At the same time, it is also well known that Washington is in the know of supplies of various types of armaments to illegal armed formations operating in Syria.
This also proves that the economic momentum in Iran that will come in the wake of the lifting of the sanctions will be exploited for armaments and not used for the welfare of the Iranian people.
Oil-rich Azerbaijan has been spending heavily on armaments – it regularly boasts that its defence budget is higher than Armenia's entire state budget – and has vowed to take back the territory.
The Europeans believe that this would constrain their ability to manage national, or indeed European, foreign and defence policies.As things stand, there is not much of a two-way street in armaments.
Their penchant for protecting their own markets from each other let alone from the Americans makes it that much harder to build a transatlantic armaments market.
WHEN Tony Blair intervened in 2006 to call off a police inquiry into allegations that BAE Systems, an armaments firm and Britain's biggest manufacturer, had paid bribes to secure a decades-long, £43 billion ($70 billion) arms deal with Saudi Arabia, he cited national-security grounds.
Outside NATO, too, international armaments co-operation can help to strengthen political ties.
Not that abolition of the article would quickly lead to a unified armaments market; but the fact that governments are not even thinking about scrapping it shows Europe's distance from such a market.The French defence industry has in itself become a major obstacle to cross-border rationalisation.
The recent plans for Britain, France and Germany to build a common Multi-Role Armoured Vehicle have stalled because France wants a vehicle with a large gun, whereas the other two need troop carriers.The European Union cannot promote a single market in armaments as it can in other areas.
And the shifting structure of the industry makes the consolidation into a single grouping seem less likely than ever.Relations between France and Germany, once each other's privileged partners in armaments production, have declined sharply in the past two years.
The real recovery from the Great Depression came with the fiscal stimulus engendered by the second world war, when no one complained that governments were wasting money on armaments and air-raid shelters.
