There are no wounded on the North Sea today - not yet. But there are men and women who will be, if the North Sea becomes a battlefield, and the rules that protect them remain untested by the wind and waves. The United Kingdom’s energy debate is framed as a choice between fossil fuels and renewables, but beneath the policy arguments lies a humanitarian question: what happens when the machines break, the platforms catch fire, or the ships collide in stormy waters? Who tends the wounded then - and under what rules?

The Geneva Conventions do not distinguish between a battlefield and a drilling rig. Common Article 3 applies whenever violence erupts within a state’s jurisdiction - or, by extension, in areas under its effective control, including offshore installations. If an accident or attack leaves workers injured, displaced, or trapped, the obligation to provide medical care without distinction remains. The Red Cross emblem, once worn by volunteers on the fields of Solferino, still carries the promise: here, you are not an enemy, but a patient. Yet no convention writes itself into the steel of a platform, no treaty guarantees a medevac helicopter in a gale. The rules exist, but the institutional capacity to enforce them offshore - especially in crisis - is untested, untrained, and likely unresourced.

Former military leaders understand this. They know that energy infrastructure, however vital, is not inherently protected under international law unless it is clearly separated from military objectives - a distinction that crumbles when a drilling platform is also a strategic asset. If hostilities were to erupt, would a damaged rig be treated as a civilian object entitled to protection - or as a legitimate target whose casualties are merely collateral? The answer depends not on the convention but on the will of those holding the gun. And that is the gap Dunant spent his life trying to close: the gap between what the law says and what happens when the gun is raised.

He would not oppose drilling on principle. He would ask instead: What is the plan when the plan fails? Who is trained to treat burns, crush injuries, or decompression sickness in the North Sea? Are ambulances - maritime or aerial - standing by? Are supply lines for blood, antibiotics, and anaesthetics mapped? Without those, the rules are parchment. And parchment burns easily.

The true measure of energy security is not barrels per day or megawatts on the grid. It is whether the state has prepared, in advance, to treat the wounded - not just its own citizens, but anyone caught in the crossfire of its ambition. Until that preparation is visible, verifiable, and resourced, the rules remain a hope, not a shield. And hope, as he learned at Solferino, is not a substitute for an institution.