America's belief in the utility of nuclear weapons, along with its hypocritical insistence that nearly all other nations abide by the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) while it ignores the NPT's Article VI obligation to engage in 'good faith" negotiation to completely eliminate such weapons, have persuaded other nations that nuclear weapons are desirable. Witness India, then Pakistan and, now, North Korea.
Moreover, continued US willingness to plan to use nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War ignores a July 8, 1996, advisory opinion issued by the World Court, which concluded: "[T]he threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law." The court envisioned but one circumstance in which the use of nuclear weapons by a state might not constitute a crime against humanity: the "extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which its very survival would be at stake."
According to Gerson, among the principles from which the World Court drew "were that nuclear weapons are genocidal and potentially omnicidal; they cause indiscriminate harm to combatants and non-combatants alike and inflict unnecessary suffering; they violate the requirement that military responses be proportional; they destroy the ecosystem, thus endangering future generations; they violate international treaties outlawing the use of poison gas; and they inflict unacceptable damage to neutral nations." [p. 35]
But, perhaps, George Kennan said it best in 1982, when he wrote: "[T]he readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings - against people whom we do not know, whom we have never seen, and for whose guilt or innocence it is not for us to establish - and in doing so, to place in jeopardy the natural structure upon which all civilization rests, as though the safety and the perceived interests of our own generation were more important than everything that has ever taken place or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a presumption, a blasphemy, an indignity - an indignity of monstrous dimensions - offered to God!" ["A Christian's View of the Arms Race," The Nuclear Delusion p. 207]
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