Conventional Thinking? The 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Politics of Legal Restraints on Weapons during the Cold War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though largely unknown, the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) has been successful in many areas. The treaty remains in force today and has helped to regulate many types of weapons, including landmines, incendiary weapons, and blinding laser weapons. Additionally, it has helped to clarify terms important for international legal norms, such as “unnecessary suffering” and “military necessity.” The CCW was the first treaty to regulate conventional weapons in more than 70 years. Why is this seemingly useful treaty relatively unfamiliar compared with other laws of war treaties, remembered only by humanitarians who occasionally invoke it to denounce it for being conservative or even a “humanitarian failure”? This article shows that besides “humanitarian politics,” Cold War politics had a major and underappreciated impact on conventional weapons treaty negotiations from the late 1960s through the 1980s. In particular, Cold War politics established the different sides in the negotiations (West, East, and South), which had a far-reaching impact on the conduct and tone of the negotiations, determined the weapons and issues under discussion, and ultimately affected implementation of the 1980 CCW following its ratification. By tracing the history of conventional weapons negotiations from 1968 to 1980 and examining the key impact of Cold War politics on the process, this article sheds light on the politics of conventional weapons negotiations today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".