WORLD ROUNDUPWhen AI Decides Who Lives and Dies | Countering North Korean Cybercrime and Its Enablers | Climate Change and Military Power, and more
· US Accuses Russia of Using Chemical Weapons Against Ukraine
Washington says banned substances including poison gas used during the First World War are being deployed on the battlefield, with one soldier suffocating to death
· Britain ‘Must Invest in Iron Dome as World War Looms’
Ex-US security adviser urges UK to spend 4pc of GDP on defence because ‘it’s a lot cheaper to prevent a war than have a fight’
· Countering North Korean Cybercrime and Its Enablers
The crackdown on digital platforms that help North Korea launder billions in stolen cryptocurrency has so far achieved only mixed results
· The Case for Averting War Between Israel and Hisballah
There are several reasons why a massive Israeli military operation designed to eliminate Hizballah might be counterproductive
· Climate Change and Military Power: Hunting for Submarines in the Warming Ocean
Climate change has significant effects on military power, capabilities, effectiveness, and employment – for example, the range of detection of enemy submarines through underwater acoustics is contracting due to climate change
· When AI Decides Who Lives and Dies
The Israeli military’s algorithmic targeting has created dangerous new precedents
US Accuses Russia of Using Chemical Weapons Against Ukraine (Alistair Dawber and Marc Bennetts, The Times)
The United States has accused Russia of using chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops in violation of the international ban on their use.
The State Department issued a statement that claimed it was likely Russia had used the weapons, including the choking agent chloropicrin, to gain an upper hand during the conflict.
“The use of such chemicals is not an isolated incident and is probably driven by Russian forces’ desire to dislodge Ukrainian forces from fortified positions and achieve tactical gains on the battlefield,” it said.
President Biden said shortly after the start of Russia’s invasion that the United States would take unspecified retaliatory measures if Putin’s forces used chemical weapons in Ukraine. “We would respond if he uses it. The nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use,” Biden said.
Chloropicrin is listed as a banned choking agent by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which was created to implement and monitor compliance with the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
Chloropicrin’s use dates back more than a century and was deployed against allied forces by German troops in the First World War.
US officials said that the Russian military has also used grenades loaded with CS and CN gases. They said that at least 500 Ukrainian soldiers had been treated for exposure to toxic substances and one was killed by suffocating on tear gas.
Ukrainian military officials have said that Russia has used chemical weapons on more than 1,400 occasions since the start of the war in February 2022, including during the battle for Mariupol. They also said that their use by Moscow was increasing.
Britain ‘Must Invest in Iron Dome as World War Looms’ (Gwyn Wright, The Telegraph)
Britain must invest in an Iron Dome defense system, a former US national security adviser said as he warned that another world war was on the horizon.
General HR McMaster also urged the Government and the US to spend 4 per cent of GDP on the military because “it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to prevent a war than have a fight”. (Cont.)
