However, I agree with China's position that ``the arms embargo against China is political discrimination'' - it sure is: and so the embargo should in my view immediately be extended to include everyone else by banning the arms trade entirely, not just in the so-called ``sensitive technologies'' that the British and American governments have warned against: rather, everything, from bullets to missiles.

And the United States should follow suit and ban exports of its own armaments, as should Russia and China itself.

There can hardly be any trade as pernicious as the arms trade, unless it is perhaps the trade in illicit drugs, which is already banned.

This point of view may well be considered naive, as it no doubt is: I am a product of the 1960s, in case you were wondering, somewhat given to naivete. But no more naive, perhaps, than the control of greenhouse gases which Europe is already enforcing to help mitigate global warming. If Europe can take the moral and political leadership in protection of the planet, why can it not also lead in the protection of the planet's people? As Europe knows from its own experience, war has resulted in the demise of many more people in the past 100 years than global warming is likely to in the next 100.

More recently, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Iraq War is in large part the legacy of Western arms sales to Saddam Hussein in decades past. The Iran-Iraq War was not, for the most part, fought with Iranian and Iraqi-made weapons. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the tanks that rolled over the border were not made in Iraq.

The problem with the current arms sales regime is that, as China has pointed out, arms sales - and embargoes - are political statements. As long as arms sales are allowed, the assigning of political values to sales or embargoes is inevitable.

The arguments in favor of allowing arms sales are sophistry, or worse: for example, the statement that the embargo damages the EU's wider commercial and economic interests in China is the sort of argument which, even if true, used to be used to justify bribery, and when America made a similar argument in declining to ratify the Kyoto accords on carbon emissions, the Europeans gave it short shrift.

Or that arms exports help bolster local arms industries and keep workers employed. When the peasants of Afghanistan or Bolivia make the similar point about poppies or coca, they are met with helicopters spraying herbicides.

Or that China, Pakistan, Iran, etc will secure the arms anyway from places like Russia. Well, let them, if Russia cannot be persuaded to join in a worldwide ban: if Russian arms were still top-of-the-line, this issue would not have arisen.

The arguments used against selling arms to China are almost as poor. If one argues that the embargo should not be lifted because it would send the wrong message to China or that its human rights record has not improved sufficiently, then that implies that arms sales are an appropriate medium for one country to send messages to another or that presumably there is a defined point at which China's human rights record would be acceptable - it's hard to imagine a consensus arising as what the level might be: the Guantanamo Bay level, perhaps?

A worldwide ban sidesteps all these issues. One does not need to question a country's intentions or integrity to take the position that if it wants armed forces, then it should at least equip them itself. This would, of course, be economically inefficient and drive up the cost of maintaining an army; raising the cost of war might make it less attractive as an instrument of policy.

No ban will be foolproof: there are always dual-use technologies and it is not practical for NATO allies to be prohibited from buying each other's technologies. But the leading producers of high-technology arms are all NATO countries; they can restrict their sales to themselves.

At the very least, countries which aspire to permanent seats in UN Security Council should be actively working to discourage arms sales while at the same time actively supporting the development of multinational security systems to mitigate the need for heavily armed militaries in the first place.

pgordon@iagroup.com.hk