Abstract

Mutiny on the Nuclear Bounty

Last month, the Western nuclear powers stared the cold war in the eye, and flinched. Faced with the prospect of endorsing a United Nations resolution sponsored by the 110 members of the Non-Aligned Movement calling on the World Court to declare nuclear weapons illegal, the United States, Great Britain and France were roused into a frenzy of frantic transcontinental lobbying to stop the initiative before it reached the General Assembly. Their power play insured that the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, the glue that so inextricably bound the cold war antagonists together, would survive even the disappearance of an enemy. What prompted strong language from the normally cotton-mouthed speakers of the diplomatic community was a resolution, introduced by the Non-Aligned Movement and supported by a loose coalition of citizen groups, that called the U.N. General Assembly to seek an advisory opinion from the World Court in The Hague, Netherlands on the legality of the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons. Four years after the fall of the Berlin wall the controversy reveals that the cold war perks of power that came with nuclear weapons did not disappear along with it. In the words of Australian ambassador to the United Nations Richard Butler, "There is no post-cold war order. The first step to getting there is the elimination of nuclear weapons."