ON MARCH 4, the 4,309-ton French freighter La Coubre, carting seventy-six tons of Belgian grenades and ammunition to the army of Fidel Castro, exploded in Havana harbor, killing more than seventy-five seamen, dock workers and firefighters. The series of deadly blasts triggered a series of sensational questions that hit headlines in both the United States and Cuba. Had an American agent or anti-Castro Cuban slipped aboard and left a time bomb in the hold? Had a careless dock worker dropped a match into the munitions? Had a cargo net snapped, unleashing crates of grenades against the deck? Had a plane sneaked low across the harbor and tossed bombs into the freighter?

Other questions, tinged with less excitement, were also evoked. But, too theoretical, old and uncomfortable, they made few headlines. They are questions which have arisen time after time, applied to incident after incident, in the last decade. Their most cogent expression came from Colombian liberal Eduardo Santos in 1955. “Against whom are we Latin Americans arming ourselves?” he cried out before a Columbia University forum. “Why are our countries ruining themselves buying arms which they will never use? ... In this day of the atom bomb, with the new arms whose cost is fabulous, with technical systems involving thousands of millions, what are our poor countries about, bankrupting themselves upon armaments which in the event of an international conflict would spell absolutely nothing?” The true meaning of La Coubre involves not its explosion, but its presence. Why was the munitions vessel in Havana in the first place?

La Coubre and its grenades represent an often unnoticed phenomenon of the cold war. While the great nations of the world terrorize each other in a nuclear-arms race, the weaker, underdeveloped nations are running madly through their own series of small-arms sprints. They have their junior balances of terror. Conditions are perfect: a glut of small arms on the world market, a host of military governments and revolutionaries hungrier for guns than bread, and help from major powers in satisfying that hunger.

No one has estimated the total amount of small arms available on the world market during a year. But partial figures, based on known transactions and reports from governments, shed some light. Last November 2, The New York Times reported that the British government had sold 1,000,000 surplus small arms during 1959. At the same time, Italy was disposing of 500,000 surplus carbines. Business Week reported September 19 that “enough small weapons are stolen from Formosa each year to arm three or four American regiments” (these American weapons then filter into Southeast Asia). Cuba reportedly bought $120,000,000 worth of arms during 1959. The Dominican Republic announced it had spent $88,000,000 on arms last year — more than half its national budget.

Although the Cuban and Dominican governments purchased new weapons, surplus arms make up most of the international market. Arnold Freshman, director of the Arms Traffic Division of the State Department’s Office of Munitions Control, estimates that 70 per cent of available arms are surplus. As European governments modernize their weapons or change them to conform with the NATO standardization policy, they dump their old arms on the world market. The Communist bloc also has embarked on a standardization program and soon may put its old weapons up for sale.

In fact, the armies of underdeveloped nations have used Communist weapons for several years. After September, 1955, the Soviet bloc delivered $380,000,000 worth of large and small weapons to Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. Some of these arms later reached the commercial market when the Israeli army captured them in its 1956 invasion of Egypt. Guinea, which has a 2,000-man army, bought three shipments of rifles from Czechoslovakia last year after the United States ignored a request for arms.

THIS COUNTRY has assumed dual, contradictory roles in the arming of weak nations. Under the mutual security program, it has dispensed several billion dollars of military assistance to underdeveloped countries since 1950. At the same time, it has tried to control the commercial market and shut off the flow of small arms to troubled areas. In its most conspicuous attempt to restrict commercial traffic, the State Department has embargoed arms to the Caribbean, where it fears an outbreak between Castro and Dominican Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo.

The embargo began two years ago, with the Office of Munitions Control halting the issuance of licenses to American dealers for shipping arms to the Caribbean. Since then, the State Department also has tried to persuade European governments to withhold shipments. Last October, for example, a representative of the British Embassy was called to the State Department and told the United States objected to a deal that would have sent British jets to Cuba. The British canceled the transaction.

Without cooperation from other governments, of course, the State Department embargo would be meaningless, for foreign arms dealers can easily fill the vacuum left by restricted American dealers. There is, in fact, strong evidence that they have done so. While the Office of Munitions Control asserts that the embargo, coupled with the cooperation of American Allies, is decreasing the flow of arms to the Caribbean, the decrease cannot be significant. On March 11, The New York Times reported estimates that “the firepower of Premier Castro’s forces is more than two and one-half times that of President Batista’s forces in 1958.” Belgian, Italian, Spanish and Norwegian munitions, some produced with United States aid, have reached Cuba since the embargo. La Coubre was delivering its second arms shipment to Castro when it exploded. Last year, the French sold jets, light tanks, mortars, grenades and ammunition to the Dominican Republic.

