The curse abides.

On May 3, 1983, the Catholic bishops of the United States issued their pastoral letter on peace and war, decrying the arms race as a curse on humanity and warning that "the threat of nuclear war hangs over the human community." A decade later, with the signing of the START II accord in Moscow on January 3, 1993, remarkable reductions-- up to two-thirds of Russian and U.S. strategic weapons--are scheduled by 2003. Yet despite START II, the nuclear arms race continues: worldwide, 20,000 nuclear warheads will still remain in place in 2003. And this year alone, the U.S. plans to spend $38 billion on nuclear war preparations.

Recent tensions among Russia, the U.S., and Ukraine over the latter's failure to implement START I, signed in 1991, make clear how hard it is for nuclear-armed states to wean themselves from dependency on these devastating weapons. Because knowledge of nuclear technology is widespread and indestructible, the nuclear genie is out of the bottle. Crude fission weapons can be constructed by nearly any nation able to reprocess nuclear fuel into plutonium from its civilian power stations. Nuclear power programs in both Algeria and North Korea may conceal nuclear weapons production, and Iraq's "great deceit" in hiding its program should dispel any false optimism about taming the nuclear hydra. The U.S., while attempting to curtail such nuclear proliferation, has refused to definitively stop its own nuclear testing. Defense Department scientists are even now developing a new generation of small nuclear weapons--including a thousand-ton "tinynuke" warhead for attacking ground troops--for use in the third world.

Now add to this these ominous, everyday facts: other weapons of mass destruction-chemical and biological weapons--are far easier to make and to conceal than nuclear weapons; and conventional arms transfers worldwide go on unabated, out-stripping in dollar value even the world's grain trade. From 1987 to 1991, the top five exporters of conventional weapons (as it happens, the five permanent members of the Security Council, which are also acknowledged nuclear powers) sold more than $150 billion in conventional arms, with the U.S. and the Soviet Union accounting for $120 billion between them.

But arms proliferation in all these categories is not spawned by sheer availability. As the bishops noted, "negotiating on arms control agreements in isolation, without persistent and parallel efforts to reduce the political tensions which motivate the buildup of armaments, will not suffice." Arms reduction is chiefly a political and diplomatic challenge, more a matter of restraining the demand-side of the arms equation than of controlling the supply-side. To build the modicum of trust between adversaries needed to instill even the glimmer of hope for nonmilitary solutions, the bishops called for a variety of initiatives, including unilateral ones. The near-collapse of the Soviet economy and the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev allowed such unilateral actions to become a reality, and George Bush reciprocated in kind. The fact that the dramatic reductions proposed in START II were formulated in less than six months would have been thought impossible even two years ago.

In 1990, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union agreed bilaterally to halt the production of chemical warfare agents and to reduce theft stocks of these weapons. While only the U.S., Russia, and Iraq admit to having chemical weapons, twenty other nations are suspected of having them. But the U.S.-Soviet initiative gave rise to a new, multilateral chemical weapons accord. Last month in Paris, more than 120 nations, including the U.S., Russia, Israel, and Iran, began signing the new Chemical Weapons Convention, the most stringent agreement of its kind. It not only outlaws the development, production, and use of chemical weapons, but calls for the destruction of existing stocks; the dismantling of all production facilities within ten years; and it establishes the most complex international verification regime ever designed, one that includes challenge inspections of a suspected country. In this respect, the CWC itself builds on the 1987 U.S .-USSR intermediate-range nuclear treaty that set stringent standards for verification.

But nations do not necessarily abide by their treaty obligations. Iraq flaunts the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to which it is a party, and has made a sieve of international nuclear regulations. It has been able to do this because governments which ought to know better lack vigilance and the international agencies meant to monitor such matters do not have the means or the backing they need. According to the New York Times (November 25, 1992), half of the equipment licensed by the U.S. Commerce Department for sale to Iran in the past four years was considered "nuclear weapons relevant" by the Energy Department. Stronger regulation and better coordination need immediate attention.

Conventional weapons do not evoke the same fear as weapons of mass destruction, yet according to Richard Barnet (Harpers, February 1993), at least 20 million people died during the cold-war period in more than 120 conventional wars. It is conventional weapons that most need tough, multilateral controls. But it is here that the "conversion of hearts" the bishops called for will be most difficult to achieve: A well-established pattern for worldwide arms trading exists; extensive and efficient suppliers maintain it; tensions that all but defy solutions drive demand; and the sheer force of habit creates a vicious circle. Hardly was the Gulf War ended, for example, when President Bush reversed his own call for proscribing arms transfers to the Middle East and announced the U.S. would sell 18 billion dollars' worth of arms to its allies in the region

During the cold war, it was control of conventional weapons that received the least scrutiny of all arms transfers. Now, some hint of change is finally afoot. In 1990, The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty brought significant cutbacks in these arms in Europe and created greater "transparency" of arms transfers. This move, coupled with the Gulf War, led to a December 1991 UN General Assembly call for a voluntary register of all international arms sales. More than 150 nations, not including China, approved the resolution. As a result, by this April, all major 1992 arms transfers are to have been reported to the UN. It is a modest, necessary step.

The bishops were correct a decade ago when they observed that the demand for weapons will disappear only when the earth's various tribes and factions have developed more effective means of nonviolent conflict resolution. But the mark of Cain abides: In the last ten years, more than 70 percent of those who died in wars were unarmed civilians, victims of conventional weapons. The next ten years will be both critical and dangerous. It is crucial that world leaders attend to the control of conventional arms, including the bishops who should speak out again with the same principled specificity that marked "The Challenge of Peace."