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Hague Convention of 1899:
(IV,3) Declaration concerning the Prohibition of the Use of Bullets which can Easily Expand or Change their Form inside the Human Body such as Bullets with a Hard Covering which does not Completely Cover the Core, or containing Indentations
Fun fact, the Hague conventions and Geneva Conventions texts were found to be technically applicable to hunting rounds which heavily deform on impact, such that development of the Full Metal Jacket was pursued (it also helped improve accuracy).
It all seems kind of quaint when you can shred people with artillery, grenades, autocannons, mortars, and so forth, possibly not killing them but leaving them in agonizing pain and disfigurement, but a bullet that makes a slightly larger wound cavity is uncivilized.
Disabling them without killing is generally deemed morally superior, and the force of a solid metal slug can cause heavy internal damage so it isn’t superior to rounds more likely to pierce.
does that mean that hollow tip bullets are a war crime?
Yes exactly.
Yes, but a small caveat: only in cases where regular rounds will not cause additional collateral damage. Hollowpoints were designed to pierce armor then shatter or to melt on soft tissue to avoid hitting other nearby entities.
I’m not sure about the armor piercing bit, but an illustrative example of the modern arguments for the use of hollowpoints would be in police work; say, a raid in somewhere crowded, or in a soft walled environment like a drywalled apartment complex or a plane.
Hollowpoints would stop in a person, rather than going through them (most of the the time) and thereby preventing penetration through too many walls, penetrating the skin of an aircraft or killing bystanders behind targets. Most of the projectile energy will be lost in the first soft target, minimizing collateral damage.
Hard to make an argument about crowds in warfare, you’re generally not supposed to attack civilian crowds in the first place.
We are redefining the sodium-potassium projectile as a delivery-system for the weapon, rather than a bullet itself :)
Quite properly, the weapon is the resultant explosion, not the mass of the projectile.
No one complains that an rocket propelled grenade is bullet shaped!
Sodium and potassium are significantly lighter than lead. Bullets made from them would slow down from air resistance and destabilize (aka tumble) significantly faster than standard bullets
So you just have to make them huge?
No fights on rainy days.
