Chapter 4 addresses the notion of humanitarianism as predicated on distance, that is, geographical scale. This is prominently embodied in the figure of the distant stranger, a trope ubiquitous and simplistic in equal measure. In this context, what role does distance play for people’s desire to intervene in the lives of others? What compels people to support those nearby, regional neighbours, or across nation states and continents? The chapter illustrates how people create and respond to distance, and how this shapes their personal and professional trajectories, and interventions in the lives of others. This matters not least because the notion of distance, physical and social, looms large in how philosophers and ordinary people construct responsibilities towards others. Unravelling these tropes, everyday humanitarian practice shows how distance is not fixed, but dynamic and flexible. Those who intervene outside of their own country are attracted to help in faraway places not least by a desire for travel and adventure. When faced with street children or begging veterans on a daily basis, some find they need to keep poverty at bay. They move between immersing themselves, and withdrawing when it becomes overwhelming. Embedding themselves in local communities of need, or retreating, sometimes for good, to more comfortable surroundings, requires constant negotiation and raises moral quandaries. As practitioners are using sliding scales, humanitarian distance emerges not as fixed, but segmented into mobile, interlocking and dynamic scales, which they adopt as it suits their situation.

Humankind has enjoyed a rich history of wars, ever since men could organise themselves into fighting units against adversary forces. While international law categorically sanctioned the resort to war other than for legitimate self-defence, the family of nations has since time immemorial, whether individually or collectively, attempted to regulate personal conduct in warfare. After the Thirty Years War, which was terminated with the 1648 Peace Treaty of Westphalia, war became an interstate affair, rather than as previously a personal feud between princes. This chapter examines the evolution of custom in international humanitarian law and the elements that demonstrate evidence of state practice and opinio juris with regard to criminalisation. Wright, in his comments to the concluding Law Report of the allied trials of World War II, claimed that the punishment of war criminals had 'been recognised by the practice of nations and [was] part of the traditional law'.

The need for new arrangements stemmed from the success of the Convention, whilst the means selected to enable the system to cope with the increasing demand was the creation of a new Court of Human Rights to replace the original institutions. This chapter describes the main features of the new Court, outlines its procedures and reviews its work in order to explain the current supervisory arrangements. Normally, failure to appeal to the Constitutional Court will lead to a ruling of inadmissibility on the ground of non-exhaustion of domestic remedies. With the advent of Protocol No. 11, a new Agreement was required and so the European Agreement relating to Persons Participating in Proceedings of the European Court of Human Rights was concluded in 1996. Judgments of a Chamber and of the Grand Chamber must be reasoned and, as with the original Court, any judge may deliver a separate opinion.

Chapter 5 engages with the COVID-19 pandemic which seemed to many as though we were living in ‘the world of post-apocalypse movies’. This chapter argues that rather than being tangential to nuclear politics, global health crises – such as COVID-19 – are exacerbated by how states prioritise nuclear weapons and military spending as solutions to security threats. The author analyses how the Trump administration’s decision to end a pandemic early warning system, the UK government’s failure to take the findings of a pandemic planning exercise seriously, and the early handling of the COVID-19 pandemic during February–April 2020 demonstrate how poorly prepared states are for security threats and health crises, such as those that would be generated by a nuclear conflict or accident. Moreover, the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic reveals how a state-centric, military-focused understanding of security makes the world less, rather than more, safe. Subsequently, the chapter builds upon recent work in critical security studies and argues that by reconceptualising security differently and moving away from the importance of the state as the object to be secured, not only can we better understand and critique the political and ethical dimensions of nuclear weapons, but we can also contribute towards reforming security and addressing the harms that nuclear weapons cause in the Third Nuclear Age.

The medieval Christian world held neutrality in low esteem. It could hardly do otherwise, given the prevailing concept of war in Christian thought as a contest between justice and injustice. True to their intellectual heritage of just-war ideas, neither Gentili nor Grotius had a strong conception of a set of rights of neutrals as such. Neutrals were nevertheless recognised as having rights of a sort: the basic rights which natural law accorded to persons and states generally. The so-called 'rights' of neutrals comprised, in reality, an alliance between general natural-law rights and the freedom of action 'left over' when the rights of belligerents came to a stop. Even with the evolution of these sets of basic rights and duties of neutrals and belligerents, a host of practical problems remained relating to their exercise in practice.

Chapter 7 analyses events between August and October 2020 and begins by discussing the revelation that money given to the Pentagon for face masks and medical equipment was instead funnelled to defence contractors to make jet engine parts and body armour. The author argues that militarism and the entrenchment of the nuclear-military-industrial complex across economics, politics, media, and society serve to make the world less safe. In particular, the chapter focuses on the absurdities of the Pentagon awarding a $13 billion contract to Northrup Grumman to build a new fleet of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Such developments reflect a staggering level of exterminism given that in a bizarre hangover from the Cold War, ICBM silos based across the American Midwest are intended to act as a ‘nuclear sponge’ to draw an enemy attack away from larger American cities. Also central to this chapter is the impact that militarism and nuclear weapons currently have on exacerbating climate change, and the potential climate impact of even a small nuclear war that could annihilate all life on earth By discussing the influence of lobbying, cronyism, and corruption in and beyond the nuclear-military-industrial complex, this chapter draws attention to the political economy and environmental harm that underpins the Third Nuclear Age.

Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, just as Vattel and Hübner were writing, an important new phase in the law of neutrality was beginning. Belligerents were starting to wage economic war upon one another in a more thoroughgoing fashion than before. Various innovations in belligerents' rights were not supinely accepted by neutrals. Attempts of various kinds were made by neutral states to defend their claimed rights. In the process, some far-reaching legal innovations were made. With the spectre of total war removed, at least for the time being, it would prove possible for the states of the world gradually to reach a degree of agreement on some of the specific issues of the law of neutrality, if not on its more fundamental points. A time of confrontation was about to give way to a time of accommodation.

From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, the law of neutrality came of age. This was achieved by the growth of a network of bilateral treaties of 'amity and commerce' between the principal European states. Resolution of neutrality issues by means of bilateral treaties was not an invention of the seventeenth century. The most striking feature of the treaty network of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was its liberality towards neutrals. Neutral ships sometimes attempted to undermine the visit-and-search process in unscrupulous ways. One was by destroying crucial evidence, for example by hastily throwing the ship's papers overboard as a belligerent ship approached. If Britain was gradually emerging as a consistent advocate of broad rights for belligerents, certain other states were moving in the opposite direction. From the 1780s, the effect of British free riding was set to become more apparent, to the particular discomfiture of France, Britain's long-term enemy.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the code-of-conduct school of thought would have the doctrinal field largely to itself. But it continued to be a broad church, with the split between the deductive wing and the pragmatic line remaining very much in evidence. It was, accordingly, an age of diversity within this framework. More significant, though, was the fact that state practice was pushing the law in the direction of a certain uniformity, with a broad consensus for redressing the juridical 'balance of power' more in favour of the rights of neutrals than of belligerents. The high point of this trend was the adoption of the Declaration of Paris in 1856, when the world definitively resolved that the 'free ships-free goods' principle should become a rule of general law. In the nineteenth century, practice rather than theory continued to play the leading role in the evolution of the law of neutrality generally.

In 1907, at the Second Hague Peace Conference, was a major effort made to codify the entire law of neutrality. A provision on submarine cables was placed in the Hague Rules on War, barring belligerent occupiers of enemy territory from seizing or destroying cables connecting the occupied territory with a neutral state except in cases of 'absolute necessity'. In December 1911, the House of Lords voted against the draft legislation which would have enabled Britain to ratify both the Hague Convention on Neutrality at Sea and the Declaration of London. That was the death knell of the Declaration as a legally binding instrument. Without Britain's adherence, no other state troubled to ratify it. The Declaration of London, and indeed much of the traditional law of neutrality along with it, was soon to be subjected to a very much greater test.

Chapter 8 covers the tumultuous events of November 2020 to January 2021 – including the US presidential election and the storming of the US Capitol – arguing that there is a democratic deficit at the heart of nuclear weapons policy. Here, the twin forces of populist authoritarianism and the backsliding of democracy create, as the poet Amanda Gorman eloquently put it in her poem at the inauguration of President Biden, ‘a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it’. This chapter argues that authoritarian conspiracy theories that influence populist movements of the modern era pose a serious threat to the planet, especially in states that have leaders with the sole authority to use nuclear weapons. As the storming of the US Capitol made clear, democratic states such as the United States are not immune to instability and violence striking at the heart of state institutions. Beyond this, the author demonstrates how nuclear weapons undermine democracy itself, and shows that the Third Nuclear Age is wrought with exterminist dangers that threaten the social and political fabric of democracy itself.

The European Convention, which protects the right to life in Article 2, deals with liberty and security of person in Article 5. To decide whether someone has been deprived of his rights under Article 5(1) it is necessary to begin by establishing that he has been 'deprived of his liberty'. Article 5(2) requires a person to be informed about the reasons for an arrest and is intended to enable someone who is arrested to admit or deny the alleged offence and make effective use of the judicial safeguards of Articles 5(3) and 5(4). Article 5(4) provides that when a person is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention he 'shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful'.

Chapter 4 covers the period from November 2019 to the end of January 2020. Taking its title from a song released by Sam Fender (Newcastle’s answer to a young Bruce Springsteen) and voted BBC Radio 1’s ‘Hottest Record of the Year’, this chapter argues that the norm around the non-use of nuclear weapons is further eroded by recent steps to develop and deploy new nuclear weapons technologies across the globe. The chapter focuses on the recent deployment of low-yield nuclear weapons as well as new technologies such as hypersonic missiles to show that such technologies present novel risks and dangers by facilitating a new arms race. The author then goes beyond the conventional account of new technology in the new nuclear age by arguing that popular culture is central to shaping how the world comes to know, think, and feel about technological developments and nuclear weapons. By engaging with the rise of doom-laden apocalyptic indie pop music by the likes of Sam Fender and Phoebe Bridgers, as well as media coverage of the UK General Election in December 2019, alongside the American assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, the chapter examines the salience that nuclear weapons are now once again gaining in the public imagination. In doing so the author illustrates how popular culture and the media construct representations of the world that enable certain policies and political actions in the new nuclear age.

The law of neutrality is the law regulating the coexistence of war and peace. Its history is the story of the competition between opposing rights, those of belligerents against those of neutrals. Belligerents claim a right to take whatever steps are necessary to bring their foes to heel, including, when necessary, interrupting their trade with neutral persons. The building of a law of neutral rights has been a sort of juridical guerrilla war. Neutrality encompasses the humanitarianism of the Red Cross but also the derring-do of the blockade runner. Historically, the blockade runner and the arms dealer were earlier on the scene, by a very considerable margin, than the humanitarian and the pacifist. More than perhaps any other area of international law, neutrality has been moulded far more by the struggles of the real world than by the expositions of commentators.