Hulme, Karen --- "Weapons" [2013] ELECD 827; in White, Nigel; Henderson, Christian (eds), "Research Handbook on International Conflict and Security Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013) 315

Book Title: Research Handbook on International Conflict and Security Law

Editor(s): White, Nigel; Henderson, Christian

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849808569

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Weapons

Author(s): Hulme, Karen

Number of pages: 27

Abstract/Description:

Weapons have a clear strategic and security dimension; most patently epitomized by nuclear weapons and the Cold War strategy of ‘mutual assured destruction’ (hereinafter ‘MAD’). They also play a broader role in the lead-up to war; in arms races, military preparations for war and, of course, in the opening throes of battle. During armed conflict itself the laws attempt to humanize warfare and the instruments with which it can be fought, limiting the crueller and more barbaric forms of weaponry and those unable to distinguish between soldier and civilian. Yet, it is the continuing threat that weapons leave on the battlefield after the conflict that has drawn most attention in recent years. With the adoption of numerous instruments requiring the post-conflict removal of weapons and weapons debris, as well as the care of weapons-affected victims, a jus post bellum of weaponry already exists. In 1975 Richard Baxter wrote of the legal regulation of weaponry that it was ‘either pitched on a very high level of abstraction or was directed to specific weapons or projectiles of marginal military utility’. By comparison, said Baxter, were the ‘enormous technological developments that had taken place in the art of warfare’. Such views are arguably not sustainable today, as the most recent prohibition on cluster munitions demonstrates. Yet, as enormous technological developments continue apace, for example in the development and use of drones, will we be able to come to this same judgement in the near future?