1. Legal Challenges for Nuclear Security and Deterrence

Nuclear security and nuclear deterrence face continuing challenges; nuclear security and safety requires tremendous efforts that under extraordinary and unforeseen circumstances have proven to have been largely in vain. Reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is widely considered as ‘increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective’, yet all nuclear-armed States are engaged in modernizing their respective nuclear arsenals. The contributions to this volume examine global and regional approaches to fully understand this situation and to explore viable solutions to this ever-growing problem. Contributors try to develop realistic pathways to nuclear disarmament at a time of an obvious and seemingly widening schism. One part of the international community of States is propagating an unconditioned prohibition of developing, acquiring, hosting, global using nuclear weapons, while the other part is unwilling to accept such prohibition, as long as nuclear weapons exist.