Arms Control for Uninhabited Vehicles: A Detailed Study

Posted on 02 April 2013 by altmann

In a detailed scientific article just published online, physicist and peace researcher Jürgen Altmann (TU Dortmund, Germany) explains that armed uninhabited vehicles (on land, on/under water, in the air) do not exist in a legal vacuum.

 

For example, they must not be equipped with biological or chemical weapons. In Europe most land and air vehicles are covered by the definitions of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces (CFE Treaty), thus they are limited by numbers and subject to verification. If armed uninhabited vehicles cannot be prohibited outright, then limitations similar to the CFE Treaty are needed in other regions of the world. To avoid dangers for international humanitarian law and military stability, autonomous attack, that is attacks without a human decision in each single case, should be prohibited. Additional prohibitions are needed, among others, for small and very small armed vehicles.

 

Jürgen Altmann, Arms control for armed uninhabited vehicles: an ethical issue, Ethics and Information Technology, 2013, DOI 10.1007/s10676-013-9314-5. Read the full article  (open access, 17 pages) here.

altmann
Jürgen Altmann (PhD) is a physicist and peace researcher (retired) at TU Dortmund University, Germany. Since 1985 he has studied scientific-technical problems of disarmament. An experimental focus is automatic sensor systems for co-operative verification of disarmament and peace agreements and for IAEA safeguards for an underground final repository. The second focus is assessment of new military technologies and preventive arms control, including verification. Studies have dealt with “non-lethal” weapons, civilian and military technologies in aviation, military uses of microsystems technology and of nanotechnology, confidence and security building measures for cyber forces, armed uncrewed vehicles and autonomous weapon systems. He co-founded and chairs the German Research Association for Science, Disarmament and International Security (FONAS) and has authored book chapters on the relationship of natural science, armament and disarmament. He teaches a lecture "Physics and Technology of the Verification of Arms-Limitation Agreements".

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