ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the efforts to regulate not only chemical weapons but biological and nuclear weapons as well as various kinds of conventional weapons. St. Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians during the middle Ages converted the principle of distinction from a moral obligation into a legal obligation and extended protection to peasants, merchants, and anyone not bearing arms. As with the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions are state-centric in the sense they were meant to apply mainly to interstate war. As William Banks comments, Under Geneva, there are two kinds of wars: interstate armed conflicts and intrastate armed conflicts. Ratified by 170 countries, it has been largely observed, although the Soviet Union is rumored to have used germ warfare in Afghanistan in the 1980s. There is general acknowledgment that international humanitarian law (IHL) accepts that there is no such thing as a perfectly clean war. The changing nature of conflict invites ever dirtier wars that IHL seeks to manage.
