If one subscribes to that view, there's no argument that this was a collective decision for humanities sake, but rather a cost/benefit analysis by the military.
Someone should tell Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmines_in_Ukraine
The US and the USSR never banned them. Most of the world did so they could claim moral clout, but make no mistake, if the shooting started they'd be buying them from one side or the other like crazy.
As former USSR countries, UKR and RUS never agreed to ban them. Same for cluster munitions. And we're seeing just how brutally effective both are.
Why do you believe so?
Imagine a version of game theory in which a defector gets a huge, overwhelming advantage, but everyone declines to defect because they just have so much integrity and a vision of a better world. Now imagine how different the universe would have to be for that to work.
Of course, safety is important, so you also are forbidden from operating electric scooters on many public roads.
All sorts of vehicles are banned from roads. Not banning SUVs doesn’t indicate that were unable to ban SUVs because of some lack of ability to regulate vehicle types on roads.
But for some reason this is a strategy many climate change activists seem to dislike.
So e.g. chemical and biological weapons are pretty poor performers when you put them up against conventional weapons.
For one thing, both can backfire greatly if for example they are improperly handled behind the frontlines. Weapons need to be stable and easy to handle and able to deal with fuckups without killing your own people.
They also are expensive as hell, it costs a lot more (and is probably harder) to find competent people willing to make these types of weapons, and per dollar, they don't kill as many people as conventional bombs do. (See: World War 1) So, they are 'banned', but mostly because they aren't very effective.
When you look at so-called chemical weapons that are in use, they are usually used for temporary area denial, are stable, not that lethal, if at all, and easy to produce: white phosphorus, CN and CS gas, etc. The US of course calls white phosphorus for 'illumination' but the people firing it know what they're using it for. So when they do beat out the alternatives, they get used anyway.
Laser weapons are being developed but they are basically just not there yet. Batteries are heavy and the usefulness seems pretty limited to shooting down incoming drones/missiles possibly. Just using anti-missile missiles or just a stream of bullets is still cheaper and more reliable. Again, if you can see and hit someone in the eyes with a laser, why not just shoot them with a normal bullet? The economics don't make sense.
Poisoned bullets I haven't really heard of, I'm not sure what kind of poison would survive being coated onto a bullet and fired out of a gun, or how making a really expensive nerve agent bullet and then shooting someone with it is better or more sensible than just shooting them with a regular bullet so I can't really comment.
Expanding ammo was 'banned' but again, it was essentially replaced with spitzer style rifle bullets that are more accurate and effective anyway, and can have a similar result on impact.
tldr it's not a good comparison to call these things actually banned in a meaningful sense.
The only "banned" weapons that aren't still being used routinely are nukes.
I don't think it makes sense to ban weapons of war. People don't go to war for fun; they fight out of desperation, whether it's a desperate struggle for national survival, or a desperate struggle for the political survival of some despot. If they can't buy precision glide-bombs and cruise missiles, they use barrel-bombs and gas. Rape as a weapon of war is banned as a warcrime, but it happens in every war, because killing seems to give men a stiffy.
Waging war on civilians is a warcrime, but all wars are fought against civilians; siege warfare is as old as warfare itself, and is the epitome of war against civilians. The same applies to carpet-bombing, and most kinds of economic sanctions. Armies don't usually go to war - countries go to war.
(The situation in Sudan looks anomalous to me; the warring parties seem to be two branches of the same military force, fighting over control over illegal mines).
If lasers were available in WW2 I think they would have been used as blinding weapons against kamikazes. One could make the argument the rules of war against blinding don't apply to someone who is already going to kill themselves to attack you -- he's not planning on having usable eyes anyway.
The Device that Won WW2 - The Cavity Magnetron
Yea, the fact the US/Britain had RADAR while Germany/Japan did not, or did not in the same fashion the allied forces did dramatically shifted the favor towards the allies.
> For all these reasons, rather than keeping weapons out of the sustainability discussion – they should be our focus. If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society. Switching to low-tech weapons sounds unrealistic because it would require global cooperation, but the same holds for lowering the emissions from fossil fuels. Switching to low-tech weapons sounds unrealistic because it involves “uninventing” things, but this also applies to many other problematic everyday products.
> Indeed, military technology is one of the few domains in which we have collectively decided not to use certain technologies. Humanity has banned many types of weapons in warfare, such as chemical and biological weapons, blinding laser weapons, and poisoned bullets. Meanwhile, no country has succeeded in outlawing SUVs, although their danger to other road users and the environment is well-known. As weird as it sounds, military technology leads by example