Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at the objects that victims of human rights abuses carry with them in their long search for reparations and commemoration of their losses. This week, we continue our examination of physicality in security studies by reading new research on the weaponization of water.

At one point in human history, water’s importance in war went beyond bearing convoys, hiding submarines, and slaking soldiers’ thirst. Water was often itself a weapon. In areas where it was scarce, armies took action to make it scarcer to force besieged enemy cities to capitulate, and in areas where it was abundant, combatants destroyed dams and watched the resulting floods carry their adversaries away. Today, however, most combatants recoil at the use of water as a weapon, and only the most depraved deploy it.

In a new article in International Security, political scientist Charlotte Grech-Madin traces the rise of this “water taboo” and explains how it has been enforced since it first appeared. In doing so, Grech-Madin makes the case that the taboo arose not from any decline in water’s tactical utility but from a moral response sparked by human rights advocates.

In World War II, both sides routinely targeted water sources as part of their war effort. The British even built a special bomb for destroying German dams in an attempt to flood German farmland, deploying it in an air offensive with the achingly British name “Operation Chastise,” which killed 1,600 civilians. At the outset of the Korean War, norms remained the same. The new Geneva Conventions made no mention of water as a weapon, and North Korean forces were quick to target dams in the south while United Nations forces destroyed North Korean hydroelectric plants. As human rights discourse gathered momentum, however, the combatants soon sought to cover the shame of their use of water with rhetorical fig leaves. In 1953, when UN commander Mark Clark asked the US Air Force to bomb dams in an effort to inundate key North Korean agricultural land and destroy 250,000 tons of rice, the Air Force did so only on the condition that the bombings would be publicly described as an attempt to inundate military railroads, not civilian rice fields.

By the Vietnam War, states were utilizing that sense of shame to their own ends. North Vietnamese propaganda frequently highlighted the importance of the system of dikes in the country to its civilian agricultural production, suggesting the humanitarian crisis that would result if US bombers targeted the country’s water system. The argument was so effective that, while Richard Nixon wanted to ignore it and launch a mass bombing operation against the dikes, noted humanitarian Henry Kissinger intervened and convinced him not to, telling the president, “I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.” The norm had suddenly grown so strong that even Kissinger had to take heed of it.

Its sudden strength did not appear from nowhere. By the early 1970s, protection of the North Vietnamese dikes had become a key goal of both the peace movement and advocates of international law. An unlikely coalition of UN Secretary-General (and ex-Nazi collaborator) Kurt Waldheim, Presbyterian minister Eugene Carson Blake, and actor and activist Jane Fonda began an effort to bring worldwide attention to reports that the US was intentionally bombing the dikes. Nixon, who in private had wanted to bomb the dikes so badly that he had chastised Henry Kissinger for being “so goddamned concerned about the civilians,” furiously denied the reports, saying that he had issued specific orders to avoid bombing the dikes due to the likelihood of resulting civilian casualties. The activists’ provocation and Nixon’s response set a powerful precedent.

By 1977, the UN General Assembly had passed protocols that institutionalized the taboo, calling attacks on water resources a “grave breach” of international humanitarian law. US military doctrine followed suit, removing from official policy references to methods for denying enemy forces fresh water. Those protocols and policies have since grown into a vast array of national and international legal measures to protect water during wartime. Well within living memory, a US president sought to unleash floods on North Vietnam that his own Secretary of State estimated would drown 200,000 people. Today, however, when states violate the water taboo, they are greeted with swift international condemnation often led by the US. Sometimes activism really does get the goods.

Orla Barry spoke to Syrian refugees in Denmark who have had their residency permits revoked following a policy shift by the Danish government. Denmark now considers some areas of Syria safe enough for people who fled them to return, and has canceled residency permits for some people from those areas. There are no diplomatic relations between Denmark and the Assad government in Syria, so the Danish government cannot legally deport refugees back to Syria. Instead, people who have had their residency permits revoked are sent to facilities in Denmark, where conditions are so bad that the government hopes they will choose to leave on their own.

Annika London reflected on the contrasts between her grandmother’s view of “security” as a Black woman who left the South as part of the second wave of the Great Migration and the way Washington experts present “security” as a policy area. National security focuses almost exclusively on foreign enemies, including the North Vietnamese soldiers that London’s grandmother’s eldest son was sent halfway across the world to kill. Yet, at home, in both London grandmother’s generation and her own, Black people in the US face state violence, threats to their franchise and aggressions that have nothing to do with overseas adversaries. Finding meaning in conventional definitions of security is difficult, London wrote, when those definitions refuse to engage with threats to Black lives.

Shirin Jaafari chronicled the closing of the Rainbow Center, a community space on Turkey’s border with Syria that served Syrian refugee children in the area. At its height, the Rainbow Center hosted over 100 children six days a week, offering educational activities and mental health support. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the center to close, and as the pandemic rages in Turkey there are no indications of when it will reopen. Center co-founder Salim Abdul Ghani works to check in on some of the children who frequented the center, but the pandemic and the resulting economic downturn have forced many of them back into the labor force.

A useful find by the Iraq Study Group, since the Bush administration’s argument about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq boiled down to, “where there’s smoke alarm, there’s fire.”

When threat inflation goes wrong.

Great moments in Pentagon press briefings.

For too long, Dr. Mario has been the only playable character in Super Smash Bros with a graduate degree. Get this done, Nintendo!

This is what Professional Military Education really looks like.

Some soldiers: I don’t want to get the COVID-19 vaccination because it’s not FDA approved.

The Army: We both know you have literally no idea what is in Rip Its. Get out of here.

This is distressingly accurate, but presumably there’s also a neoconservative cicada who, upon hearing that the US is involved in the same wars in 2021 as in 2004, is pretty stoked.

The CIA’s new attempts to appeal to millennials are really paying off.