The governments of the world spend massive amounts of money on weapons. In 2007, the United States alone sold $39.4 billion in conventional weapons to over 23 countries. When you add up the total arms trade for the world it comes to over $1 trillion dollars a year. It is all too clear that for many countries war and weapons is a big business.

Nobel Oscar Arias Sanchez on The Proliferation of Weapons

In his address when accepting the Nobel Prize, Oscar Arias Sanchez said, “We want arms to fall silent and men to speak. Our sons are being killed by conventional weapons. Our youths are being killed by conventional weapons. Fear of nuclear war, the horrors of what we have heard about the nuclear end of the world, seems to have made us uncaring about conventional war… How welcome it would be if conventional weapons were treated with the same awe as the atom bomb! How welcome it would be if the killing of many little by little, everyday, was considered just as outrageous as the killing of many all at once!”

While governments spend incredible sums for guns, tanks, bombs missiles and warplanes, basic human needs go unmet for hundreds of millions of people. Most so-called “aid” to other countries is in fact money to be used to buy arms. Perhaps 15 times more is given in weapons aid than in true humanitarian aid.

Those weapons don’t just lie around in warehouses. They make possible armed conflicts, big and small that take an estimated 1,000 lives a day worldwide. Without the easy availability of weapons these conflicts would not take place or they would be less violent. The international arms trade also supports governments and armed groups that commit human rights abuses. Dictatorships in countries like Burma, militias and gangs in places like Darfur and the Congo all depend on the arms trade. And it’s not just the guns that kill. Violent conflicts like civil wars kill many more people through increased poverty, famine and disease.

We often hear of “weapons of mass destruction,” nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that are devastatingly destructive. Yet conventional weapons bring about death and destruction on a daily basis. We must seek to control the international arms trade, as an important way of reducing violence and bringing about a more peaceful world.