Weapons of War: Environmental Impact

Environmental Impact

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• Publisher: KW Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9789381904749
• eBook ISBN: 9789385714719
• Edition: 1

The Indian Air Force, from a humble beginning in 1932 with 4 Wapiti aircraft, six Indian officers and 22 hawai sepoys, have traversed a long journey of eighty one years and crossed noteworthy milestones to become the fourth largest air force in the world. While facing several limitations/challenges, IAF have met all the national defence requirements, and made several strategic contributions. With growing economic interests and national aspirations, expanding interests well beyond our territorial boundaries and prevailing internal security challenges, India's national defence requirements are also increasing. The first Gulf War was a monumental turning point in the war-time employment of aerospace power. Ever since significance of aerospace power in war, crisis and peace time has been gaining ascendency. Kosovo and Libya are the two pertinent examples of the allies virtually relying on aerospace power, without committing any soldiers on the ground. Scrutiny of the emerging global and national trends suggests that employment of the aerospace assets, as well as nation's expectation from the IAF, will continue to rise. Alongside, there is an unplanned fall in flying platforms, weapon systems and pilot strength of the IAF.This study is an attempt to analyse the history of the IAF in war as well as 'other than war operations'; to appreciate the emerging trends in geopolitics, aerospace technology and doctrine; and to identify the likely challenges IAF would be facing in the next two decades and beyond. Road map for transformation of the national security framework, indigenous aerospace industry and the IAF has also been suggested.

I

Introduction

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Armed conflict between nations or between opposing factions within a nation can have grave consequences.¹ The impact of military weaponry and tactics extends beyond military targets to affect civilian populations and the natural environment. The main impacts of armed conflict on the environment are habitat destruction and loss of wildlife, over-exploitation and degradation of natural resources, and pollution. Armed forces may directly target forests and other ecosystems in order to deprive enemy troops of cover, shelter, and food. Mass movements of people and other disruptions caused by armed conflict can deplete forest cover, timber and wildlife. During non-international armed conflict (NIAC)² in a weak State, lawlessness can make it difficult to prevent illegal logging, mining, and poaching. Even peacetime military activities and preparation for war can be extraordinarily harmful to the environment.

Although wartime environmental damage is as old as war itself, the technological advancement in weapon systems and modern tactics have raised the scale of destruction of ecosystems. From the use of poison gases in World War I and atomic bombs in World War II to the use of chemical defoliants in Vietnam, the laying of landmines in numerous NIAC,³ and the burning of oil wells in the Gulf War, war has left a legacy that extends far beyond the battlefield and long past the duration of the original conflict. The Gulf War zone is still littered with tonnes of depleted uranium and unexploded military ordnance left by the coalition forces.⁴ The US military forces based in Afghanistan since 2001 have generated a huge quantity of toxic chemicals and hazardous radioactive waste; when they withdraw, the waste they leave behind will continue to pollute Afghanistan for centuries.

It was after the Vietnam War that the world first isolated the environmental consequences of war as a separate legal issue. The 1990 Gulf War created such severe environmental devastation that the international community was compelled to create an institution to enforce legal norms. The 1999 Kosovo conflict raised further environmental issues. Serbian forces and militias poisoned wells and allegedly engaged in scorched earth tactics to spur Kosovar Albanians to leave their homes. NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign caused severe damage to certain areas, particularly around the oil refinery, and petrochemical and fertiliser plants complex at Pancevo and at the industrial facilities of Novi Sad.⁵ More recently, a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report has alleged serious environmental damages in the Gaza Strip following a 23-day conflict between Israel and Palestinians.⁶ Non-state armed conflicts may also cause depletion of natural resources and biodiversity. This may weaken the chances of lasting peace to find sustainable livelihoods. Thus, whatever may be the cause of a conflict, environmental degradation and resource depletion can drag it into a vicious circle of poverty, further political instability, more armed conflict, greater environmental degradation, and even greater poverty.

