Building discourse on explosive weapons

We have a new website you should check out (and bookmark) at: www.ExplosiveWeapons.info.

But hold on, I hear you say, what about Disarmament Insight? Don’t worry, it’s not disappearing. But over the course of 2010 our efforts will be on this new website, with which we’ll be able to do things we can’t with dear old Blogger.

Originally set up in 2007 to accompany our work that year as part of the 'Disarmament as Humanitarian Action' project at UNIDIR, the Disarmament Insight blog you’re reading now continued a lot longer - and achieved a much wider readership - than we ever hoped. In particular, the blog's commentary became one reference for those seeking independent analysis on what was going on during the Oslo process on cluster munitions. However, the DI blog covered all sorts of other issues relevant to humanitarian disarmament work from anti-personnel mines to primate behaviour, evolutionary psychology to explosive violence.

Blog readers will have noticed that over the last few months our blogging has tapered off, with some conspicuous exceptions like Tim Caughley's thought-provoking analysis of the Conference on Disarmament’s Shannon Mandate. That's because toward the end of last year Maya and I completed our project at UNIDIR on a history of international efforts on cluster munitions, which resulted in a book I wrote entitled Unacceptable Harm: A History of How the Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions Was Won. After that marathon we both took a break from the blinking cursor for a while.

Among the things it covers, ‘Unacceptable Harm’ looks at what lessons banning cluster munitions might hold for future efforts to protect civilians from the effects of explosive weapons. This was also a topic explored over the course of the blog (just type ‘explosive weapons’ into the search box at right to get a list of posts). In that regard, I’m pleased to report that in January of this year we commenced a new project at UNIDIR on Discourse on Explosive Weapons (DEW), with the kind financial support of the Government of Norway.

The effects of explosive weapons on civilians represent a distinct humanitarian problem—one recognized by the UN Secretary-General in his 2009 report on the protection of civilians in armed conflict (S/2009/277).

Explosive weapons range from unitary bombs, cluster munitions, rockets and missiles to grenades, shells, improvised explosive devices and mines. The blast wave created by the detonation, projection of fragments, and sometimes the collapse of structures in the surrounding area is a major cause of civilian harm. Explosive weapons also cause damage to infrastructure vital to the civilian population and leave behind unexploded explosive ordnance, which poses a post-conflict health risk and negatively affects reconstruction and long-term development.

Representatives of States seem to find it difficult to engage in substantive dialogue on how to address the concerns raised by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. Policy practitioners lack a common vocabulary and conceptual tools to enable them to productively frame these issues.

Meanwhile, the process leading to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions provides an example of how the international debate on a weapon category was re-framed to put the protection of civilians at its centre. In addition, a 2009 report by Landmine Action (now re-branded Action on Armed Violence) on Explosive Violence showed that States already tacitly recognize explosive weapons as a single category from a technological and ethical standpoint.

Greater focus on the humanitarian effects of explosive weapons could enhance civilian protection, support the effectiveness of legal norms applicable in armed conflict, contribute to reducing the global burden of armed violence and represent a further step toward creating the conditions for general and complete disarmament. Practical ways to achieve that is what the DEW project is exploring.

As part of the project’s work, alongside symposia and the generation of resource materials, we’ve set up the explosive weapons website. This is where news and resources related to our explosive weapons work will appear during the course of 2010 including background papers, podcasts and summary reports from our symposia. There’s even a Twitter feed… (We also have a project page at UNIDIR here.) We invite you to follow our work and avail yourself of the stuff we’re producing.

As always, thanks to all of our readers and please keep following our work!

John Borrie

Picture: 'Explosion, Abkhazia' (Simon Conway, Landmine Action).

Protecting civilians from explosive violence: time for states to raise their voices

Last week the United Nations Secretary-General submitted his annual report to the Security Council on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. The language of the report represents something of a break-though of a sort that's pleasing to see from the editorial perspective of this blog. Hopefully now states will also begin to make their voices heard in supporting the Protection of Civilians report's content both in the Security Council chamber and in elsewhere.

