A good deal of the creative energy of international lawyers in recent years has been absorbed in the continuing Soviet-Western debate revolving around the special Soviet juridical concept of peaceful coexistence or, in its Western-style and United Nations-endorsed euphemism, the concept of friendly relations and co-operation among states with differing political and social systems. Whether in the United Nations Sixth (Legal) Committee, in the authoritative, if private, International Law Association, even in the World Federation of United Nations Associations' scientific seminars, or at times in the International Law Commission itself, the discussion over coexistence (friendly relations) has tended to be a straight Soviet-Western dialectical contest that has been concerned sometimes with hammering out minimum principles of Soviet-Western accommodation in the Cold War era, and sometimes seemingly with the making of propaganda points that would be helpful in carrying on future Soviet-Western dialogues or even more perhaps in carrying the ideological war to the neutralist, uncommitted countries. The apparent achievement of a reasonably firm or stable Soviet-Western detente, with a consequent increasing focus on extension and development of minimum principles of world public order on a basis of reciprocity and mutuality of interest as between the two main competing legal value systems has been amply commented on already. In a sense, the international law of the detente, constructed on a pragmatic basis of inter-systems agreement or consensus, and demonstrated empirically in the actual record of such de facto accommodations and give-and-take, represents a species of “new” international law.* At least, it represents a new gloss on the old customary international law, albeit a gloss that is specially concerned, in the special societal conditions of the contemporary world community, with considerations of security, of stability of settled expectations, and of certainty and the avoidance of surprise in inter-group (more accurately inter-systems) relations—the old “Watchman’s State” legal virtues.

Since 1945 the number of nations possessing nuclear weapons has increased five times and stockpiles of nuclear weapons have increased thousands of times. The enormity of the build-up of capabilities for nuclear destruction has largely overshadowed the remarkable progress that has been made since 1945 in developing the peaceful applications of nuclear science. The take-off point for the economic use of nuclear fuels for generating electricity appears to have now been reached.

Nearly three decades ago I published in this JOURNAL an article in which I tried to prove that even in international law there exist rules having the character of jus cogens; i.e., norms with which treaties must not conflict. Since my eminent colleague in the International Law Commission, Ambassador Tabibi, mentioned in a meeting of this Commission that the view expressed in my article “foreshadowed the solution” embodied in Article 37 of the Commission’s draft Convention on the Law of Treaties concerning the problem of jus cogens in international law, I feel obliged to defend this draft against the criticism directed against it by the eminent English lawyer, Professor Georg Schwarzenberger.