This article considers the prospects for an international treaty governing cyber warfare, reading them against the history of weapons-specific arms control. The author, Alexi Franklin, traces the Just War tradition from Augustine of Hippo through its modern refinements, which have concentrated on classes of weapons — landmines, cluster munitions, and chemical, biological and nuclear arms — judged too indiscriminate to permit, and on instruments such as the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Franklin situates cyber operations along a spectrum of severity: Russia's 2007 attacks on Estonian networks, disruptive but not dangerous; the 2010 Stuxnet sabotage of Iran's nuclear programme, novel but not destabilising to international law; and the 2015 attack disabling Ukraine's power grid in winter, which carried potentially fatal consequences for civilians. He argues that cyber weapons occupy a new offensive class operating outside existing treaty law, and that curbing them matters both to protect noncombatants and to stop cyber conflicts escalating into kinetic ones.