Your report, Iraq allegedly sought SA nuclear material (October 8), confirms the repeated lack of political will on the part the national conventional arms control committee to apply its own principles and rationale. It is also reported elsewhere that SA has supplied a nuclear device to Yemen for transhipment to Iraq.

The council, no doubt, will respond that it only deals in "conventional" rather than nuclear weapons, and that its function is merely to rubber-stamp permits.

Despite apartheid-SA's expertise in phoney documentation, the council pretends that what it doesn't see doesn't happen.

Will Defence Minister Mosioua Lekota still insist that bilateral agreements between Iraq and SA take precedence over both the SA constitution and this country's commitments to the United Nations (UN)?

Iraq was reportedly just six months short of nuclear capability at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. Did SA contribute to that capability as part of the G5-for-oil barter arrangements during the 1980s? What about chemical and biological weapons?

The connection with Iraq also includes Armscor's pirating of state-of-the-art US missile technology through the International Signal Corporation of Pennsylvania during the 1980s, and the sale of that technology to China and Iraq. The Americans, not surprisingly, were alarmed, and maintained their arms embargo against SA long after the UN arms embargo was rescinded in 1994.

To what purpose do SA arms exports serve in destabilisation of politically turbulent regions such as Africa, the Middle East and India/Pakistan? This is an industry Nelson Mandela should have shut down as soon as he came to office. It remains economically unviable, as proved repeatedly by Denel's financial losses.

With acknowledgements to Terry Crawford-Browne and Business Day.