there has been news not only of the export of conventional weapons from China, but also of missile carriers and - what is far more dangerous - nuclear technology to countries such as Iran and Algeria. Recently, the Chinese regime has even gone as far as supporting Kim Il Sung's crumbling North Korean dictatorship in its insane race to build a nuclear bomb as soon as possible. Neither does China seem in any great hurry to sign the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty that it had, in fact, agreed to sign last summer. Russia has also considerably slowed down its reconversion of the arms industry: it is selling surplus military equipment on the international market at bargain basement prices (Iran is once again amongst the buyers), and seems to want to solve its grave financial problems by once more selling arms to the world.

The interview with Boris Yeltsin that appeared in "Izvestia" on 22 February is very revealing: "The sale of arms is a necessity for us today - said the Russian President - Soviet weapons are extremely popular throughout the world and it is very easy to find buyers". Vladimir Shibayev, Vice-Chairman of the Russian Government Committee for International Economic Relations, confirms this: "The world arms market is divided up between various countries, and it would be very stupid of us to give up the market share we have won for ourselves; after all, the sale of arms is a very profitable business".

The United Nations imposed a tardy and ineffective embargo on the sale of military equipment to the ex-Yugoslavia, and all those countries who had a surplus of arms to sell (from the Lebanon to the countries of the Warsaw Pact) couldn't supply the opposing forces engaged in the war quickly enough.

In other words, the illusion that military power means security is taking a long time to fade and this is confirmed by, amongst other things, the Ukraine's desire to equip itself with a completely new army of more than 400,000 men.

If these tendencies are confirmed they could jeopardize international efforts to control market supply: in fact, it only needs one of the participating countries not to respect the new rules for everyone else to revert to the old saying: "if we don't export arms somebody else will". This trend is unfortunately confirmed by the fact that a country like Sweden, usually very loath to traffick in arms, is revising its policy in this area.

All this makes the Radical Party project even more necessary: there is no hope of governments being able to arrive at swift and effective decisions necessary to combat this dangerous world situation without pressure being brought upon them by the people and their elected representatives.

The Radical initiative of May 1991 must therefore be relaunched in as many world parliaments as possible. We would remind you that this initiative resulted in the Italian Chamber of Deputies unanimously approving a resolution concerning the creation of an "international regime for the non-proliferation of conventional weapons and military technology". Or, in other words, the establishing of new forms of collaboration between the north and the south of the world, collaboration in which military exports are systematically substituted by technological exports for civilian use and financial aid to underdeveloped countries.