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The Protocol on Incendiary Weapons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2017

W. Hays Parks
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Extract

From the time that man discovered fire and devised ways to use it as a tool for survival and advancement, it also has been employed as a weapon for destruction. Sun Tsu's The Art of War (500 B.C.) refers to incendiary arrows, while Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War describes a flame weapon used by the Spartans in 42 B.C. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ascribes Roman success at Constantinople (1453 A.D.) to “Greek fire,” ignited naptha mixed with pitch and resin and spread upon the surface of the water. Great Britain employed Greek fire almost five centuries later as a defence along its coastlines in anticipation of an invasion in 1940.

In the European wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, armies employed compulsory taxation of the countryside in lieu of looting to finance their activities. A defaulting town would have some of its buildings burned, leading to the tax being referred to as Brandschatzung, “burning money.” This practice became widespread during the Thirty Years war.

Type
Tenth Anniversary of the 1980 Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons
Information
International Review of the Red Cross (1961 - 1997) , Volume 30 , Issue 279 , December 1990 , pp. 535 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 1990

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References

1 ICRC, Draft Rules for the Limitation of the Dangers Incurred by the Civilian Population in Time of War, second edition, Geneva, 1958, Article 14, p. 12.

2 ICRC, Conference of Government Experts on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons, Report, Geneva, 1975, p. 17, para. 49.

3 ICRC, Weapons that may Cause Unnecessary Suffering or have Indiscriminate Effects - Report of the Work of Experts, Geneva, 1973, p. 63, para. 221.

4 Rules concerning the Control of Wireless Telegraphy in Time of War and Air Warfare fixed by the Commission of Jurists entrusted with Studying and Reporting on the Revision of the Laws of War assembled at The Hague on December 11, 1922 – Part II – Rules of Air Warfare, Article 18 in General Collection of the Laws and Customs of War, Marcel Deltenre (ed.), Editions Ferd. Wellens-Pay, Brussels, 1943, p. 827.

5 Working Group on Incendiary Weapons (A. CONF. 95/cw6) of 2 October 1980, Report, p. 2.