The Secretary-General's report observed that the "choice of weapons is critical in minimizing and reducing the impacts of hostilities on civilians". While this might sound obvious, it's worth noting that heavy weapons such as artillery and rockets were nevertheless used in populated areas in conflicts in recent months such as Gaza and in Sri Lanka, something the report also commented on in its paragraph 36:

"As demonstrated by this year’s hostilities in Sri Lanka and Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the use in densely populated environments of explosive weapons that have so-called “area effect” inevitably has an indiscriminate and severe humanitarian impact. First, in terms of the risk to civilians caught in the blast radius or killed or injured by damaged and collapsed buildings. Secondly, in terms of damage to infrastructure vital to the wellbeing of the civilian population, such as water and sanitation systems."

These are certainly issues that individually some Security Council members are taking very seriously. Only today, for instance, the New York Times reported that the new American military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, would sharply restrict the use of airstrikes there in an effort to reduce the civilian deaths he had concluded were undermining the American-led mission. In today's warfare, in which the lines between military objectives and civilian concentrations are usually blurred, those on the cutting edge of military thought are increasingly aware that the use of explosive violence in such areas can be counter-productive, as well as morally and legally unacceptable.

The Secretary-General further noted in last week's report that the Security Council "has a critical role in promoting systematic compliance with the law" including condemning violations "without exceptions", threatening and if necessary applying targeted measures against the leadership of parties violating their obligations to "respect" civilians and keeping track of violations and mandating commissions of inquiry "where concerns exist regarding serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law".

The British NGO Landmine Action issued a media release responding to the Secretary General's report, which

"welcomes the clear expression of concern from the UN Secretary-General regarding the humanitarian problems caused by explosive weapons. Landmine Action urges States, international organisations and civil society to further document the civilian harm caused by explosive weapons, work to prevent the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and support all efforts to minimise the post-conflict harm that explosive weapons cause."

One of the key points underlined by multilateral processes representing 'disarmament as humanitarian action' such as the Ottawa process to prohibit anti-personnel mines and the Oslo process resulting in the Convention on Cluster Munitions is that the collection and analysis of empirical evidence is crucial in changing policy makers' minds and re-framing issues in ways that make them more tractable. Nevertheless, weapons-specific processes like these require a huge amount of effort that is difficult to sustain throughout treaty implementation, let alone repeat for other weapons.

And, a risk of weapon-specific multilateral processes in general is that governments opposed to stigmatising the use of explosive violence in populated areas will succeed in breaking up and subdividing issues around use of explosive weapons (as Richard Moyes at Landmine Action has pointed out) that muddy the waters, or denude relevant multilateral processes of real value.

There is a need for the international community to begin looking beyond just the weapon specific to highlight explosive weapons as a broad category of concern at time of use and post-conflict. This is something a few of us have already begun trying to do (Landmine Action's media release mentioned, for instance, Disarmament Insight's work at facilitating such discussion).

In light of the Protection of Civilians report, the Security Council could be one place for states and international organisations to take the new discourse forward. But it also needs to be a broader debate. The international community should do more to ensure civilians are protected, and that will necessarily entail some fresh thinking.

John Borrie

Image downloaded from Wikipedia: "A Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon is prepared for testing at the Eglin Air Force Armament Center on March 11, 2003. The MOAB is a precision-guided munition weighing 21,500 pounds and will be dropped from a C-130 Hercules aircraft for the test. It will be the largest non-nuclear conventional weapon in existence."

What could the CCW do about improvised explosive devices?

If there is a weapon that reflects our times, it is the improvised explosive device (IED). These weapons come in myriad forms– whether it's the suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest approaching a checkpoint in Afghanistan, the command-detonated roadside bombs encountered by troops in Iraq or, indeed, the seizure of passenger planes in mid-air by hijackers to be used as flying bombs – as occurred on 911.

Most often on this blog, when we’ve provided commentary on the work of the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) it’s been with reference to its Group of Government Experts’ efforts on cluster munitions. However, the CCW is a framework treaty that contains five protocols, two of which – Amended Protocol II on mines and booby traps, and Protocol V on explosive remnants of war – have active sub-processes of their own.

Last week, in a discussion facilitated by the Swiss, states party to Amended Protocol II began a discussion about IEDs. Presenting were Chris Clark from the UN Mine Action Service, Richard Moyes from UK NGO Landmine Action, Erik Tollefsen from the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, and Colin King, an independent explosive ordnance consultant.
An IED is

“A device placed or fabricated in an improvised manner incorporating destructive, lethal, noxious, pyrotechnic, or incendiary chemicals or explosives and designed to destroy, incapacitate, harass or distract. It may incorporate military stores, but is normally devised from non-military components.” (IED Factsheet)

Colin King observed there has been an evolution of attacks using IEDs over the last few decades. In the 1970s, non-state armed groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) really did have to improvise using commonly available materials such as nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers, stolen blasting caps and mechanical or electronic timers cannibalized from devices like alarm clocks. The IEDs tended to be unreliable, and to have uncertain effects in terms of explosive yield and signature. In other words, these types of IED were low-tech, basic weapons not particularly well suited to their targets.

