L-015 IM Policies and achievements National Policies and International Cooperations in the field of Insensitive Munitions

The concept of Insensitive Munitions appeared in the 1980s in different countries with different names, essentially in the US as a follow-on to severe accidents. However, this sort of accidents had often occurred in the past without raising similar programs. What makes the difference today is a technical capability to solve the problem, although this remains a difficult challenge which may require the acceptance of tradeoffs between safety, performance and cost.

According to the relative weight attributed to these three factors, this tradeoff varies from one nation to another, and even from one service to another within the same nation (navies being in general the most concerned). In particular, safety requirements differ in their philosophies and in their degree of enforcement. However, at the same time, there is a need for cooperation between these countries and between the different services within the same country:

• for technical reasons (the difficulty and the cost of the challenge);
• and for military reasons, both between services (due to considerations of shipping and commonality of weapons) and between nations (the need for interoperability within NATO and with friendly nations).

This report describes:

• the IM philosophy;
• the national policies and the main achievements regarding IM in a number of NATO nations* plus Australia;
• the topics and organizations of some international cooperations relevant to the IM field.

* Some documents or excerpts are reprinted from "Insensitive Munitions", a special issue (bilingual English and French) of Defense & Technologie International, published by Connection International (Paris, France), October 1992

Politiques et réalisations en matière de MURAT Politiques nationales et coopérations internationales dans le domaine des MURAT

Ce rapport est un complément au document NIMIC-MD-495-94 du 2 décembre 1994 "IM Policies and Achievements (National Policies and International Cooperations in the Field of Insensitive Munitions)". Il comporte:

• les textes originaux de documents frangais traduits en anglais dans le document ci-dessus;
• les versions françaises de textes NIMIC bilingues et d'articles parus en français et anglais dans une publication consacrée aux MURAT';
• la version française d'un résumé de rapport ISL écrit en allemand;
• (a toutes fins utiles) le texte original de la déclaration de politique de l'Espagne en matière de MURAT