With India and Pakistan at this moment on the very edge of war, the question of exactly how these two poor and technologically backward countries got to the point where they can threaten each other with sophisticated warplanes, armour and other advanced weapons assumes a particular significance. The question is answered more fully and precisely than before in a new study, “The Arms Trade with the Third World” from the Stockholm International Press Research Institute, published today.
 
The book, the first major work to bring together the political, military and economic aspects of the arms trade with Third World countries has a simple starting point : all wars fought in the past 23 years have been fought in the Third Worlds, and all have been fought with weapons supplied by a few Great Powers. Exports of major weapons to Third World countries have pushed dramatically upwards during the past 20 years. Between 1950 and 1970, the book shows, the total yearly value of these exports has increased seven-fold, by 1970 amounting to one and a half billion dollars. Four countries - the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and France - have stocked with the arsenals of the Third World, with the US and the Soviet Union accounting for about two thirds of all supplies and Britain and France a further 20 per cent.

The history of Indo-Pakistani arms race, as detailed in the book, is particularly illuminating, since it involves all the players of the arms trade game. While it would be foolish to deny that the initial impetus for the race sprang from the existing hostility between India and Pakistan. It is also true that the competition between the Great Powers for influence in the subcontinent looks in retrospect curiously collusive. It is as if the US and the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China had positively conspired to divert the subcontinent’s resources to military ends and to prime it for destructive war.

Supplies of major weapons to the subcontinent have shown the same rising trend as to the Third World as a whole, increasing four and a half times between the first half of the Fifties and the second half of the Sixties. The real beginning of the local arms race was in 1954, when the United States, searching for a South Asian partner to link its anti-Communist alliances in the Far East and the Middle East, persuaded Pakistan to join SEATO and the Baghdad Pact as the price for weapons supplies, which Pakistan wanted principally because of its fear of India.

This US aid to Pakistan was matched by substantial Indian purchases from Britain and France with Britain supplying over half the total. Orders from India for Hunters and additional Canberras and Ouragans closely followed.
 
Reports that Pakistan was to receive F-86 Sabres and B-37 Canberras from the US. AMX-13 tanks were ordered after Pakistan received M-41 Bulldogs from the US. Nevertheless, the SIPRI study says, India’s purchases up to 1962 indicated that her object was a prestige build-up of weaponry - lots of jet combat aircraft and an aircraft-carrier, but no new infantry weapons and little of the support equipment necessary for the actual operational use of the new air assets in real war.

The Indian defeat in the 1962 war with China changes the Indian attitude. The Western Powers grew disillusioned with India after her refusal to accept a US-Britain commitment for air defence, the US refusing to supply India with F-104 starfighters. The Soviet Union saw its chance and stepped in with an alternative offer of a SAM-2 AA missiles complex plus MiG-21s, both direct export and to be produced under license. Later India took Soviet frigates, Soviet submarines and Su-7 ground attack fighters from Russia, which gained further ground by imposing no embargo during the 1965 war with Pakistan.

The great inflow of Western and Soviet arms into India after the 1962 war was, the study suggests, the precipitating factor in the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. Pakistan’s “acute awareness that any advantages in firepower which its armed forces possessed over India were being whittled away” led it to make its move over Kashmir before, as Pakistan saw it, its advantage wholly passed away. After 1965, Pakistan’s potential arms suppliers played a rapid game of musical chairs. When it became clear that Pakistan was buying arms from China, the US partially lifted its embargo on arms supplies. Pakistan then signed an arms agreement with the Soviet Union in 1968, possibly using as quid pro the closing of the US base at Peshawar, and acquired other US supplies indirectly via Europe, probably with American connivance, as well as Mirage jets and submarines from France.

Meanwhile the US, perhaps as the result of State Department study indicating that the withholding of military aid had “not been successful in any instance,” announced that it would supply Pakistan with six Starfighters, seven B-57 bombers and 200 armoured personnel carriers as a “one-time exception.” It is the supply of these, as well as spare parts, that has now been suspended. As to the motives of the suppliers, they illustrate the complete range - the Soviet Union and the US trying to use the supply of arms to “reinforce their dominant role in world affairs.” France and Britain trying to preserve a vulnerable domestic arms base by exports. The SIPRI study provides similarly precise details on arms supplies to 91 third world countries. Four thousand individual arms deals, many of them unrecorded in public trade statistics have been identified by the SIPRI workers.

The book is a mine of disquieting information and as in previous SIPRI works, coolly realistic about the possibility of improvement. But “in the regions where the competing military commitments of the Great Powers are important there is no prospect of any such agreements being reached until there is more progress in settlement between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is in the regions where the links with the major arms race are weakest that the possibility of agreement is greatest, for instance, Latin America and the Sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, the competitive arming of third world countries will presumably go on, in the Middle East, in East Asia, and in the Indian subcontinent, whether or not the war that now threatens actually takes place.