HIROSHIMA AND THE ICJ: RE-THINKING THE LEGALITY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

Abstract

Nuclear weapons remain the most controversial category of armaments under international law. Their unparalleled destructive capacity, long-term radiological effects, environmental devastation, and existential implications for humanity make them uniquely difficult to reconcile with the normative architecture of the international law. Notwithstanding, the decades of disarmament diplomacy as well as humanitarian consequences, nuclear weapons continue to occupy a protected and even privileged space within global security doctrine. The authors therefore argued that the current legal regime is structurally contradictory in the sense that it stigmatizes proliferation on the one hand while at the same time normalizing possession by a select class of states. Furthermore, the subsisting framework operated to recognize humanitarian limits on warfare, while tolerating strategic doctrines based on catastrophic annihilation; and invoked good faith disarmament obligations without meaningful enforcement. The paper therefore concluded that nuclear weapons expose one of the deepest legitimacy crises in international law, the inability of a universal legal order to effectively outlaw the most universally catastrophic means of warfare.