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.

CCW: No rest for ...

It's July, summer has finally come to Geneva and, under normal circumstances, the thoughts of disarmament diplomats would now be turning to a few weeks of holidays before the Conference on Disarmament resumes again on July 28. This year, though, any such vacation plans have been dashed by three weeks of work to "negotiate a proposal" on cluster munitions, which began on Monday in Geneva, and one week of talks on the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons, which begin on Monday in New York.

Negotiations on cluster munitions? I hear you ask; "hasn't that all been taken care of by those Dublin negotiations Disarmament Insight wrote so much about in May?" Well, yes and no. The Dublin Conference on cluster munitions, which was part of the stand-alone "Oslo Process," did agree a treaty banning cluster munitions, which was adopted by 111 States and is due to be signed in Oslo on 3 December.

In parallel, however, States party to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) - about two-thirds of which participated in the Dublin conference but which also includes some not in Dublin including the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel - are also engaged in an effort to negotiate a proposal on cluster munitions that would balance military with humanitarian concerns.

The big question before the CCW meeting began on Monday was: How would States that had adopted the new Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) approach the negotiations, bearing in mind that the CCW negotiations had virtually no chance of setting the same high standards of international humanitarian law (IHL) as had been achieved in Dublin? The answer now seems apparent. These States - most of them at any rate - do not want to end up in the CCW with a Protocol developed in the CCW that would, in effect, countenance the further use of cluster munitions rather than stigmatizing them.

Adopters of the new CCM want a CCW outcome on cluster munitions that complements their achievement in Dublin, not undermines it. Possible acceptable outcomes for these States could include a CCW Protocol that prohibits the transfer of all cluster munitions, or that prohibits the use of cluster munitions in or close to civilian areas.

And a number of States and organisations raised concerns this week that suggested language for a new CCW Protocol on cluster munitions, as had been outlined in a Chair's paper, ran a real risk of rolling back existing IHL rather than building on it. These concerns were first raised in April (see our blog on 'Cherry picking at the CCW' for background) and again at this CCW meeting, partly stemming from the fact that the proposed text reiterated (in some cases with modifications) selected existing rules and principles of IHL, while remaining silent on others.

There were tough discussions under the Japanese Friend of the Chair in the latter part of the week in a key suggested Article in the Chair's paper, on 'protection of civilians and civilian objects', with New Zealand, Austria, Mexico, Germany, Canada, the UK, US and India the most active in the debate. These differing views should have convinced Japan that its current tack of trying to get countries to accept reformulations of existing IHL rules they feel deeply uncomfortable about is unlikely to yield results. Of course, it would be good to see this approach abandoned in favour of one that focuses on elaborating new rules and principles, whatever these may be. But there remains fundamental opposition to that, as New Zealand found in defending the square-bracketed language in paragraph 3 of Article 3:

"It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians [or in areas normally inhabited by civilians] the object of attack using cluster munitions."

Overall, the third session of the CCW negotiations got off to a sluggish start this week, with most negotiating sessions running well under their allotted time. Perhaps it has something to do with the hot and heavy weather and thoughts of squandered vacation time. More likely, though, it can be put down to the unfamiliar and downright awkward situation of trying to do something that has already been done very well elsewhere. It's hard to draw motivation from that.

Patrick Mc Carthy


Photo Credit: Geneva's Jet d'Eau by neurosis on Flickr.

The use of weapons

On 30 June I discussed technology historian David Edgerton's thought provoking book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, especially the relevance of use-centred accounts of technological development and 'creole technology'.

Edgerton's work also challenges conventional wisdom as to the significance of certain technologies. Among the examples he discusses are World War Two technologies we're accustomed to thinking as central to eventual Allied victory - strategic bombing and the first use of atomic weapons.

During the war, British air commanders such as Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris claimed that continued area bombing of targets in German-occupied Europe were devastating. However, a United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) found a wide range of evidence to contradict this after the war had ended. In contrast, the USSBS's assessment of the American bombing of Japan - which overall was much less heavy in terms of tonnage of bombs dropped - was that it did similar damage "because the bombs were more concentrated in time and more accurately delivered".

These are not new facts, but they're often overlooked. One obvious lesson is that technologies in themselves don't ensure success in war, especially if the adversary has time to respond and adapt, as the Third Reich did to several years of area bombing. While of course this had its costs, area bombing also had costs for the Allies. In 1940 there weren't many other options for an isolated Britain to take the offensive than to bomb what it could hit with its air force (that is, cities rather than the precision targets the RAF thought it could strike in planning before the war). But later in the war there were more options, yet the UK was heavily invested in its bombing strategy by then and found it hard to change, except for limited periods (like the run-up to D-Day). It's worth recalling that Stalin never doubted that the opening of a Western land offensive - not area bombing - was the only way to relieve the military pressure on the Soviet Union. The terrible fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945 immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five occurred in part because the Allies wanted to demonstrate to the Soviets that their air power was of some use.

Assessments of the usefulness (the utility) of a given technology have to be made against the most effective alternatives, not simply the absence of them. The USSBS compared conventional and atomic bombing in Japan in terms of resources required to achieve equivalent effects - that is, death and damage caused. While the total destructive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs was great, a lot of the energy was not directed at the target. Edgerton explains that "What the report was suggesting was that an atomic raid did the same sort of damage as a standard large conventional one, a few per cent at most of the destruction meted out to Japan from the air."

However morally distasteful such calculations may strike us, they are illuminating. Edgerton points out that the American atomic bombs were products of an industrial effort costing just under US$2 billion (or $20 billion in 1996 dollars). At the time, it cost around $3 billion to construct the 4,000 or so B-29s used exclusively in long distance operations against Japan, including to drop the atomic bombs:

"One billion dollars to destroy a city which would have been destroyed at minimal additional cost by one [large] conventional raid represented an awful lot of 'bucks per bang' ... In other words, by reducing the conventional material available [since resources are finite], the atomic programme, it could be argued, lengthened the war and this cost lives. That we do not see this is partly the result of a carefully fabricated myth put about after the war, that the bomb brought the war to a quick end and saved no fewer than 1 million US lives. This myth depended on the dubious counterfactual argument that the Japanese would have fought on and on had they not suffered atomic bombing, and that the only other way of defeating them involved an invasion that would have cost 1 million lives. In other words, this argument assumed that blockade and conventional bombing were ineffective by comparison with the atomic bomb."

Yet, based on USSBS and other data, blockade and conventional bombing clearly did have profound effects on Japan's war-making capacity. It means that, in 1945, arguments for the efficacy of atomic weapons compared with other means at the time were doubtful - they were not thought to be the war-winners we may consider th