As yet, it's apparently untested in the Hague. Hence "probable", not known, either way.
I will defer to your opinion over the learned doctor of the law.
There have been arguments that use of AP weapons (not just DU) on infantry is going to cause undue suffering, due to overpenetration and insufficient wounding effect.
Over-penetration. Choice! Over-penetration is cruel in the same way that wounding an enemy rather than killing him is cruel. Over-wounding is cruel, under-wounding is cruel, and wounding with Momma Bear round for a given mix of range, cover, and angle is just about as cruel. People will argue all kinds of nonsense. You wound him, anywhere, anyway, then that's a day's work. For a given shot, there's always something else one might want, but for the most part you'll take anything you can get. There have been "under-woundings" with the 5.56mm since its inception, despite its occasional terminal ballistic tendency to tumble. A certainly, some have argued that was a problem; the basic calculus of military expedience [termed "military necessity" with the law of land warfare]was inescapable, however: a soldier's personal fighting load of 210 5.56mm rounds in magazines weighed half as much as it would in 7.62mm NATO. That makes it lawful. If we field a weapon that is useful for a military purpose in all its characteristics, and is not
intended in any aspect of its design to produce suffering, then that weapon is lawful.
(In other words, shooting grunts with AP means having to wound them twice or more to stop them, rather than shooting them once with FMJ's.)
Or, at the right range, shooting them with AP means wounding, and with FMJ means a kick in the chest. When we take the law of war and start trying to link it to such a fine, and rather backward, parsing of terminal ballistics, then we do not serve the soldier, who is (in the particulars of forbidden weapons) its
intended beneficiary. The current U.S. 5.56mm round is tungsten-cored rather than lead cored. Now while there was a problem with lead contamination on downrange in training areas, another purpose of the switch was clearly to do better downrange against the slow proliferation of body armor. An old school, lead-cored 5.56mm will drill a short vest at 25m from the muzzle, but if you've looked at how fast the round loses energy in flight, then being able to drill a vest (or a truck door and chest rack) at 500m with a lead-cored FMJ round.
Likewise, soft projectiles are disallowed for military use because they fragment, making treatment harder. .
Expanding or fragmenting small arms rounds (less than 20mm) are banned by the Hague Convention of 1899, IIRC. An expanding small arms round can be harder (being a lead antimony alloy, for instance) than a FMJ round. Lead-cored FMJ rounds are softer than AP rounds (which in military small arms usually have a full metal jacket, as well), but that makes then no more questionable under the law of war.
The toxicity (both chemically and radioactively) of DU is part of its appeal to some users;.
For anti-armor munitions? I would like to know who?? I am sure that making small arms projectiles from DU is possible, and likely done by the same type of folks who use punji stakes, booby-trapped toys, carcass-implanted IED's, and chemical weapons for crowd control. I am talking about the uses of the U.S. and its Western allies have for DU, at least those that are open source.
it's the primary basis for arguments against its use as undue suffering. DU is literally a poisoned round.
No! A poisoned round is a round to which one has added poison. Like many other munitions its characteristics make it toxic, but this toxicity is incidental to its characteristics of producing the best armor-piercing round, let alone pyrophoric armor-piercing anti-armor rounds on God's green earth. If you argue to take that away from our soldiers because of a basic misapprehension of how the laws of war actually operate [as opposed to how some
wish they operated], then you can expect no indulgence from this quarter.
I have been in the U.S. Army for 29 years, 2 months, and 4 days, and though I am no expert, it has been my personal observation that as an institution it has more scrupulous in trying to balance its operational requirements and moral and ethical responsibilities. The militaries that do not use DU are those who, for the most part, don't have access to it, and they are the ones who complain about it. The civilians, they can go talk to their rooting congressman about making another stupid rule for our soldiers to have to follow.
