During the Cold War, arms-control efforts focused on weapons of mass destruction. Diplomats struggled to find ways to limit biological, chemical and nuclear arsenals. They met with varying degrees of success, and they are laboring still to protect humanity from their destructive power. In recent years, a new threat has become evident: that posed by small arms and light weapons. Capping the trade in such weapons will be no less frustrating than the effort to limit the spread of the others, but governments and arms-control advocates must try.
This category of weapons poses entirely new challenges for arms control. Small arms are easy to make, easy to use and easy to transport or smuggle. As a result they are cheap and widely available. Experts estimate there are more than 500 million small arms and light weapons circulating worldwide. They may be designated as "small" or "light," but they are just as deadly as other weapons. In the last decade, 3 million people have been killed in conflicts that used small arms alone. As many as 90 percent of all deaths in contemporary wars are caused by light weapons. They have become "the primary tools of violence" in the world.
The proliferation of such weapons has changed the face of war. The horrific rise in the number of child soldiers is partially attributable to the growing availability of small arms. Older, larger weapons could not be handled by most children under the age of 16; the new ones can. Although small arms are just as deadly as large weapons, we have not yet seen the real effects of the growing use of this class of weapons.