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The recent war in the Persian Gulf has once again focused attention on the proliferation of advanced weapons and the international arms indusuy. Although Iraq had little or no defense industrial capability, it was able to obtain a vast arsenal of modern weapons from the Soviet Union, Western Europe, China, Eastern Europe, and a variety of arms producers in the developing world. Today, the international arms market is a buyers' market in which modern tanks, fighter aircraft, submarines, missiles, and other weapons are available to any nation that can afford them. Increasingly, sales of major weapons also include the transfer of the underlying technologies necessary for local production, resulting in widespread proliferation of modern weapons and the means to produce-and even develop them. The end of the Cold War has brought profoundly decreased demand for weapons by the United States, the Soviet Union, and most European governments. In the United States, and elsewhere, some defense companies are seeking to increase their international sales as part of a strategy to adjust to the new realities of lower procurement budgets and less domestic demand for their products. But because of worldwide overcapacity in defense production, competition is fierce and sales arrangements are complex, increasingly bypassing government- to-government agreements.