Introduction

When warfare was envisaged as Napoleonic battalions or German Panzer units traversing Europe, no serious conceptual difficulties attended the detection and identification of environmental consequences. Even in the modern era, battle scars inflicted by artillery and gunfire raise only trifling new problems in this regard. And when considering nuclear weapons, it is ironic that an exemplary virtue of their use would be the ease of detecting at least the direct environmental damage from their detonation.

But a more insidious form of warfare is moving into a preeminent role on the international stage: chemical and biological weapons (CBW). Chemical weapons may be defined primarily as nerve agents, which are closely related to toxins – inanimate poisonous substances produced by living organisms. Biological weapons may be defined as living organisms that infect their victims, causing incapacitation and often death; some can spread to other living entities, even those not initially attacked. Unlike ordnance, these weapons are dispersed as a difficult-to-detect aerosol; moreover, unlike ordnance, the injurious effects of these weapons typically linger far beyond their initial use. Measured by their capability to contaminate soil and water and hence despoil an ecosystem for a prolonged period, the environmental harms caused by CBW exceed the damage caused by most explosive munitions. In terms of assigning responsibility, the invisibility of chemical or biological agents, combined with their long-lasting and noxious effects, complicates the task of building a legal regime to assess those harms.