The 1970s seem rather halcyon days now. Armed groups making and deploying IEDs in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have become highly sophisticated in terms of funding and organisation: as their experience and access to materials began to match the scale of their ambitions and inventiveness, it has made life increasingly hazardous for both soldiers and civilians.

The IRA’s best chance of destroying a vehicle in Britain or Northern Ireland in the 1970s, for instance, was by physically attaching a time-delay bomb. More recently, insurgents in Iraq and many other places have long had access to shaped-charge explosives like the High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds launched from rocket-propelled grenade launchers. But in recent years they’ve also been able to hold of explosively formed penetrators able to destroy modern armoured vehicles - potentially from a significant distance, we were told. And along with the technology, methods of attack involving sophisticated means of coordination have made counter-measures against IEDs a difficult cat-and-mouse game for military forces.

And, as Richard Moyes pointed out, IEDs are certainly an issue in humanitarian terms too. Landmine Action’s research into incidents of explosive ordnance based on English language news reports of 1,836 incidents in 38 countries over six months revealed that 60 per cent related to IEDs causing many civilian deaths and injuries.

It’s a moot point what the CCW can actually do – if anything – about IEDs, not least because the primary makers and users of IEDs are armed non-state actors, not governments bound by agreements like Amended Protocol II. And, as the International Committee of the Red Cross pointed out, there isn’t anything especially novel about the fact a munition is improvised from a humanitarian law perspective. IHL rules still apply.

Nevertheless, in a ‘food for thought’ paper for the meeting, the Swiss set out some possible avenues for discussion about specific measures such as:

“What are specific best practices to cut the supply?
• What can be done in order to avoid that AXO, UXO, badly managed stockpiles, and commercially available products provide the explosives)?
• Could the CCW APII work towards a best practice guide for the improved storage, security, and transport of explosives?
• What mechanisms would help better controlling the manufacture and trafficking of explosives?
• Are there different approaches to deal with IEDs under domestic criminal law?”

Certainly last week’s CCW talks didn’t come up with any clear answers about what to do next. But, as presenters like King pointed out, a lot of IEDs are ‘local manufactures’ – mass produced, but using parts like abandoned or stolen military munitions. Artillery shells have become a favoured source of explosive for many roadside or vehicle-borne IEDs in Iraq, for instance.

So, governments undertaking practical work at the national level to tighten up stockpile management and storage of explosive material in places under their jurisdiction or control would be an important start. Another thing states can do is to join and fully implement the CCW’s ERW protocol to ensure that unexploded and abandoned ordnance is cleared up quickly, and not diverted to putting the bang into IEDs. Not sexy stuff, but worthwhile.

John Borrie

Image: IEDs made from military munitions found in Baghdad (retrieved from Wikipedia Commons, sourced in turn from U.S. Department of Defense).

Patterns of explosive violence

The shelling of a hospital in North East Sri Lanka has brought the battle that the government armed forces wage there against the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) back into international headlines. The humanitarian situation has deteriorated to the point of being called ‘nightmarish’ as hundreds of thousands of civilians are trapped between the front lines, in an area now quite inadequately named ‘the safe zone’.

Like the recent events in Gaza, the situation in Sri Lanka is another sad illustration of the severe humanitarian harm that the use of explosive force in populated areas consistently causes. A recent Policy Brief by Landmine Action emphasizes the direct link between the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and the civilian harm that predictably results from it.

The policy brief notes that media coverage and policy analysis on the Gaza conflict tended to focus on the use of white phosphorous (including on this blog) and other ‘unusual’ weapons, a focus which risks to ‘normalise’ the use of explosive force generally. It should, however, be recognized that explosive weapons caused ‘by far the greatest number of deaths and injuries’ in the Gaza conflict, that explosive force in general is ‘particularly associated with psychological harm’, especially among children, and that in an armed conflict it is usually explosive weapons that cause most damage to infrastructure, such as houses, hospitals, schools, and the electrical power, water and sewage systems. Moreover, unexploded explosive ordnance presents ongoing health risks to the civilian population for years after a conflict has ended.

