World Court Project UK
The Public Conscience in Action
Our Challenge
Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945. For many years the tiny minority of states with nuclear weapons claimed that they were only there as a last resort against nuclear attack or an overwhelming conventional attack. This was advertised as "nuclear deterrence"; but it also had a great deal to do with great powers asserting their prestige.
Yet there was a massive build-up of sea, land and airborne warheads primed for launch at a moment's notice. There were, and still are, tens of thousands
of them far more than anyone could need for nuclear deterrence. For example, Britain, one of the smaller nuclear-armed states, has enough warheads to destroy every capital city in the world. Nuclear weapons are like a deadly virus. They seem to have some terrible will of their own to survive.
Human beings are not machines. Like the rest of us, our leaders can make absurd mistakes and have moments of madness. Technicians may be carefully trained. But they are human and likely to become careless and slapdash over the years. Somewhere, given enough time, something will go catastrophically wrong. The enormous power of nuclear weapons and human unreliability do not sit well together. Perhaps we avoided a nuclear catastrophe only through good fortune.
We lived in dread for decades. Since the end of the Cold War the public's fear of nuclear weapons has diminished and they only feature on the political agenda now and again. But nuclear weapons have not gone away. Arsenals have been slimmed down but they remain an ever-present menace to all our futures. There are still about 26,000 of them, enough to destroy all humanity many times over.
What is at stake? It is nothing less than the survival of civilization and the key factor in this whole scenario is the nuclear weapon. We either destroy it or it will destroy us:
Christopher Weeramantry, former World Court judge, speaking in Edinburgh 2009
The moment of the Hiroshima detonation
In many ways the situation has become more dangerous and urgent since the end of the Cold War. Second, the nuclear club is growing. First there was the U.S. By 1968 Russia, U.K., France and China had joined. Then came Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Now additional states could decide to go nuclear and terrorist groups may well have nuclear ambitions.
These dangers challenge all humanity. It is our common task to confront this self-inflicted threat. The World Court Project believes that no human being, and no state, can be trusted with nuclear weapons. There are no “responsible" nuclear states. Nuclear weapons are immoral and unlawful. The only rational policy is their total abolition under the law.