ABSTRACT
The title of this introduction could be read as suggesting a demise of the legal and political framework that currently surrounds the civilian and military exploitations of nuclear energy. It is more likely, in my view, that we shall see change rather than demise, and I like to think that change will increase the role of nuclear power and decrease the role of nuclear weapons. I believe the accelerating interdependence of states will gradually multiply and increase non-military leverages that are available to states and make it more problematic to use the leverage that can be had from armed force. The relevance of the global military order will be reduced. Nuclear weapons are already claimed to be useless and irrelevant between the P5. I also believe there will be an increased reliance on nuclear power and a development of many new types of reactors – high temperature gas cooled reactors, breeders, thorium fuelled reactors, as well as multi-nationally operated reactors and other nuclear installations for the production of fuel and the disposal of waste. To be sure, none of this change is overnight. The world is mostly slow to wake up to the need for innovation and change. It often takes disaster to rouse us. Even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki scientists foresaw the threat to humanity that nuclear weapons would pose, but it is only now that a serious discussion – as distinguished from rhetoric – has begun about an eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Even before Chernobyl the safety features of the RBMK type of reactor had been severely criticized but it took that disaster to bring about insistence on a global nuclear safety culture permeating technology, management and legal infrastructure. I am impatient – and some of you would say naïve – about phasing out nuclear weapons and the global military order and equally impatient about phasing in safe energy – including safe nuclear power. However, I recognize that we must start from where we are and we need to know something about how we got to where we are.
