Danilo Freire

Thinking Little: Giving Greater Focus to Small Arms

Weapons of mass destruction fears, which aren’t invalid, overshadow what might actually be a bigger, and less easy to approach, threat: that of the proliferation small arms and light weaponry. Are nukes the weapons we should be most immediately worried about? I don’t think so.

Not that we shouldn’t care about nuclear programs, or about people like Ahmedinejad or Al Qaeda having them. Of course we should. A focus on preventing acquisition of large scale disaster weaponry like the CBRN (chemicalbiologicalradiologicalnuclear) class of weapons isn’t exactly a tactic matched with the technologies of the wars that we face (well, not ‘we,’ I don’t face wars. I just blog about them).

The wars we fight are wars where small arms rule. And this is the point in my blog post where I say, if you haven’t already read C.J. Chivers’ The Gun, it’s an incredibly important work and you’re missing out on a whole lot of small arms insight if you haven’t. The problem with the insurgencies and conflicts and civil wars of current times and recent history is that they are fueled not by the big scary weaponry of doomsday proclamations, but by the AK-47s that you can train a child to use and the RPGs that can take down Chinooks and the IEDs that you can make with two pieces of duct tape and a marshmallow. (Okay… maybe more like an fertilizer and easily-made contact detonators, but you get the point.) Ignoring the power that regions bloated with small arms that don’t need much in the way of instruction manuals and which are easily bought, sold and smuggled across borders to put in the hands of whomever is ignoring the power that makes these wars so dangerous. And peacebuilding? Nationbuilding? Those processes don’t work on war-ravaged, freaked out populations with guns at the ready. Regions that continue to have untrackable and unregulated access to small arms and light weaponry will continue to feel the threat of armed groups, will continue to feel the need to arm themselves in defense, and will continue to experience regular community violence. You can’t build peace on a pile of AK-47s (or their Chinese knock-off cousins).

About 85 percent of IEDs are made with fertilizer from a single company inside Pakistan. When it comes to “our interests in Afghanistan” (and by “interests” I mean keeping as many body parts on as many people as possible and actually maybe leaving there before I have my first grandchild), that’s probably far more immediately problematic than Pakistan’s nukes. The greatest single loss of US life in Afghanistan was most likely the result of an RPG, not a nuke or a disease or a freaky terror chemical. We need to be preventing those RPGs from being so easily accessible in the first place.

By all means, keep being freaked out by the idea of Al Qaeda getting their hands on nuclear fuel or biological weaponry; I know I will be. But for the sake of the way conflict works now, and for the sake of actually creating sustainable peace, we have to be far more focused on creating and enforcing actionable international agreements to limit and track the small arms trade and to tailor our foreign/military policies to give larger weight to the smaller weapons.