Disarmament
Civil Society and Disarmament
Disarmament Study Series
United Nations Disarmament Yearbook
United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) Occasional Papers
United Nations Disarmament Yearbook (Chinese language)
Ḥawliyyaẗ nazʿ al-silāh
Sostoânie mnogostoronnih soglašenij o regulirovanii vooruženij i razoruženii (Organizaciâ Obʺedinennyh Nacij)
Disarmament: A Basic Guide
International peace and security - and therefore disarmament - stand at the core of the UN mandate. The publications in this series are designed to inform, educate and generate public understanding of the importance of multilateral action, and to rally support for it, in the field of arms limitation and disarmament. Intended primarily for the general reader, the basic guides may also be useful for the disarmament educator or trainer. They are published by the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs in collaboration with the NGO (non-governmental organizations) Committee on Disarmament, Peace and Security pursuant to the purposes of the United Nations Disarmament Information Programme.
Report of the Disarmament Commission
L’avenir du Traité d’interdiction complète des essais nucléaires
Le premier test nucléaire dans le monde, baptisé Trinity, a eu lieu le 16 juillet 1945 dans un désert aride du Nouveau-Mexique, que les conquistadors espagnols avaient appelé Jornada del Muerto (Le voyage de l’homme mort). Dans les décennies qui ont suivi, plus de 2 000 essais de ce type ont eu lieu dans huit pays, certains dans l’atmosphère, d’autres dans le sol et d’autres encore sous l’eau.
Le droit international relatif aux droits de l’homme: un bref historique
L’expression « droits de l’homme » peut être utilisée dans un sens abstrait et philosophique, soit comme une catégorie de revendications morales que tous les êtres humains peuvent invoquer ou, de manière pragmatique, comme la manifestation de ces revendications dans le droit positif, par exemple, comme garanties constitutionnelles pour rendre les gouvernements responsables dans le cadre des procédures légales nationales. Alors que la première description fait référence aux « droits de l’homme », la deuxième concerne le « droit relatif aux droits de l’homme ».
Celso Furtado
Asked to define underdevelopment, Celso Furtado replied in his characteristically north-eastern Brazilian accent: There is no need to define underdevelopment; just go out and look; that is underdevelopment! Yet, his greatest contribution to development thought was a thorough understanding of underdevelopment and its determinants.
Girls in war: Sex slave, mother, domestic aide, combatant
The attackers tied me up and raped me because I was fighting. About five of them did the same thing to me until one of the commanders who knew my father came and stopped them, but also took me to his house to make me his wife. I just accepted him because of fear and didnt want to say no because he might do the same thing to me too. This is the testimony of a young girl of 14 from Liberia as told to the Machel Review in a focus group conducted jointly by the United Nations Childrens Fund (unicef) and the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (osrsg/caac).
Gunnar Myrdal
Born in 1898 in Sweden, Nobel Laureate Gunnar would become one of the leading economists of the twentieth century. Known for his research on transformative issues in underdeveloped economies, he believed inequality to be a major impediment to economic and social progress, and the reduction of inequality a precondition for development.
A nuclear-weapons-free world: Is it achievable?
After the worst of times, we are perhaps entering the best of times for proponents of nuclear disarmament. At long last, advocates of the elimination of nuclear weapons have reason for some guarded optimism. The road to a nuclear-weapons-free world will be long and bumpy, but those expected to take the initiative seem to have finally decided to lead. That is encouraging.
Next steps to universal nuclear disarmament
It is almost 65 years since the development of the first nuclear bomb, and yet we have had only two cases of use of nuclear weapons in war, namely Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So we have been spared the horror of a large nuclear war during this period when more than 130,000 nuclear weapons were built. This is a very unusual event in the history of mankind: so many weapons built, never to be used. Why has this happened? First, the leadership of the two nuclear superpowers and of the smaller nuclear States behaved as rational decision makers, as far as the control of nuclear weapons and the decision not to initiate their use were concerned. In others words, deterrence worked, but we have to recall that the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and other lesser crises pushed the risk of a nuclear confrontation very close to the abyss. Moreover, the system of nuclear deterrence worked and still works now on the basis of the capability of each nuclear superpower to react promptly if they receive information that they are under nuclear missile attack from their opponent. The idea is that each nuclear superpower should react against the opponent before its own nuclear missiles are destroyed while still on the ground or in their silos. With this system, known as nuclear reaction alert or launch on warning, we have had numerous incidents of false attack that risked accidental nuclear war. Among the factors that spared mankind from the horror of a nuclear war, one was good luck, in not taking wrong decisions at critical moments, and in keeping technical mistakes and failures ultimately under control.