of unilateralism are diverse, as is the motivation of its supporters. They break
down roughly into two aspects. The first, more often prominent in the 1950s
than in the later period, is that it is wrong in general to use weapons of such
power, and which can only cause massive destruction to non-combatants. The
second is that the proliferation of nuclear weaponry makes all-out nuclear war
more rather than less likely. It is thus held that abandoning Britain’s nuclear
weapons is, among other things, a policy most likely to protect the UK from
attack. It was further argued, in this direction, that abandoning nuclear
weaponry and removing US nuclear forces from UK territory would ensure
that the ‘enemy’, traditionally the Soviet Union, had no reason to use similar
weapons on the UK. As such the unilateralist argument essentially conflicts
with the generaldeterrencetheory behind much nuclearstrategy. There is
no doubt that the unilateralist argument commanded considerable public
support up to the mid-1980s. It was again the official policy of the British
Labour Party for most of the 1980s. However, there was at least equally strong
opposition to unilateralism, and its place in the Labourmanifestosfor the
1983 and 1987 general elections undoubtedly contributed to the party’s heavy
defeats. There was substantial sympathy for unilateralism in other parts of the
political spectrum, especially the Liberal (now Liberal Democrat) Party, whose
leaders, however, prevented unilateralism ever becoming official policy. The
arguments for unilateralism have now become much weaker with the end of
any serious nuclear threat from the successors to the Soviet Union. In fact, the
nuclear threat is now widely perceived to be from minor powers desperate
enough to try to blackmail a country like the UK. Here the argument for a
credible deterrent may, in fact, be stronger than it ever was against the vastly
more powerfulSoviet bloc. It is noteworthy that by 2002 both the USA and
the UK found it worthwhile explicitly to state that they would have no
hesitation in using nuclear weapons against such a state, though the British
Secretary of State for Defence went on, curiously, to state that he was not at all
sure this threat would work as a deterrent.
United Nations (UN)
The United Nations replaced the inter-warLeague of Nationsin an attempt
to ensure world peace and secure the economic, social and political conditions
under which this can be achieved. It started as an agreement between the allies
fighting Hitler’s axis powers in the Second World War, and much of its
structure and subsequent problems follow from this. Its charter originated
from discussions held at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC) in 1944, between
the USA, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and later China, and the
Charter was signed in June 1945, with an initial membership of 51 countries.
By 1992 the total number of members had reached 179, following a sudden
United Nations (UN)