At Albany Law School, Stephen is interested in Business Law and its impacts in entrepreneurship. He has served two years as Secretary of the Business Law Society. In his second year, Stephen won the 2019 Donna Jo Morse Negotiation Competition. In the fall of his third year, Stephen completed a field placement that focused on the commercialization of innovative technologies at the Research Foundation for the State University of New York.
Stephen prepared this paper for Professor Bonventre’s International Law of War and Crime seminar.
On July 16, 1945, minutes before the first nuclear test in the Los Alamos desert, physicist Enrico Fermi joked, “[n]ow, let's make a bet whether the atmosphere will be set on fire by this test.” Although before conducting the live test teams of mathematicians and physicists solved that there was a three million to one chance of actually igniting the atmosphere's nitrogen, this was a legitimate concern during the early days of nuclear weapons.
That question alone conveys the immense power that nuclear weapons wield over the planet. Since their first use, the UN, world leaders, scientific communities, and grassroots movements have theorized about how to best police nuclear weapons.
This paper examines the hesitation of the international community to draw bright-line rules regulating nuclear weapons. This review proceeds by examining: the lawlessness of Mutually Assured Destruction, the successes and failures of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, a 1996 Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice, and the 2017 Treaty On The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
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