Sir, - Kevin Myers is spot-on in his remarks on arms manufacturing today (An Irishman's Diary, October 4th). But matters are even more lop-sided in the media and popular imagination than he thinks.
The single most deadly weapon in the world, the one that has wreaked the most havoc over the past 20 years, is the AK-47 assault rifle, the favourite weapon of the terrorist and guerrilla fighter. Russia and China between them have flooded the world with about 40 million AK-47s - about 60 per cent of all the assault rifles in the world.
Two American academics, Boutwell and Klare, writing in the Scientific American (January 2000), assert correctly: "With a few hundred machine guns and mortars, a small army can take over an entire country, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands." For example, in the 1990s, the "army" of Charles Taylor, initially 100 men armed only with AK-47s, reduced Sierra Leone and Liberia to a state of internal chaos, murdering thousands in the process. And this has been repeated across many parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia. Low-technology weaponry is cheap and plentiful, and is often operated by children as young as 10. The deadliest scandal of our age may not be the smart bomb, but the 10-year-old guerrilla.
High-technology equipment, such as that sold by Western states, is expensive to buy and maintain, and needs costly power sources and highly trained personnel for operation and service. Such equipment has a high attrition rate in battle and is hard to replace. It can be used only sparingly and is often useless against guerrillas in jungles and mountains. Contrary to what commentators such as Vincent Browne and John Pilger assert, the vast majority of people in the developing world are not threatened by high-tech weapons, but by gangs posing as "armies" equipped with rifles, mortars and explosives. This is a situation we in Ireland know very well. - Yours, etc.,
Toby Joyce, Balreask Manor, Navan, Co Meath.