Nuclear Arsenals, International Lawyers, and the Challenge of the Millennium

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, a remarkable yet extraordinarily tragic and bloody century, we are given to flashbacks of events of truly millennial salience, among them the Manhattan Project and the development of the atom bomb. The image of a mushroom cloud of immense destructive capacity is complemented by the knowledge that under that cloud were the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first victims of the atomic age. The disturbing image of a vaporized human being etched in rock near the epicenter of the bomb blast in Hiroshima remains a permanent legacy of the human impact of an atomic blast. This is an image that both rivets and disturbs those who now visit the bomb site.

It is a haunting and disturbing warning about the threat posed by nuclear weapons; a threat that bespeaks vaporized humanity as a casualty of thermonuclear war.