Landmine Action calls in its policy brief for more explicit recognition of the humanitarian impact of the use of explosive force in populated areas and encourages humanitarian organizations to challenge the prevailing attitude towards this ‘technological pattern of force’ as ‘normal’ or ‘conventional’. In order to further stigmatize the use of explosive force in populated areas ‘a collective and explicit recognition that explosive weapons used in populated areas tend to result in a predictable pattern of indiscriminate and severe humanitarian harm’ can help to ‘shape the public and political discourse about what is right and wrong’.


Maya Brehm

Photo Credit: 'p012877' by Conseil Régional de Basse-Normandie / National Archives USA, available at: PhotosNormandie on Flickr.

References:
Explosive violence: Israel and Gaza, Landmine Action Policy Brief, 30 January 2009.
Explosive Violence blog by Richard Moyes.

Verdun, via Oslo?

Recent columns (dated 22 July and 22 September, 2008) by the Lexington Institute’s Loren Thompson raise questions about the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). In the coming days, I’ll address three of Thompson's central arguments - arguments which track US government positions in many respects:

1. (1) taking cluster munitions out of service will result in greater humanitarian suffering due to the use of more high explosive unitary weapons as the only alternative;
2. (2) that the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) is a flawed process, while the more inclusive UN Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) offers a more hopeful and reasonable outcome; and
3. (3) Thompson's contention that high tech solutions like the U.S. BLU-108 Sensor Fuzed Weapon are an answer to humanitarian concerns.

So, on to the first question: will banning cluster munitions result in the unintended consequence of great humanitarian harm from unitary weapons?

Thompson argues that “a blanket ban on all cluster munitions will not end the desire of military forces to deny use of contested areas to enemies, and therefore might perversely encourage the use of more lethal ‘unitary’ munitions.” This echoes, almost verbatim, the final paragraph of the 19 June 2008 policy memorandum issued by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Among the most extreme examples of lethal uses of unitary warheads are the artillery exchanges in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, during which the French and the Germans slaughtered one another’s’ soldiers and civilians en masse with high explosive artillery shells.

According to the US policy memo, cluster munitions supposedly offer a more humanitarian answer. Their presumed genius is to distribute a large amount of explosive power in small packages over a large area using relatively few pieces of equipment, as opposed to many pieces of equipment sending high explosive warheads on lots of single targets. Some militaries like the shot-gun blasts of cluster munitions to attack moving targets, troop concentrations, tank formations and artillery formations. Take these away, so goes the argument, and you create conditions for another Verdun, or at least saturation bombing on a localized level. If we can’t use lots of little bombs to attack contested areas, so goes the argument, we’ll be forced to use lots and lots of big bombs to do the same job. Even more civilians will be injured or killed in process.

In other words, the argument is as follows: if we cannot use one means of warfare (i.e., cluster munitions) that results in indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, we will be forced to use means or methods that are even more indiscriminate and disproportionate (e.g., saturation bombing with unitary weapons). For states that respect the rule of humanitarian law as it has developed over the past fifty years, such an argument runs into considerable trouble.

The bedrock principles of distinction, proportionality and the legal obligation to take precautionary measures are enshrined in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. These principles are considered by many to have reached customary status (see, for example, the Red Cross Customary Humanitarian Law Study) or at the very least worthy of inclusion in military law manuals (see, for instance, chapter 2 of the US Military’s Operational Law Handbook)) Taking indiscriminate cluster munitions out of a state’s arsenal does not relieve its armed forces from these obligations.

The fundamental principle of distinction requires that “Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives.” [Protocol I, Art. 52]

Furthermore, attacks have to be proportionate. Article 51(5)(b) of Protocol I spells out the proportionality rule: an “attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated” is legally unacceptable.

In light of these humanitarian law principles, for a course of action to be acceptable, the military advantage of the attack must outweigh the anticipated collateral damage. Importantly, the balancing test of the proportionality principle is not between an attack that is less costly to civilians as opposed to another attack that is more costly to civilians. If neither alternative results in an anticipated military advantage that outweighs the anticipated collateral damage of either action, then neither course of action is acceptable. I have written about this elsewhere before the adoption of the CCM (see pp. 40-41, of this article).