Since European governments, like the United States, license their arms exports, the flow of munitions into the Caribbean indicates official resistance to the pleas of the State Department. Several reasons for this resistance have been suggested: pressure by the Belgian rifle manufacturer, Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre, on the Brussels government; an attempt by France to court the Dominican vote on the Algerian — question in the U.N.; a general European feeling that if they don’t sell the arms, someone else — perhaps a Communist government — will. In addition, Europeans may resent the long-standing American attitude toward all arms shipments to Latin America. Since World War II, the United States, in the interest of standardization, has tried to keep the arms traffic in the Western Hemisphere exclusively American.

THE LEGAL flow of arms into the Caribbean has decreased much of the need for gun-running from Florida. There are no revolutionary groups with the force and appeal that Castro had when he mounted his offensives against Batista. During Castro’s rebellion, conspirators in Miami smuggled $3,000,000 worth of arms to him. Now in power, Castro need not depend on Florida. Smuggling, however, apparently figures somewhat in the defense plans of Trujillo, whose army uses mostly American small arms. Last year, Augusto Maria Ferrando, the Dominican Consul General in Miami, offered customs agents $2,400 if they would let a C-74 Globemaster leave Miami International Airport with a cargo of small arms and ammunition. He was convicted of attempted bribery and conspiracy to smuggle arms, and the United States asked the Dominican Republic to recall him. A Miami exporter shipped five B-26 bombers, surplus Air Force equipment, to Chile last year for use in aerial photography. The bombers never reached Chile but landed in the Dominican Republic to become part of Trujillo’s Air Force. The State Department has demanded their return.

Hoping to stop the smuggling, the government has assigned a small force of customs men, recently augmented with FBI agents, to patrol Florida’s coastline and airports. In two years, customs agents have seized more than forty major shipments of illegal arms. The courts have convicted 200 persons, handing out five-year sentences in recent cases. Nevertheless, this has stopped only a small part of the traffic. In their most optimistic guesses, customs agents say they have seized 20 to 35 per cent of the illegal arms and arrested 40 per cent of the smugglers. “It would take thousands of men to patrol the Florida coast to watch all small-boat movements,” says editor William C. Baggs of the Miami News, “and thousands more to, watch all airstrips and the hundreds of flat fields that can be used by light planes. Conversion of Florida into this sort of armed camp probably would not be acceptable by American citizens under any circumstances short of war.”

With the Caribbean trade relatively quiet, the chief destination of the world’s gun-runners now appears to be Algeria, where the activities of American dealers have affected the traffic. In 1957, for example, the Italian government planned to sell 18,000 surplus rifles for shipment to Tunisia. The French, certain that the arms would reach the rebels, protested, but the Italians decided to complete the deal unless a new purchaser could be found. Pasadena Firearms Co. of California stepped in and bought the lot for importation to the United States, where the guns were sold to hunters and collectors.

SUCH American absorption of surplus weapons has grown tremendously during the past few years. Imports of surplus rifles increased from 6,000 in 1954 to 170,000 in 1958. The State Department, which licenses these imports, considers them one way of keeping part of the world traffic under control.

While these importations may ease foreign relations, they have disturbed domestic relations. United States sporting-rifle manufacturers are not pleased. A hunter can buy a surplus rifle for as little as $10.88; a new American rifle would cost him at least $80. From 1954 to 1958, the sale of American centerfire rifles dropped from 466,450 to 204,840 units. Last June, six manufacturers petitioned the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization to limit imports of surplus rifles to 5,000 annually, arguing that continued imports would destroy American sporting- rifle manufacturers, leaving the United States without a small-arms industry in case of war.

Importers organized the American Council for Technical Products, which prepared an answer to the manufacturers’ petition. The council told the OCDM that imports do not compete with American rifles: about half end up over mantels or in gun collections and never reach the hands of hunters. And in wartime, the council added, the government, rather than use the present small gunsmiths, would turn to huge companies, which could easily convert their mass-production equipment for small-arms manufacture.

