ABSTRACT
Results of a site visit with the CEO and engineers of a leading global armaments manufacturer reveal a healthy shared anxiety among many defense contractors and engineers who genuinely desire to assure themselves that their chosen activities are morally justifiable and specifically do not violate the extant provisions of international law or otherwise represent reckless or irresponsibly risky behavior. Efforts at legal control of weapons development are impossible without the willing participation of such experts, whether working directly for national governments, their militaries, or private defense contractors. I apply the distinction between “black-letter” (hard) law and voluntary compliance (“soft law”) to the current legal debates regarding robotics, cyber, and other new areas of governance wherein the “canons of good governance” tend to mitigate against prospects for substantive “hard law” revisions, making voluntary consent and compliance a more reasonable path to success. The book concludes with an enumeration and discussion of voluntary guidelines for research and defense engineering, listing several principles of responsible engineering and defense contracting to serve in lieu of heretofore unattainable revisions to international law.
