A Legal Path to a Nuclear Weapons Free World

Abstract

Sometimes satire brings you closer to the truth than bare facts. In 1964 a fi lm was launched which few who have seen it will ever forget. It was called ‘Dr. Strangelove – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ and dealt with a hypothetical nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, set off as a fi rst strike by an American general. Forty six years later, opinion in the nuclear weapons countries and their allies is still divided between those who believe that ‘the bomb’ has kept the peace between old and new enemies and those who fear that the longer nuclear weapons remain in the world’s arsenals the greater is the possibility, if not of a full-fl edged nuclear war, at least of a nuclear explosion with dreadful consequences. But grosso modo the horror is gone. What was once called omnicide or nuclear winter has become another equation to be solved in the complex math of world governance. This article will briefl y trace the role which law has played in attempts to hold the bomb at bay and will then focus on a legal instrument through which this objective can be achieved, the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention (MNWC).