Treaty interpretation is a matter of legal methodology, a comprehensive notion embracing a great variety of subjects. In the Diagram published together with this study, the present writer gives his own view of legal methodology as applied to international law. The “legal process” as shown therein is a complicated one, certain parts of which have been examined in earlier studies, viz., the principles of rational organization, the recognized manifestations of international law, and the existence of a hierarchy among them. Treaty interpretation as dealt with, here, belongs to the wide category of problems designated in the Diagram as those of the ascertainment of the content (meaning, message) of the recognized manifestations of international law. For reasons/which, it is hoped, will become clear in the following pages, it is important to place treaty interpretation and the whole of ascertainment of content in the context of methodology generally, not isolated from the other questions involved in the application of recognized manifestations or from the problems surrounding the latter, such as the doctrine of “sources”. As to the link between the present subject and that of the ascertainment of the content of recognized manifestations other than treaties, it is readily agreed that doctrinal treatment of the former would gain by a contrasting sketch of the latter, but since the present study already exceeds the limits of the habitual article, this writer has to forego what otherwise would be a legitimate pursuit.

Today, a growing number of states are looking to nuclear power to meet their future energy needs. The technologies involved are also capable of use for military purposes. Hence the global concern to limit the spread of nuclear weapons without, at the same time, impeding the development of peaceful applications of nuclear power. The Parker Report concerning the application by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd to build a reprocessing plant at Windscale highlights the problems, legal, political and moral, that attempts to reconcile these twin aims give rise to. This article, after analysing the Report's treatment of the non-proliferation question, considers the wider international legal implications of the decision to permit the building of the plant, with particular reference to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the anti-proliferation policies of the Carter Administration in the United States.

The Asser Institute has asked me to speak in English, here in The Hague before a Dutch audience. Permit me to linger for a moment over this phenomenon.

The scope and emotion of the discussion concerning transnational corporations suggest that some more basic problems are at its roots, such as the discrepancy between the legal equality and sovereignty of states and their actual inequality and dependence; the hegemony of the North and the distress of the South, the many-layered interdependence and the groping, but palpable, steps toward a new world economic order; the relationship between the state and the private economy in the home and the host states of transnational corporations; or the question whether private social power is bad per se and tends to corrupt, and whether the power of transnational corporations equals the sudden change from the quantity to the quality.

Unfortunately, I could not be present, when Verheul publicly assumed his professorship at Leyden University on 26 May 1978, as the successor of W.L.G. Lemaire (1907–1976), so that I only know his address from the printed text. It is highly original, comprehensive, striking owing to many turns of thought of such a nature as will no doubt be unexpected for many readers, and it stimulates further thought about practically everything which he wanted to say – here and there in the form of a cry from his very heart.

The first launchings of satellites into orbit around the Earth by the USSR and the USA resulted in the establishment in 1962 of the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) and the European Organisation for the Development and Construction of Space Vehicle Launchers (ELDO), both of which have their headquarters in Paris. The Conventions for the establishment of these organisations came into force in 1964 and are registered with the Secretary-General of the United Nations.