Big things in small packages: steps to limit nuclear arms are admirable, but an international effort to regulate small arms would do more to save lives.

Commendable as it is to seek an international reduction in nuclear arms, and it is commendable, the degree to which US President Barack Obama's campaign will actually save lives is directly proportional to the political risk his proposal entails--which in both cases is negligible.

While the specter of a nuclear-armed terrorist attacking a major international city is frightening, so is Godzilla, a potential alien invasion, or Nostradamus forecasting the end of the world. The most effective thing about both terrorism and nuclear weapons is not the actual body count they produce, but rather the ability they have to sow fear and as a result, distort priorities.

Every single innocent civilian killed by a terrorist is a tragedy, just as every person who has died as a result of nuclear weapons is appalling. More people died of bug bites last year than from terrorist attacks. Nobody has died from a nuclear weapon in more than 50 years.

An estimated 140,000 people died from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and another 80,000 at Nagasaki. The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) estimates that 1000 people are killed every day by small arms and another 3,000 seriously injured. Even if we were to double the total number of estimated deaths for Hiroshima and Nagasaki--up to 440,000--to account for difficult to quantify radiation related deaths, the same number of people die from small arms about every 62 weeks.

Nuclear weapons have, of course, evolved, becoming more powerful and deadly. Use of a nuclear weapon now has the potential to kill many times more people than either bomb dropped on Japan. It is also likely that any terrorist organization that is capable of deploying a nuclear weapon on an innocent civilian population will do so with a relatively weak and hastily constructed weapon operated in less than ideal conditions. Though such a scenario paints a bleak picture, the number of deaths would have to surpass 30,000 (ten times the deaths that occurred on September 11, 2001) to equal the number of gun deaths in the United States each year.

In recent years there have been effective international campaigns to limit the use of other types of weapons. In December 2008 in Oslo, 94 countries signed a treaty pledging not to use cluster munitions, though notably not the United States. The Ottawa Treaty banning the use of anti-personnel land mines has 156 signatories, but not the United States, Russia, China, India or Pakistan. A 1993 treaty outlawing chemical weapons now has 187 countries on board. So while there is precedent for international agreements producing results, no global agreement regulating the trade in small arms exists. A UN committee vote in 2006 on a resolution titled "Towards an Arms Treaty" saw 139 countries voting "yes," 24 abstentions and only the United States voting "no." In December of that year, the resolution went before the entire UN General Assembly resulting in 153 yes votes, 24 abstentions and a lone "no" from the United States.

Obama says, "In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up." This statement rests on the logic that since the end of the Cold War new states have acquired weapons and non-state actors have risen with the capacity and desire to acquire these weapons. However, Obama misjudges the most geopolitically destabilizing post-Cold War development.

While the rise of violent non-state actors is an increasing challenge, more dangerous than nukes is the black market economy such groups use to finance themselves and procure weapons to push their agenda. These black market operations clearly manifested themselves in Europe during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s and have been a feature of every armed conflict since--with the possible exception of the brief Russo-Georgian War of 2008. Rogue militia groups have formed networks with criminal smuggling operations and in many cases morphed into singular entities capable of bypassing international arms embargoes. Such dynamics have long plagued Colombia and are now submerging Mexico in chaotic violence. The same phenomena fueled civil wars in Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq and remain the chief accelerant to violence in Afghanistan.

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Who are NATO forces fighting in Central Asia? An alliance of international jihadists and local tribes, financed by heroin smuggling, armed by professional dealers and assisted by operatives in the Pakistani intelligence service.

The international community should absolutely try to prevent a Pakistani nuclear weapon from falling into the hands of such people, but it seems obvious that the more pressing, immediate and deadly problem is an unregulated globalized trade network able to efficiently deliver dangerous and effective arms through market mechanisms wherever the highest demand and ability to pay exists.

While globalization has spread the wonders of lamb vindaloo to London and English football to Thailand, the dark side of this international wild west of commerce is that sinister elements have equally increased their ability to move merchandise, whether it be drugs, people or guns. As the book Global Transformations, written by a team of British scholars, rightly observes of the arms trade: "In few other domains has globalization been more extensive." A report by Control Arms, a collaboration between Oxfam, IANSA and Amnesty International, notes the logic behind globalized arms trade, sounding much like a general lesson in globalization: "When major Western arms companies are able to co-operate with partners in other countries they can develop and penetrate new markets, while their partners gain access to cutting edge technology."

