Andy Resnick said:
You raise some interesting points; since my football team is once again a huge disappointment, I had some time to skulk around the various arms control treaties.
HA! That's good stuff.
Andy Resnick said:
Turns out, hollow-point bullets are illegal in warfare.
Indeed, as are any weapons intended to maim instead of kill. Granted, these days you want something that can pierce armor, but there is a strategy based in burdening your opposition with cripples, maimed, and wounded men and women, rather than just reducing their numbers outright. A dead man is buried, end of story, but a wounded man requires others to rehab and care for him to some degree, and uses more resources.
In practice, this issue is now more relevant in areas such as blinding lasers or means to deafen as something other than a side-effect of an attempt to kill. This is partly why there is some debate over the use of bomblets (cluster bomb ordinance) and mines, which are prone to maim and not kill when left undetonated.
Andy Resnick said:
So are any biological toxins, regardless of their origin or method of production- so much for pollen and urushiol.
Even a CO2 bomb is outlawed. But. a bomb that kicked up sufficient dust to choke and suffocate an enemy does not appear to violate anything.
Yeah, the logic of killing is a *****eh? Take a large fuel-air-bomb for instance; many will be killed by the pressure wave, and the result of a rapid influx of oxygen to the ground zero event. This is a result of a weapon meant to kill specific targets however, so it's allowed. You'll deafen and blind plenty of people with standard dumb iron bombs, but that's not what they're meant to do, rather it's an unfortunate side-effect for people outside of the kill radius, but still close to the explosion.
This is often part of the debate for white-phosphorus munitions, which tend to burn, cripple and maim, but we (the USA) and others argue that it's used as a smoke screen munition. That is a major ongoing debate, much as Napalm was very controversial. In the end, the laws of war have little to do with sparing lives, but rather set out a set of rules as to restrict the intent of the killer to JUST killing.
Andy Resnick said:
I wonder if a bomb designed to destroy and disperse an enemy's chemical stocks would violate a treaty. Probably not- set the poison ivy on fire!
Well, that doesn't require any special design, just an enemy with stockpiles such as Iraq in the first Gulf War. Ideally you deploy high-temp incendiary bombs such as thermite to render the substances inert, but... as we've seen, it doesn't always work. Then, the WEAPON is not illegal, but questions could be raised about the wisdom of attacking the stockpiles. In the end, the onus has always fallen on the group stockpiling the illegal arms... after all, you can't wait for them to deploy them in a weaponized form.
You should follow the debate around the concept of the Bush W. -era "nuclear bunker-buster"... Many are horrified by the concept because the primary damage would be eclipsed by fallout, literally. In the past, in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we deployed air-bursts, which minimized fallout and radioactive ejecta. If you drill a bomb underground you're kicking up some nasty material that will be toxic and radioactive for a long enough period to harm many "downwind".
Bottom line: no maiming as a primary intent, no crippling as a primary intent, minimize fallout (literally and figuratively), no WMD, minimize undetonated ordinance, no chemical or biological agents: CO2 would be a "choking agent", as opposed to a nerve agent like organophosphates, or a blister agent such as Mustard Gas. I think urushiol oil would be considered a blister agent, ESPECIALLY in aerosol form, as opposed to "blood" agents such as cyanides.