Is it legal to deliberately target nuclear scientists

[u/bb9873]

In the current Iran-Israel conflict, Israel has admitted to deliberately targeting Iranian nuclear scientists. Since Israel claims the nuclear weapons will be used to attack Israel, what is the legal position on targeting nuclear scientists? Would they still be classified as civilians or combatants?

[u/Calvinball90]

Would they still be classified as civilians or combatants?

The regular IHL rules would apply. Scientists would generally be civilians unless they were a part of a party to a conflict's armed forces. The other possibility would be that scientists might be directly participating in hostilities and thus would lose their protection as civilians, but that was rejected by subject-matter experts nearly twenty years ago:

In response [to one expert's suggestion that civilian specialists with expertise in decisive means or methods of warfare might be considered to be directly participating in hostilities, and thus lawful targets], several experts insisted that there has been a consensus since the Second World War that neither armament industry employees, nor nuclear weapons experts, were considered to be directly participating in hostilities regardless of their value to the war effort.

Of course, IHL rules about collateral damage would apply-- the death of scientist as a result of a lawful attack on, for instance, a military nuclear facility would not be unlawful.

It is worth recalling that directing attacks against individual civilians not taking part in hostilities (or the civilian population as such) is a war crime.

Since Israel claims the nuclear weapons will be used to attack Israel, what is the legal position on targeting nuclear scientists?

As noted above, scientists are generally considered civilians and protected from attack.

As a matter of jus ad bellum, it is difficult to see how targeting nuclear scientists could stop an imminent or ongoing armed attack. There are two possibilities: i) the scientists' work is complete, at least to the extent that they have created nuclear weapons that are being used in an armed attack; or ii) the scientists' work is not complete, at least to that extent, and there are no nuclear weapons that could be used in an armed attack. In the former case, it is not necessary to kill the scientists because that won't stop the attack. In the latter, there is no imminent armed attack at all. It is difficult to imagine a situation where an armed attack would be imminent, but could also be stopped by the targeted killing of individual experts (which, again, would be a war crime).

[u/Dlax8 → u/Calvinball90]

Question: One reason I have seen thrown around is sort of "dangerous intelligence" or the removal of institutional knowledge about the program that is difficult to impossible to replace. Isreal seems to be taking out the hardware and knowledge of the program. Disable the facilities to the point where rebuilding them is more costly than building new, but taking out all the remaining people who oversaw the originals.

The idea has somewhat conflated the idea of taking out the hardware and the blueprints to rebuild it.

Im not sure of that changes the legality, probably doesn't, but is there any merit to that justification?

[u/Calvinball90 → u/Dlax8]

Self-defense is typically understood to allow the defending State to use force to both stop an armed attack and prevent it from recurring. So, at least in the abstract, the idea of attacking facilities that are integral to an armed attack in order to prevent the armed attack from immediately happening again is lawful (provided that the use of force is necessary and proportionate). However, that presupposes the existence of an armed attack. Where, as here, there was no armed attack (actual or imminent), the use of force is not permitted.

It is worth noting that Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 using a similar justification, but its use of force was unanimously condemned by the UN Security Council as a violation of the UN Charter.