The Paradox of Nonlethal Weapons by Fritz Allhof

Not all weapons are designed to kill; some are just meant to cause injury. Yet under the rules of war—a somewhat haphazard collection of ethical and legal directives—we are sometimes allowed to use lethal weapons even when certain nonlethal weapons are disallowed.




In short, the lethal weapons are more permissible on the battlefield. As Donald Rumsfeld once complained “in many instances, our forces are allowed to shoot somebody and kill them, but they’re not allowed to use a nonlethal riot-control agent.” This is the paradox of nonlethal weapons, and it has been around for some time. Yet as military technology becomes increasingly capable of halting an enemy without killing him, it is a situation that international law must reconsider. Isn’t less deadly better?

Restrictions on weapons come from a range of sources. The most basic, though, stems from Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (§35), which holds, “Parties to a conflict and members of their armed forces do not have an unlimited choice of methods and means of warfare.” There are two general reasons for this, each of which tracks a different school of moral thought.




The first is that we must avoid, in the words of the International Committee of the Red Cross, “means and methods of warfare which … cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering” (Rule 70). The thinking here is largely consequentialist: Superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering are inherently wasteful. The stock examples are things like serrated bayonets or exploding bullets. Conventional bayonets and bullets are enough to remove opponents from the battlefield. Their more destructive complements cause substantial internal damage, leading to complicated surgeries, higher mortality, and so on. Since they arguably serve no legitimate military objective, they are prohibited. More