Incendiary Weapons: Need For Stronger Law and a New Forum

Eighty years ago, the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo demonstrated the horrors of incendiary weapons. These UK and US airstrikes near the end of the Second World War blanketed large cities with weapons, including napalm bombs, containing chemical compounds that ignite to set fires and burn people. The heat, flames, and smoke killed approximately 25,000 people in Dresden and left civilian structures and major cultural landmarks in ruins. The conflagrations in Tokyo killed 100,000 people and wiped out the city’s wooden homes.[1]

Survivors described the terror and pain that they experienced on the ground. Witnesses to the Tokyo attack, for example, remembered seeing family members go up in flames, stepping over scorched bodies, and smelling flesh burn.[2] One of the US airmen who dropped the incendiary bombs said that the “fire in Tokyo must have ranked as one of the most horrendous fires in the history of mankind.”[3]

Because of the outrage generated by these attacks and changes to international humanitarian law, large-scale airstrikes with incendiary weapons have not occurred in recent years. They are expressly prohibited by the 1980 Protocol III to the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), which is the only international legal instrument dedicated to incendiary weapons.