Large space rocks don’t hit Earth often, but just one could cause mass destruction.
The schlocky 1998 Bruce Willis movie Armageddon was the highest grossing film of that year. The blockbuster saw a master oil driller and an unlikely crew of misfits place a nuclear bomb inside a giant asteroid heading for Earth, blow it up—and save humanity. Armageddon isn’t exactly a documentary: it’s packed full of sci-fi nonsense. But, 20 years on, its basic plot—of using a nuclear explosion to avert a cataclysmic asteroid collision—doesn’t seem quite as silly as it did at the time.
At the UN, we’ve recently witnessed the creation of an embryonic international institutional infrastructure to detect and respond to asteroids. As part of all this—and in line with increasing scientific opinion—there is also a notable focus at governmental and intergovernmental levels on the use of nuclear weapons as our best hope. The US and Russia have even mooted working together on a nuclear planetary defense initiative.
So what? If it came to a choice between legal niceties and saving humanity from extinction, there wouldn’t be much of a choice at all: law shouldn’t be a global suicide pact. Indeed, one nuclear power, Russia, has already indicated that—if that asteroid appeared—it likely would opt for “launch first, litigate second.”
The law has to protect us from states using asteroids as a pretext for dodging nuclear disarmament obligations, or—gulp—nuclear aggression in space, while at the same time providing for a limited, safeguarded exception that would allow for multilateral nuclear planetary defence, should it ever come to pass that we need the “nuclear option” to save ourselves.
The aim is that the new body would be equipped both to stop countries misusing the new legal exception to develop militarised nuclear space programmes, while at the same time avoiding the deadlock issues associated with existing institutions if humanity has to act quickly to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs.
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