In the 2007 Martić case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) the defence advanced the “unitaries would be worse” argument (See also a recent Landmine Action report). In that case, Milan Martić ordered rocket attacks on Zagreb in 1995 in response to the Croatian army’s offensive to retake the breakaway region of Krajina. The attacks killed seven people and injured 214, both directly and because of hazardous unexploded duds.

The weapon chosen by Martić’s commanders? The Orkan rocket system, equipped with cluster submunitions – a weapon that is very similar to the U.S. Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS). Martić argued in his defence brief that his armed forces were aiming at military targets in the city and that their only other weapon option was a powerful unitary rocket that would have caused greater damage to civilians. If we cannot use clusters, we would be forced to use unitaries, argued Martić.

How did the court respond? The court found that the Orkan rocket was an indiscriminate weapon, even assuming Martić’s forces were aiming at legitimate military targets in Zagreb:

[T]he Trial Chamber notes the characteristics of the weapon, it being a non-guided high dispersion weapon. The Trial Chamber therefore concludes that the M-87 Orkan, by virtue of its characteristics and the firing range in this specific instance, was incapable of hitting specific targets. For these reasons, the Trial Chamber also finds that the M-87 Orkan is an indiscriminate weapon, the use of which in densely populated civilian areas, such as Zagreb, will result in the infliction of severe casualties. [para. 463].

The court did not respond to the “unitary rockets would be worse” argument directly, evidently finding it without merit. In its silence, the court could have been relying on Article 35(1) of Protocol I, that the right of belligerents to choose the means and methods of warfare is not unlimited. Regardless of what other weapons were at hand, cluster munitions were not appropriate to attack the specified military targets in Zagreb. It follows logically that if the only other alternative would be something causing even worse civilian injuries, that alternative would also be prohibited.

Martić is now serving a 35 year sentence. He has renewed the “unitaries would have been worse” argument on appeal. Interestingly, the prosecutor’s office has argued in response that a single unitary rocket aimed at each target actually would have been better, not worse. The prosecutor’s office therefore did not reject entirely the use of unitary weapons, but neither did it endorse their indiscriminate use in large numbers.

History also gets in the way of “unitaries would be worse” argument. One might expect that cluster munition use might reduce the use of unitary weapons. Practice has sometimes shown the opposite – extensive use of such area weapons may well encourage or reinforce the use of large numbers of unitary weapons. The example of Laos immediately comes to mind – the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world was blanketed not only with cluster munitions, but also with rockets, mortars, shells and large general purpose bombs. The availability of vast quantities of cluster munitions did not prevent the use of large numbers of other types of ordnance. And clearance officials consider the unexploded cluster bomblets to be a much greater risk to civilians than the unexploded general purpose bombs.

Visitors to Southern Lebanon following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah can attest to a similar outcome – heavy shelling and bombardment included both cluster munitions and weapons with unitary warheads by the Israeli Defense Forces. Many credit the 2006 war with creating the tipping point for the CCM.

Virgil Wiebe


Photo Credit: “p011902.jpg” by PhotosNormandie on Flickr.

IEDs a threat to peace and security

The Times ran an interesting article earlier this week entitled 'The success of the home-made bomb: increased use of improvised electronic devices poses threat to peace and security'. The article is the latest in a steady trickle of media reporting about what are frequently described as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), which are a frequent weapon of insurgents in Iraq, the Taleban in Afghanistan and by various other violent actors in many conflicts around the world.

IEDs certainly aren't a new phenomenon, but they've become of increasing concern and profile for Western militaries this decade as they've found themselves in zones in which their troops are exposed to the weapons to a greater extent. The Times article mentioned above contends that up to 300 IEDs are detonated somewhere in the world every month. The countries affected include Algeria, Chechnya, Pakistan, Colombia and Sri Lanka as well as Afghanistan and Iraq mentioned already. Moreover, the Washington Post reported in July that suspected Shiite militiamen in Iraq have even begun using powerful rocket-propelled bombs described as Improvised Rocket Assisted Munitions, or IRAMs:

"They are propane tanks packed with hundreds of pounds of explosives and powered by 107mm rockets. They are often fired by remote control from the backs of trucks, sometimes in close succession. Rocket-propelled bombs have killed at least 21 people, including at least three U.S. soldiers, this year."

