Norm Dynamics in Multilateral Arms Control: Interests, Conflicts, and Justice

Chapter Four. Arms Control Norms and Technology

CHAPTER FOUR Arms Control Norms and Technology Elvira Rosert, Una Becker-Jakob, Giorgio Franceschini, and Annette Schaper War Is, as Martin van Creveld (1991, 1) puts it, “completely permeated by technology and governed by it.” Technological innovations, be it through increasing precision, lethality and range of weapons, or decreased defensibility against them, have led to an increase in the destructiveness of war that culminated in the “mechanised slaughter of the twentieth-century conflicts” (Monin and Gallimore 2002, 41). However, warfare has been affected not only by technological developments—international norms regulating and prohibiting the use and possession of certain weapons have accompanied it as long as has technological innovation. Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, weapon technological developments have been accompanied by the tightening and deepening of international arms control, so that today numerous international norms regulate and prohibit the use and possession of certain weapons, including prescriptions and proscriptions for stockpiling, transfer, production, destruction, and, rarely, weapons development. These norms fulfill three main functions: to prevent war by mitigating the security dilemma and assuring stability between opponents (Larsen 2002, 8) and, if prevention fails, to limit war damages and to reduce human suffering by specifying the legitimate means of combat (Oeter 2008, 119, 126). However, a glance at the state of the art of military technologies reveals that while international norms have restrained the accumulation, proliferation, and use of some weapons, the development of new weapons and the modernization of existing warfare technologies continues. This puts existing norms under a constant challenge, as the pace of technological progress by far exceeds that of the normative (M. Smith 2009, 105). On the other hand, new technologies can [110] chapter four and do strengthen existing norms as well—by creating new options for verifying their implementation, hampering the transfer of dangerous materials, or limiting the weapons’ effects. But when does technology serve as a normthreatening factor and when as a norm-promoting factor? To pursue this question , the chapter starts with some general considerations concerning the relationship of norms and technology and shows how new weapons technologies have affected the emergence of new norms. In the second part, we examine the influence of technological innovation on existing norms and regimes in four cases—biological weapons (bw), nuclear proliferation, nuclear testing, and antipersonnel landmines. HOW TECHNOLOGY TRIGGERS NORM EVOLUTION As the following section will show, historically, most arms control-related norms emerged as reactions to advances in warfare technology and thus can be seen as an effort to contain the constantly increasing levels of destructiveness (Croft 1996, 22). However, the project to humanize war was only partly successful , since not all advances in warfare technologies have led to the emergence of new norms—rather, only a few of them did (Price 1995, 73–74). Furthermore, some recent processes of norm setting were not directed against new weapons but against weapons that had been in use for a long time. Major breakthroughs in warfare technology came with the Industrial Revolution bringing about magazine-loading firearms, machine guns, explosive bullets , mines and torpedoes, and, later, larger military hardware such as tanks, battle jets, steel-hardened battleships, and submarines (M. Smith 2009, 112–15). Most of these weapons still escape normative opprobrium. Nonetheless, the tremendous increase in the number of victims of war that some of these technologies had brought about in the nineteenth century led to the evolution of the international humanitarian law—a body of international law that regulates the protection of victims and the use of means and methods of combat. The latter ’s principles (discrimination between combatants and civilians, proportionality and avoidance of unnecessary suffering) and the norms derived from them were codified in several multilateral documents that usually followed the introduction of new warfare technologies: the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868 prohibited the exploding bullets that the Russian military had introduced in 1863 (Schindler and Toman 1988, 101). This prohibition did not prevent the British Army from developing another weapon causing cruel wounds, namely Arms Control Norms and Technology [111] the dumdum bullet—which, however, was prohibited at the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 (Prokosch 1995, 11–13). Moreover, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibited the use of poisonous weapons, although this prohibition was also disregarded when various parties made massive use of chemical warfare in World War I. After this war, the desire to hedge the use as well as further development...