Biggest terror threat is from small arms

The world may be focused on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction, especially in Iraq. But a more widespread threat to US security - and to individual Americans - may be the vast number of relatively simple and cheap conventional arms.

Lightweight shoulder-fired "MANPADS" (man-portable air defense systems) such as US-made Stingers; Russian SA-7's; and Chinese, Egyptian, and Pakistani equivalents are everywhere today. Not only have they been supplied to countries with terrorist elements, but their relative simplicity has made it easy to "reverse engineer" them and build new variants.

With the exception of Israel's national airline, El Al, and a few business jets, commercial air carriers have no defense against such attacks. And according to a General Accounting Office report last week, even the US military has "serious reliability problems" with some of its systems meant to defend against missiles.

But beyond one-man antiaircraft weapons (thousands of which exist around the world today), the proliferation of other light conventional weapons poses a mounting threat. Estimates of small arms around the world now range from 500 million to one billion. These include assault rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, portable antitank and antiaircraft weapons, light mortars, land mines, and explosives.

"In some areas of the world an AK-47 assault rifle can be bought for a bag of maize or $20-$30," reports the United Nations.

Michael Klare, an expert on defense policy and arms trade at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., warns that "the most deadly combat system of the current epoch is the adolescent human male equipped with a Kalashnikov assault rifle." In Somalia, the 1993 US debacle described in "Black Hawk Down" was caused by a couple of rifle-propelled grenades fired at US helicopters, and it seemed as if everybody above the age of 12 in Mogadishu had his own AK-47.

Will the same be true in Baghdad?

"If I was a GI, I wouldn't be worried about weapons of mass destruction but about house-to-house fighting in Baghdad," says Dr. Klare. And even if the war against the Saddam Hussein regime is over quickly, that doesn't mean an end to the danger to US forces from small arms. More threatening, says Klare, may be factional fighting - "separating the Sunnis from the Shiites and the Kurds ... and getting caught in the middle of shooting matches."

In Iraq, training camps for children give instruction in the proper use of small arms and light weapons. Most Kurdish men and boys are armed.

The steady increase in small arms and light weapons around the world, documented by the United Nations and other organizations, has several causes. Among them: a growing arms trade fueled by criminal activities involving drugs, diamonds, and other black-marketed goods; few international restrictions of the type governing chemical and biological weapons and land mines; the increase in terrorist groups; "failed states" marked by poverty and lawlessness, and countries newly independent but lacking a strong central government.

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