The 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice

摘要

The advisory opinion came at a high point of multilateral disarmament diplomacy. The Chemical Weapons Convention had been negotiated, the NPT had been indefinitely extended, and negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was nearly complete. The initiative to obtain the opinion and the opinion itself reflect that moment. In the subsequent two decades, efforts toward consolidating a multilateral nuclear disarmament regime have been stymied. Nuclear-armed states have done little to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in their security postures, let alone acknowledge that their use is incompatible with the law of armed conflict. Their planning for maintenance and modernization of their arsenals for decades to come and the associated projected vast spending-$1 trillion by the United States over the next three decades-manifests a lack of good faith in meeting the obligation of negotiating the elimination of nuclear arms. On the positive side, nuclear weapons have not been detonated in war, the demand for disarmament is still being vigorously pressed by non-nuclear-weapon states and civil society actors, and the contradiction between reliance on nuclear arms and what the court called "elementary considerations of humanity" is being exposed with renewed energy. In this complex environment, the advisory opinion remains an indispensable guide to the norms compelling nonuse of nuclear weapons and their universal elimination.