The target country can choose from a range of sellers in the international market place. It is virtually impossible to secure universal participation in embargoes and difficult to police their application in participating countries. The incentive to make large profits by circumventing sanctions is more powerful than the motive for enforcing them, and a variety of means and routes exist to camouflage sanctions-busting contacts.

Sanctions imposed on India and Pakistan in 1998 were especially egregious because both had already crossed the nuclear threshold and announced unilateral moratoria on further testing. Not a single country has been added to the proliferation-sensitive list as a result of those tests. The nuclear arsenal of the Big Five is more of a proliferant than a deterrent.

Sanctions are counter-productive through two effects: political and economic. Politically, their goal is to reduce the support for sanctioned leaders by their own people. But sanctions offer an easy scapegoat for ruinous economic policies: economic pain is simply blamed on hostile and ill-intentioned foreigners. Bearing pain in order to cope with sanctions is portrayed as the patriotic duty of every citizen. Dissent is stifled and political opposition muted, silenced or liquidated.

Economically, sanctions create shortages and raise prices in conditions of scarcity. The poor suffer, the middle class shrinks, the ruling class extracts fatter rents from monopoly controls over the illicit trade in banned goods. We have enough credible evidence to suggest that family cliques surrounding dictators under international sanctions have monopolised the black market spawned by the imposition of sanctions and the resulting shortages of goods in the open market.

The more profitable the trade, the richer the leaders become and the greater the vested interest they have in perpetuating sanctions while using State-controlled media to plausibly scapegoat the West or the 'Western-controlled' UN for the peoples' misery. In addition, scarcity increases the dependence of the population on the distribution of necessities by the regime, so that sanctions give leaders yet another tool with which to exercise control and leverage over their people.

The motives for the imposition and maintenance of sanctions are often rooted in domestic politics. Rivals for office seek to reap electoral advantage by depicting opponents as 'soft' on the enemy. No US presidential candidate dares to offend the Cuban-American lobby by calling for the removal of sanctions on Fidel Castro, despite the clear demonstration of their failure.

Sanctions on Cuba remain in place, not because they serve any purpose, not because they are achieving their original goals, but because of the power of a domestic electoral lobby. The geographical concentration of the exiles in Miami gives them a crucial swing vote role in determining the outcome of Florida's electoral votes, which in turn is important in influencing the outcome of presidential elections - as we all learnt only too well this year!

Having imposed sanctions on India and Pakistan, Washington finds itself imprisoned in the classic termination trap: how to lift sanctions without appearing to back down, on the one hand, or reward 'bad' behaviour, on the other. Having already paid the international price for testing, India sees no reason to revert to the status quo ante on high technology access in return for signing the CTBT and joining the global non-proliferation regime. The longer Washington vacillates, the more time other countries have to fill in the commercial void.

Sanctions can damage producer-groups in the countries imposing them, for example farmers. In addition, because of the frequency with which a country resorts to sanctions, the long-term reliability of its suppliers becomes suspect, with the result that foreign purchasers may not switch back to its products even after sanctions are lifted.

They inflict pain on innocent countries in the neighbourhood. The readiness of the international community to impose sanctions is not matched by a willingness to defray the costs of adjustment of those among the non-targeted group for whom the pain is the greatest. Very quickly these countries conclude that their economic interests are better served by continuing economic exchanges with the targeted regime, if by other names and through alternative channels.

US sanctions against the former Soviet Union, for example, with respect to the construction of a gas pipeline between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, often strained relations between Washington and other NATO capitals.

Public and hence political support for sanctions rests in their image as a humane alternative, and perhaps a necessary prelude, to war, which is increasingly regarded as a tool of the very last resort. The imposition of sanctions is frequently accompanied by sentimentality and sanctimony in Western countries. Yet they cause death and destruction, sometimes on a large scale, through 'structural violence': starvation, malnutrition and the spread of deadly diseases.

In contrast to wars, sanctions shift the burden of harm solely to civilians, and solely on one side. The degree and scale of death and suffering inflicted by the 'structural violence' of sanctions exceeds the 'cleaner' alternative of open warfare. And their primary victims are innocent civilians, mainly women and children. In a provocative essay in Foreign Affairs (May/June 1999), John Mueller and Karl Mueller argued that sanctions have caused more deaths in the 20th century than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.

The imposition of sanctions on India and Pakistan for their nuclear tests in 1998 also begged the question of moral equivalence. India and Pakistan breached no international treaty, convention or law by testing. For the five nuclear weapons states, to impose sanctions on the nuclear gatecrashers is akin to outlaws sitting in judgment, passing sentence and imposing punishment on the law abiding.

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