ABSTRACT
This chapter expounds the view that the incidence of new and unregulated weapons arises from the fact that technological innovations outpace the laws of war. Hence, unregulated weapons, be they nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, Improvised Explosive Devices, or armed drones, constitute a nightmare in the law of armed conflict. But because unregulated weapons possess ambiguous legality, their express illegality is inherent in the consequences of their use. In other words, even if these weapons are not expressly prohibited, the fact that there are unconscionable consequences in their use—consequences that offend international humanitarian law—is the basic source of the disavowal of their use. This position is further strengthened by the Martens Clause. It is also argued that non-state actors in asymmetric warfare have no attraction in eschewing the deployment of prohibited weapons because they use these dirty weapons to compensate for their resource and numerical inferiority.
