On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament Selected Writings of Richard Falk

We are at a time when international law and the law of war are particularly important. The testing of nuclear weapons that is being used in the rhetoric surrounding threats of war is creating new fears and heightening current tensions. Richard Falk has for decades been an outspoken authority calling for nuclear disarmament and the enforcement of non-proliferation treaties. In this collection of essays, Falk examines the global threats to all humanity posed by nuclear weapons. He is not satisfied with accepting arms control measures as a managerial stopgap to these threats and seeks no less than to move the world back from the nuclear precipice and towards denuclearization. Falk's essays reflect the wisdom and innovative thinking he has brought to his long career as a scholar and activist, as he reminds nuclear weapons states of their obligation under international law and moral imperative to seek nuclear disarmament.

Part I. International Law and World Order: 1. The Shimoda case: a legal appraisal of the atomic attacks upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki; 2. Nuclear policy and world order: why denuclearization; 3. Toward a legal regime for nuclear weapons; 4. Nuclear weapons, international law and the world court: a historic encounter; 5. The nuclear weapons advisory opinion and the new jurisprudence of global civil society; 6. Inhibiting reliance on biological weaponry: the role and relevance of international law; Part II. Impacts of Democracy, Neutrality and National Interest: 7. Nuclear weapons and the end of democracy; 8. Nuclear weapons and the renewal of democracy; 9. Neutrality, international law and the nuclear arms race; 10. Nuclearism and national interest – the situation of a non-nuclear ally; 11. A radical world order challenge: addressing global climate change and the threat of nuclear weapons; Part III. Nuclear Policy Initiatives: 12. Arms control, foreign policy, and global reform; 13. The illegitimacy of the non-proliferation regime; 14. No first use of nuclear weapons: pros and cons; 15. Environmental warfare and ecocide facts, appraisal, and proposals; Part IV. Remembering the Past, Encountering the Future: 16. The paucity of the millennial moment: the case of nuclearism; 17. The nuclear challenge after seventy years; 18. The spirit of Thoreau in the age of Trident.

Stefan Andersson is the editor of Revisiting the Vietnam War and International Law: Views and Interpretations of Richard Falk (Cambridge, 2017), the co-editor of Russell on Religion (1999), a selection of Bertrand Russell's writing on religion and related topics, and the author of In Quest of Certainty: Bertrand Russell's Search for Certainty in Religion and Mathematics up to 'The Principles of Mathematics' (1994).