Member of the Directing Staff of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and President and Executive Director of IISS-US.

The article goes back to the early discussions of the morality of city bombing which took place before and during World War II and attempts to analyze both the moral argumentation and its historical context from the 1940s until today.

Precision operations have opened up new possibilities for avoiding the harm to civilians and their property that is the inevitable result of armed conflict. Further, as weaponry becomes more precise, interpretation of international humanitarian law is becoming increasingly demanding for an attacker. So long as such interpretations do not depart from the law or ignore the realities of military necessity, this too is to be welcomed.

The obligations of arms-exporting States toward the victims of small arms and light weapons beyond their borders are not merely moral. When serious violations of international law are threatened or perpetrated, States have a legal duty to act in a lawful manner in order to bring such violations to an end. One of the ways this can be done is by ensuring that the export and transit of weapons from their territory are tightly controlled.

The hurdles for terrorists to get a nuclear weapon are extremely high. The probability of terrorist use of such a weapon is therefore extremely low. In contrast to the nuclear weapon case there are in principle no insurmountable obstacles to the acquisition and use of radiological weapons by a well-organized terrorist group, even though such an action remains high-tech and thus very difficult.

The question of the lawfulness of the use of nuclear weapons and that of their possible prohibition have therefore been the subject of repeated discussions since 1945, without any success being achieved. either in reaching a definitive conclusion as to their lawfulness or in negotiating a general agreement to ban them.

This article analyses the relationship between “non-lethal” weapons and international law in the early 21st century by focusing on the most seminal incident to date in the short history of the “non-lethal” weapons debate, the use of an incapacitating chemical to end a terrorist attack on a Moscow theatre in October 2002.

The biological, medical (and legal) communities should face the near certainty that unless active steps are taken to prevent it, biology will become the next major military technology, and that neuroscience — and by implication much of the rest of modern biology — will become highly vulnerable to use or abuse in entirely unintended, but clearly foreseeable, ways.

An Act to implement obligations under the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the 1925 Geneva Protocol

Biannual update on national legislation and case law, January-June 2005

Recent acquisitions of the Library & Research Service