Reading Schelling's Arms and Influence tonight and one line stopped me. In 1868 the Russian Empire invited 17 states to St. Petersburg and produced the first international treaty ever to ban a weapon. The preamble set the rule that every later convention was built on: "the only legitimate object which states should endeavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy." If a weapon added suffering without adding military effect, it was outside the laws of humanity. That was the whole idea. The empire had a practical reason for hosting. Its army had just developed an exploding rifle bullet and preferred a ban to watching Prussia and Britain copy it. So even the founding document of humanitarian law was a defense-industry calculation. 158 years later russia fights its war on the opposite principle. Ballistic missiles into residential buildings at three in the morning, substations in January, a second missile aimed at the rescuers who came after the first to save lives under the risk to lose theirs. None of this weakens the Ukrainian army and none of it is supposed to. The purpose is to see how long people can keep living like this. Schelling has a name for it in the same chapter: the diplomacy of violence, the power to hurt used in place of the power to win. russia has not forgotten the 1868 declaration. It wrote the text. It knows what it is breaking better than anyone who signed after it.