(You can see some pictures of IRAMs on the Long War Journal.)

Increasing amounts of money and other resources are being spent by some governments on detection and countermeasures in order to protect their troops. But, of course, beyond the military threats there are also the deadly hazards to civilians of IEDs - who usually have no protection whatsoever, and are, indeed, often the intended victims of IED attacks. Nor is this just a headache in places like Iraq: at least one media report indicates that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI agree that "the homemade explosive devices that have wreaked havoc in Iraq pose a rising threat to the United States." Intelligence and law enforcement agencies in many other countries are also concerned.

More focused and systematic data collection about IEDs is needed, as well as some policy dialogue at the international level in the arms control field about whether and how work in this area might be of benefit. Unfortunately, we're headed into arms control silly season from here until the end of the year, with UN First Committee in New York, the biological weapons, anti-personnel mines and Certain Convention Weapons Conventions' meetings in Geneva, and the Convention on Cluster Munitions signing ceremony in Oslo where most multilateral arms control attention will be - not to mention an upcoming U.S. presidential election and an unfolding world financial crisis.

However, someone thinking and blogging on these things on a frequent basis is Landmine Action UK's Policy & Research Manager Richard Moyes, whose Explosive Violence blog Disarmament Insight also has a link to at right. Richard is also, it seems, keeping a useful ad hoc log of explosive violence incidents, many of which pertain to IED use: you can check that out here.

We certainly can't claim ignorance that IEDs are a problem, even if a lot more investigation and attention is needed.

John Borrie

Image credit: borrowed from Richard's Explosive Violence blog.

Explosive issues

In between following the political and diplomatic progress of disarmament processes like those related to cluster munitions, small arms, the arms trade and nuclear weapons, Disarmament Insight posts have also looked at some broader issues. Last week in 'The Use of Weapons' I discussed aspects of David Edgerton's book, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 - focusing on Edgerton's analysis of Second World War technologies like strategic bombing, atomic weapons and the V2 rocket and implications for today.

One nice thing about blogging is that you sometimes receive feedback about your posts. For instance, our site offers a comment function (see the link at the foot of each post) on which readers can post their remarks or questions.

Last week a chap named Ward Wilson contacted Disarmament Insight. Ward wrote an article in International Security journal last year on "The Winning Weapon? Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima" - an interesting analysis that re-examines the widely-held presumption (which I also touched on my blog post) that nuclear weapons played a decisive role in winning the war in the Pacific. I'd been unaware of Ward's article, and it appears he was unaware of Edgerton's book until reading our blog, so it seems we're all better off.

Ward, it seems, is quite a busy guy, as he too has a blog, entitled 'Rethinking Nuclear Weapons', which is worth checking out. Ward says it's part of a project "to explore the practical realities of nuclear weapons".

In addition, Ward's also just been awarded the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Challenge Essay Contest's Grand Prize for a piece he wrote entitled "The Myth of Deterrence". This is a big deal. Hopefully Ward's article will be available somewhere online soon. In the meantime, congratulations and well done to him.

Someone else out there on the World Wide Web doing some hard thinking about questions related to aspects of armed violence is Richard Moyes, Policy & Research Manager at the British NGO Landmine Action. Richard has just started a new blog entitled 'Explosive Violence' that examines news reports and issues related to the use of explosive weapons in crime and conflict.

Throughout the twentieth and early twentieth centuries we've seen the boundaries between the use of force in the battlefield and in civilian areas increasingly blurred, whether you think of strategic bombing in the Second World War or South East Asia, or suicide bombing. And what was nuclear deterrence during the Cold War if not the threat to unleash massive quantities of explosive force in populated areas, no matter how strategic planners tried to dignify it?

Recent efforts, like the new Convention on Cluster Munitions, are doing something about this as regards certain specific weapon types, and the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has tried and is trying - with varying success - to tackle this in its own manner. The use of explosive force in populated areas is an elephant in the room in both multilateral disarmament and arms control and in international humanitarian law efforts and its logical that greater efforts are made to consider what the implications of that are.

So good luck to both Ward and Richard, and we look forward to reading their future thoughts on aspects of these issues and more.

John Borrie


Reference

Wilson, Ward. "The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima." International Security 31 4 (Spring 2007): 162-179.

Picture: 'Explosive!' by Lili Vieira de Carvalho downloaded from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.