4 - Accounting for the ENMOD Convention: Cold War Influences on the Origins and Development of the 1976 Convention on Environmental Modification Techniques

Summary

This chapter is concerned with tracing the history of the drafting of the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). In seeking to understand how and why ENMOD came about, the chapter locates its emergence in the extant superpower rivalry between the USSR and USA around the time of the war in Indochina. Its provisions, it is argued, reflect the complex roles of those powers within the Cold War – as scientific innovators, military superpowers, ideological adversaries and hesitant bilateralists – and survives as a quintessential juridical exemplar of Cold War thought and practice.