The Environment

The word “environment” derives from the verb “environ,” which means to surround or encircle.⁷ Broadly speaking, the term includes water, air, soil, flora and fauna. Dictionaries define “environment” as “the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates.”⁸ Accordingly, the term encompasses the features and the products of the natural world as well as those of human civilisation. It refers to the conditions under which any organism or thing lives or is developed and the sum total of the influences which modify and determine the development of life or character or more generally, that which surrounds and influences. This vision of the environment as the external surroundings that determine the development of life is applied broadly to living beings inclusive of humans. The environment could also be defined as the sum total of the components of the atmosphere, biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. Another definition is that the environment is anything not made by humans.

The legal definition of “environment” is important; however, many treaties on environmental law do not define the term. States have been reluctant to expand the definition of the environment to include such things as natural resources, climate modification, biodiversity, and ecosystems for fear of limiting their military options. The US Council on Environmental Quality’s definition of the environment is “the natural and physical environment and the relationship of people with that environment.” This definition illustrates the problems of breadth, ambiguity, and circularity that plague this most basic question, namely, exactly what we are attempting to protect.⁹ It seems safe to say that the environment comprises abiotic and biotic components including air, water, soil, flora, fauna and the ecosystems formed by their interaction.¹⁰

The Environment Act of India states that the environment includes water, air and land and the interrelationship which exists among and between water, air and land, and human beings, other living creatures, plants, micro-organisms and property.¹¹ The UK’s Environmental Protection Act 1990, provides that the “environment” consists of all, or any, of the following media, namely, the air, water and land; and the medium of air includes the air within buildings and the air within other natural or man-made structures above or below ground. The legal definition of “environment” is notable at two levels. At the general level, it defines the scope of the legal subject and the competence of international organisations.¹² More specifically, it is crucial to efforts at establishing rules to prevent damage to the environment by hostile activities and the liability for such damage.¹³ The meanings of the term “environment” are multiple and contested in contemporary usage. The terms “nature,” “wilderness,” “ecosphere,”¹⁴ and “ecosystem,”¹⁵ in common parlance are used synonymously with “natural environment.” The distinction between “natural” and “man-made” has also become blurred in recent scholarly works of political ecologists and bio-geographers which highlight the long history of human alteration of nearly every environment on Earth, and the continual alteration and management of pristine natural environments by rural and indigenous peoples.¹⁶ The distinction becomes foggier in the categorisation of genetically modified organisms.

The environment has an independent, truly unique and intrinsic value—value that often exceeds that of human artefacts. It is interconnected within itself in a way that is very different from the way people are connected. Thus, when a combatant poisons the water of an enemy’s river, for example, he harms all the riparian states, not simply the target state. Recent history demonstrates that even in its just and lawful forms, armed conflict has become increasingly destructive¹⁷ and is likely to become more so in the future, given the technological advancement in weaponry. The environment has been described as the silent casualty of armed conflict. The governments involved in armed conflict honour the fallen soldiers and acknowledge the “collateral damage” of civilians injured and killed. However, they treat impact on the environment as the necessary cost of armed conflict and disregard any responsibility for environmental contamination.

Classification of Environmental Damage

Though an armed conflict is synonymous with environmental damage, systematic analysis about the effects of conflict on the environment is rare to find in literature. Dahl (1992) has classified environmental destruction into six categories based on the intention of the attacker:¹⁸

(a)Destruction of the human environment

(b)Destruction of the cultivated environment

(c)Destruction of the natural environment of economic importance

(d)Destruction of the natural environment of non-economic categories

(e)General environmental degradation

(f)Environmental manipulation as a tool of war

In an armed conflict, the opposing forces may legally cause (a) and (b) only. Causing (c) to (f) would be unlawful, as this would affect civilians and other protected persons. However, Dahl’s classification is not useful when one is interested in the effects of war on nature per se.

