The Arms Bazaar
Anthony Sampson
340 pages
published in 1977

Anthony Sampson made his reputation through a series of books examining the realities of economic and political power in Britain and the world. His Seven Sisters for example describes the history of Big Oil, while his most famous work, The Anatomy of Britain, first published in 1962 and regularly updated, investigated the ruling classes in the UK. The Arms Bazaar is a logical extension of this work, setting out the history and current practises of the international arms trade.

Now The Arms Bazaar was published in 1977, in a world very different from the one we currently live in. The Cold War was still more then a decade away from ending, the Soviet Union in fact seemed more strong then ever, while both Iran and Iraq were still ruled by friendly dictators and the Vietnam war was only two years in the past. At first glance then, The Arms Bazaar seems to be only of historical interest, a current affairs book whose current affairs has long since become history.

That would be wrong however. The world may have changed a lot since 1977, but the realities of the arms trade have remained the same. A book like The Arms Bazaar, which explains the history of the arms trade, its inner workings and how it influences both the domestic politics and the foreign policy of countries like the UK, France and the US, is therefore still relevant. It helps that Anthony Sampson is able to explain complex issues in a way that makes them easy to understand, without simplifying them.

When Sampson was writing The Arms Bazaar, the socalled Lockheed scandal had just been broken, in which it emerged that the Lockheed Corporation had been systematically bribing government officials around the world in order to sell its planes. Amongst the people taking bribes: prince Bernard, the husband of the then Dutch queen... It's this scandal that runs like a red thread through the book. In the process, Sampson shows that Lockheed was far from unique in doing this, that in fact this was common practise in the arms industry and something all governments knew of and expected. Nothing much has changed since then, as the Al Yamamah bribery scandal shows, in which British Aerospace is alleged to have paid hundreds of millions, if not more, in bribes to various Saudi Arabian princes...

Sampson does more than trace the history of the Lockheed scandals however, as he also traces the history of the modern arms trade back to the last half of the 19th century, and the rise of the first giant arms manufacturers, companies like Krupps and Vickers-Armstrong. These companies from their inception were always dependent on export orders to survive and they were in fact encouraged by their governments to chase after them, using middlemen like the infamous Basil Zaharoff (immortalised in the Tintin album The Broken Ear as the weapon trader Basil Bazarov, who sells to both parties in the war that he provokes). When World War I happened, the arms merchants ("merchants of death") were therefore widely blamed for it.

But it was only after World War Ii that the modern arms trade really got going. Thanks to the Cold War there wasn't quite the repeat of what had happened after the First World War, when most countries basically stopped buying much in the way of new arms for a decade or so. Instead, the US and its allies kept a continuous cycle of arms procurement going, yet because weapons became increasingly complex and hence increasingly expensive, fewer could be bought and competition between companies for government orders grew fiercer. Hence the pressure to export grew, as companies wanted to profit from their investments and governments wanted to split the costs of their new weapons with other governments: the more F-4 Phantoms sold abroad, the cheaper they became to buy for the US Airforce as well. Not to mention that arms sales were an important earner of foreign capital for countries like France and the UK and many jobs depended on it.

At first these arms sales were mostly to other western countries, but it was inevitable that they would also be sold to other countries in the socalled Third World, with the biggest customer being the Shah of Persia, who was nuts for modern weapons and airplanes. Things went so far that by the mid-seventies that customers like the Shah could get almost exactly the same hightech warplanes as were on order for the US Airforce, the F-14 Tomcat. This process has continued to the present day, with countries like Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia buying weapons almost exactly the same as those used by the US and the UK; no longer are export models accepted.

The consequences of the out of control arms trade are blindingly obvious. It has destabilised whole regions, the Middle East especially and countless billions have been wasted that could've been put to more productive use. As The Arms Bazaar showed, it has also corrupted governments, both in the "Third World" as in the socalled developed nations. Sampson offers no solutions to this, he just shows how the trade works.

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