The major thrust of contemporary international law is to restrict coercion in international relations as a modality of major change. The use of force as an instrument of change has always been wasteful, disruptive, and tragic. In the nuclear era the renunciation of force as a method of settlement of disputes has become an imperative. These necessities have resulted in a widely accepted distinction between lawful and unlawful uses of force in international relations which is embodied in the United Nations Charter. Force pursuant to the right of individual or collective defense or expressly authorized by the centralized peacekeeping machinery of the United Nations is lawful. Essentially all other major uses of force in international relations are unlawful. These fundamental proscriptions are designed to protect self-determination of the peoples of the world and to achieve at least minimum world public order. As such, they reflect the basic expectations of the international community. Since they are aimed at prohibiting the unilateral use of force as a modality of major change, they have consistently authorized the use of force in individual or collective defense at least “until the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” This defensive right is, at least at the present level of effectiveness of international peacekeeping machinery, necessary to the prevention of unilateral use of force as an instrument of change. The fundamental distinction between unlawful unilateral force to achieve major change and lawful force in individual or collective defense against such coercion is the structural steel for assessment of the lawfulness of the present military assistance to the Republic of Viet-Nam.

After two decades of hate and antagonism following the war, Japan and the Republic of Korea (hereinafter referred to as the ROK) took a step towards amicable relations, with the signing of the normalization treaty and related documents on June 22, 1965, in Tokyo. The suspicion existed among Koreans, however, that normal relations would again bring the ROK under Japan’s economic and political domination. On the other hand, the opposition party in Japan found it unfeasible at that point for Japan to select from the divided nation of Korea the ROK as its friend. Overcoming opposition within both their parliaments, the Governments of Japan and the ROK each succeeded in securing the majority necessary to ratify these documents. The instruments of ratification were exchanged in Seoul on December 18, 1965.

On April 8, 1965, the representatives of the six member states (Belgium, France, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and The Netherlands) of the European Communities signed the “Treaty Establishing a Single Council and a Single Commission of the European Communities.” The treaty’s principal object is to replace the executive bodies of the three Communities, i.e., the Commissions of the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) and the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (E.C.S.C.) by a single European Commission. At the same time, the Councils of Ministers of these three Communities are to be merged into one Council. This Merger Treaty is intended to be the first step toward the ultimate merger of the E.C.S.C, instituted by the Treaty of Paris of April 18, 1951, and the E.E.C. and EURATOM, instituted by the Eome Treaties of March 25, 1957.

The question of the legality of France’s nuclear test series, commenced on July 2, 1966, in French Polynesia, will probably stop short of any definitive third-party determination and be subjected only to general community appraisal. Yet even at the level of scholarly or diplomatic argumentation it is important to inquire into the competing interests and legal factors involved in the atmospheric tests. This is true not only because differing political expectations or even measures might depend on the consensus as to the legality or illegality of the French tests, but also because the precedential value of the tests will be of greater or less force depending upon whether there is agreement at the time of the tests that France was or was not acting within her international legal rights.