Lanier-Graham (1993) has proposed three categories of environmental harm: (i) Intentional direct destruction of the environment during war, (ii) Incidental direct destruction, that is, collateral environmental destruction incidental to war aims, and (iii) Indirect or induced destruction, that is, medium or long-term consequences directly attributable to war. The first category refers to deliberate attacks on cultivated and uncultivated lands and natural resources with the objective of environmental destruction for its own sake. The setting of oil wells on fire during the 1991 Gulf War serves as an example of this category.¹⁹ An example of the second category includes soil disturbance when troops dig trenches or when heavy equipment and battle tanks are driven across fragile surfaces. Riding heavy war machines on desert surfaces can break the desert’s thin sheet of encrusted sand. Damage in the third category includes destruction which may occur as a result of the migration of human population, for example, Afghans fleeing to Iran and Pakistan. Such migration can result in an enormous amount of untreated trash, due to the lack of sanitation and proper waste disposal, and large-scale deforestation due to the lack of shelter and fuel.

Indirect or induced destruction, Lanier-Graham’s third category, refers to habitat denial to non-human species and addresses mostly long-term wildlife consequences of war, such as species depletion and extinction. This is probably the most important category in terms of damage done and occurs in a large part because war induces human population shifts and thereby brings resource pressures to marginal lands.²⁰ This category of war-induced effects includes crude and subtle effects.²¹ Induced damage, i.e., alteration of the natural environment after war—possibly irreversible alteration—thus emerges as the most important category of the effect of armed conflict on the natural environment.

Levy and others (1997: 52) have classified the natural environment into physical, chemical, and biological components.²² The physical environment includes aspects of the natural environment, such as weather and climate, soil conditions and vegetation, water sources, as well as human infrastructure, such as water supply and sanitation, and transportation and communication networks. The chemical environment refers to things affecting air, land, and water quality, and the biological environment refers to micro- and macro-organisms and their ecological interactions in and over time and space. Thus, specialists such as marine biologists, atmospheric climate researchers, ornithologists, organic chemists, geochemists and geophysicists could in principle make valuable contributions to the assessment of damage to the natural environment from armed conflict. The approach could be useful for those recording war-related environmental damage, but does not provide an integrated and ecological assessment of the damage.

Schwartz (1998: 489),²³ has categorised environmental destructions into eight categories:

1. Deliberate, “primary symbolism,” peacetime, e.g., Galapagos Islands incident²⁴
2. Deliberate, “primary symbolism,” wartime, no current examples
3. Deliberate, “secondary symbolism,” peacetime, e.g., manipulation of chemical and biological agents
4. Deliberate, “secondary symbolism,” wartime, e.g., oil spill and oil well sabotage during Gulf War
5. Deliberate, not symbolic, peacetime, e.g., nuclear testing by France in the Pacific Ocean
6. Deliberate, not symbolic, wartime, e.g., environmental damage during the Vietnam War
7. Unintentional, not symbolic, peacetime, e.g., nuclear accident (Chernobyl)
8. Unintentional, not symbolic, wartime, e.g., collateral effects of conventional warfare

Machlis (2006) has used the term “warfare ecology” for environmental damage during war. Ecology in this context includes both biophysical and socio-economic systems. All three stages of war (preparation, war, post-war) have significant ecological consequences. Modern warfare preparation requires research, weapons testing, training and associated facilities. Training activities often lead to residual unexploded ordnance, chemical contamination, craters, noise pollution, removal of vegetation, soil erosion, and economic disruption.²⁵ The ecology of war itself is largely distinguished by immense and concentrated energy flows, severe disturbances, and habitat destruction. Post-war conditions include intense pollution, unexploded ordnance, damaged and destroyed infrastructure, degraded landscapes, economic disruption, r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Weapons of Mass Destruction
• 3. Conventional Weapons
• 4. Prohibited Conventional Weapons
• 5. Weapons and the Law
• 6. Conclusion and Recommendations
• Bibliography