More recently, Obama has rightly spoken on the need to curb American arms making their way into Mexico and fueling deadly drug cartel wars along the US-Mexican border. Obama says he will push for Congressional ratification of the Inter-American convention on small arms, which was negotiated by the Clinton administration and ratified by 24 of 34 members of the Organization of American States, but has been stalled in the US Senate since 1998. Another initiative, and one that would be politically more difficult, would be to reinstitute an assault weapons ban in the United States which expired in 2004. In Mexico, assault weapons and guns larger than. 30 caliber are illegal. About 6000 people have been killed in drug related violence in Mexico during the past year, and 90 percent of drug gang guns recovered by authorities came from the United States, many legally purchased. Last year 20, 000 weapons were seized from gangs by Mexican authorities. In 2007, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms traced nearly 2,500 weapons seized in Mexico directly back to legal US dealers, 1,800 of these were matched to dealers in the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Gun violence in Latin America is not limited to Mexico; the most recent statistics available from the UN Office of Drugs and Crime lists eight of the world's top ten gun homicide rates in the Americas, and seventeen of the top twenty with the United States amongst them. One study on small arms proliferation in Latin America estimated there were more than 80 million in circulation in 2006. Despite the temporal relevance of this issue to the 32-nations attending April's Summit of the Americas, talk of arms and violence was quickly sidelined by the mere mention of thawed US relations with Cuba, a country not even in attendance.

If Obama was to move on small arms proliferation, after he finished taking on the gun lobby in the United States, he and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev could talk about reducing Russia's $442 million in annual licit small arm exports, or the United States $618 million worth. Italy and Germany could join the discussion, with their $390 and $306 million in respective yearly exports. None of these numbers account for black market sales which some estimate surpasses $10 billion annually, or the sale of slightly larger weapons--larger than. 50 caliber--characterized as "light weapons."

These topics are worthy of discussion alongside general talk of reducing the eight-million small arms and light weapons which are produced each year, or trying to account for the one-million guns lost or stolen each year.

Next the Americans and Russians, both members of the UN Security Council, could go to New York and urge progress on the stalled UN arms treaty. The aforementioned "no" votes by the United States, if still a measure of American policy, would have the potential to derail the whole process through a Security Council veto.

Just as the killing capacity of a nuclear weapon has grown in the past half-century, the same can be said for small arms and light weapons. In addition to becoming more effective and efficient killing machines in general, the most efficient and cost-effective ways to kill have in true free market fashion proliferated most effectively. The most popular of weapons is the Automatic Kalashnikov of 1947, or AK-47, which the World Bank estimates number 75 million worldwide. In some African countries, they sell for as little as 12 USD, indicative of both accessibility and near total market saturation. The Kalashnikov is pictured on the flag of Mozambique, the coat of arms of Zimbabwe, the flag of Hezbollah and in the insignia for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

"I don't worry when my guns are used for national liberation or defense," Mikhail Kalashnikov, the weapon's creator told The Times of London in 2006, reflecting Cold War-era thinking. "But when I see how peaceful people are killed and wounded by these weapons, I get very distressed and upset."

Now, unlicensed carbon copies of the Kalashnikov are manufactured the world over, including the infamous "Khyber Pass Copy" made in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. While the bogeyman of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan--who sold nuclear designs and secrets to the highest bidder--is the poster child for market driven nuclear proliferation, the cottage industry proliferation of small arms based on blueprints of effective weapons is a contemporary reality producing actual not just potential deaths. There is no single face on spreading small arm or light weapon technology, as it is pervasive and significantly harder to monitor. Trade in weapon components is also on the rise, allowing exporters--often from several different countries--to send ambiguous pieces of weapons to be assembled into arms elsewhere.

If Obama's drive to reduce nuclear arms is a gateway to pursuing other geopolitical agendas, like Western rapprochement with Russia, then the proposals are an exercise in innovative diplomatic brinksmanship. If the proposal hopes to generate excitement and to foster cooperation between the left-leaning activist generations of the 1960s and 1970s now leading in his own country and abroad, then it is a shrewd act of political calculation. If it is a policy initiative intent on making the world a less deadly place, there are better places to start, in particular, by reducing the proliferation of weaponry that manifests deadly efficiency on a daily basis.

It is true enough that international leaders can simultaneously pursue a reduction in nuclear arms and smaller conventional weapons, but the rhetorical emphasis on nuclear arms risks sidelining the small arms agenda and exposes the nuclear initiative for what it is: a public relations-fueled proposal and not the quickest and most real way to make the world a less deadly place.

An attempt to curb the trade in small arms and light weapons would be a sign that Obama is a humanitarian truly seeking to limit the death of international innocents, and would furthermore be illustrative of a man serious about confronting the fundamental problems posed by rapid globalization of which we are now all too familiar.

Now that would be truly inspiring leadership.

SUGGESTED READING

Bhagwati, Jagdish. In Defense of Globalization. (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Buzan, Barry. People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International

Relations. (University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

Glenny, Misha. McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers. (The Bodley Head Ltd., 2008).

Kaldor, Mary. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. (Stanford University Press, 1999).

Benjamin Cunningham is the managing editor of The Prague Post.