ABSTRACT
The massive international arms trade has been as much a hallmark of the post-World War II period as the wars it spawned and aggravated, though the commerce in weapons has origins before the war. In the 1930s, for example, a congressional investigation cited the “merchants of war”—that is, U.S. weapons suppliers-as the significant culprits in drawing the United States into World War I. By supplying arms to belligerents, Congress argued, the United States inevitably joined their ranks, forced to defend the arms trade by going to war.