The importers’ argument received strong support from a Department of Commerce study, issued last December, showing that the manufacturers’ biggest problem was not surplus imports, but the decrease in Army procurement. The manufacturers lost almost their entire military market in a five-year period. Makers of centerfire rifles had a $20,000,000 drop in revenue between 1954 and 1958, of which only a little more than $1,000,000 could be blamed on the decline in civilian purchases. The OCDM most likely will reject the manufacturers’ petition and let Americans continue to pluck surplus weapons from the world market.

By purchasing surplus weapons, arresting smugglers and embargoing exports, the United States has made a commendable, although often ineffectual, attempt to limit the commercial traffic in small arms. But it has made few moves toward shrinking the real arsenal of the underdeveloped world — the United States military-assistance program. Despite the embargo on commercial arms to the Caribbean, for example, the United States spent $1,089,000 on military aid to the Dominican Republic and $543,000 on military aid to Cuba during fiscal 1959.

In most cases, military aid, ostensibly given to protect the free world against communism and to stabilize regimes against subversion, has tended (1) to force weak nations into devoting huge percentages of their vital capital to armaments; (2) to entrench undemocratic, military governments; and (3) to promote arms races between these governments.

In Arms and Politics in Latin America (1960), an indispensable book for understanding the turmoil in Latin America, Edwin Lieuwen, chairman of the history department at the University of New Mexico, has reached several chilling conclusions about our military aid program in this hemisphere: "It seems incontrovertible that the aid program exacerbates endemic rivalries and mutual suspicions among the Latin American republics and gives rise to arms races.... For the great majority of Latin Americans, who see no great danger of aggression from outside, the United States military program compounds their internal problems, interferes with the process of social change, and hinders progress in economic development."

American military aid to Iran is “not strategic and tactical but political and domestic,” Walter Lippmann has observed. It satisfies the Iranian army. “If that is the best way to help Iran, well and good,” he continued. “The question which this country will have to examine is whether it is going to be in the future the best way, or indeed how long it can be expected to work.”

THERE have been recent signs, although rather unclear ones, that the United States is re-examining policies that build up armaments in underdeveloped nations. On March 21, the New York Herald Tribune reported that a “sweeping review” was in progress. After his tour of Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, President Eisenhower said that present circumstances “should now enable some of the American republics to reduce expenditures for armaments, and thus make funds available for constructive purposes.” But he based this possibility on continued support for the Rio treaty of 1947, which perpetrates the myth that the Latin countries would have a vital military role in defending the hemisphere from outside aggression. On March 15, Assistant Secretary of State Roy R. Rubottom, Jr., told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the Administration would ask $30,000,000 less for military aid to Latin America in the 1961 fiscal year than it had asked the year before. But the requested total for 1961 — $67,000,000 — was only $2,000,000 less than the State Department actually received from Congress for the 1960 fiscal year and was, in fact, $13,000,000 more than had been spent in the 1959 fiscal year.

It may be too much to expect the United States to eliminate, or even drastically reduce, military aid to underdeveloped nations. Any sudden action would create real problems and dangers. Many of these nations have had military regimes long before the United States began sending them arms. They have used the emotions of the cold war as blackmail and have threatened to turn to the Soviet Union if their demands for weapons are not met. And the Soviet Union has been happy and able to supplant the United States as an arsenal wherever possible. Any reversal of American policy would be a slow one.

It is possible that the cry for disarmament, in order to have meaning, must come from the underdeveloped nations themselves. Here, the experience of Latin America sheds some hope — and some doubt. In the past few years, the civilian-controlled governments of Costa Rica and Chile have proposed disarmament plans. But the response from other nations, most of them dominated by the military, has been more polite than enthusiastic. The Peruvian and Argentine governments, both dependent on military support, bought more cruisers and jets at the very time they were hailing Chile’s call for disarmament. Even Mexico, a civilian government, has rejected general disarmament, because it fears that disarmament would make Latin America too dependent on the United States.

The arming of weak nations may be an inevitable offshoot of the arming of strong nations. Perhaps Cuba and the Dominican Republic will keep buying rifles until the United States and Russia stop making missiles. On the other hand, the arming of weak nations may be an inevitable offshoot of the fatuousness of strong nations. Perhaps the Shah of Iran will keep crying for guns until the United States gets enough sense to refuse them. In any case, the time for hard reappraisal is long due. There need be no more mad munitions trips to Havana.

STANLEY MEISLER is a wire service newsman now stationed in Washington.