How Reliance on Nuclear Weapons Erodes and Distorts International Law and Global Order

Deployment of nuclear forces as an international security mechanism for prevention of major war is far removed from the world envisaged by the United Nations Charter in which threat or use of force is the exception, not the rule. Reliance on nuclear weapons has also distorted the development of major instruments of international humanitarian law and international criminal law, the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Awareness is deepening of the inherent incompatibility of reliance on nuclear weapons with an ever more entrenched normative framework stressing states’ responsibilities to protect their populations against atrocities and to comply with international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute. International humanitarian law is a solid foundation for the emerging norm of non-use of nuclear weapons and for building a legal framework of a nuclear-weapons-free world that is universal in its approach.