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Charles Moxley has an extraordinary legal mind, able to grasp and synthesize the most complex of factual and legal situations. A leading arbitrator and mediator of complex high-stakes disputes in New York, Moxley is fair-minded and objective. His years-long effort to pull together the facts and law as to risks posed by nuclear weapons commands the attention of everyone who believes in the capacity of law to be a catalyst for overcoming threats to human life and civilization. --Hon. Ariel E. Belen, Justice, New York Supreme Court (Ret.) Charles Moxley has given us an incredibly thorough study of international law, its nature, its strengths, its weaknesses, and the need to find adequate ways to make it enforceable if the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons and consequent disaster are to be avoided. --Alan Cranston, U.S. Senator, 1969-1993 Charles Moxley is a brilliant lawyer and his treatise on nuclear weapons and international law could not be more important and timely. His distinguished career as a practitioner, professor, and arbitrator makes him uniquely well qualified to analyze complex and sensitive factual and legal issues in a manner that is both objective and fair minded. He is a well-known and respected authority in the legal world. I have the highest regard for Moxley's scholarship and his insightful and critical thinking. --Hon. Shira A. Scheindlin, United States District Judge (Ret.), Southern District of New York Charles Moxley's thesis that nuclear weapons violate international law may be this century's most important advance towards a peaceable world order. His book should make you worry, make you think and above all, impel you to make his case against nuclear weapons your case. --Jerome J. Shestack, Past President, American Bar Association Charles Moxley's Nuclear Weapons and International Law combines rigorous legal scholarship with the acumen of a seasoned practitioner, offering an authoritative critique of nuclear deterrence and a persuasive, urgent argument for the disarmament imperative under international law. --Mary Smith, J.D. No greater threat to human life and wellbeing exists than nuclear weapons. In this compelling and comprehensive study of existential risks posed by nuclear weapons and requirements of international law, Charles Moxley gives us reason to hope that, as with the abolition of slavery, advancement of rights of women, and so many other areas, law can help provide a way forward towards genuine human security. --Jonathan Granoff, President, Global Security Institute, Senior Advisor and U.N. Representative, World Summits of Nobel Peace Laureates Professor Moxley has written a thoughtful, well researched and clearly stated exposition of a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century, the confrontation of a policy of nuclear deterrence and use of instruments of mass destruction with the rule of law as presently understood and acceptable standards of safety. --Lawrence E. Walsh Professor Moxley's book is a broad-ranging treatment of a complex subject that will contribute to the debate. The combination of international law, nuclear weapons policy, and technical analysis makes interesting reading. --Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State, Carter Administration

"As Chief Legal Officer of Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis and General Counsel of AIG in the aftermath, I've seen how elemental forces can lurch out of control--and how, with creative legal approaches and wise and innovative policy, risks can be steered towards more positive outcomes. Charles Moxley, in this monumental tome, addresses an even more momentous matrix of risk and offers a potential way out---the harnessing of law to help lead the world towards defense policies that restore some measure of limit to man's destructiveness in war, recognizing the unlawfulness as well as folly of nuclear weapons. The billions going into nuclear weapons annually, the heightened rhetoric trivializing the potential use of these weapons, the wishful thinking that nuclear weapons uses could be limited to low-yield tactical weapons in remote areas, the proliferating numbers of these weapons, the hair trigger alert levels of our and Russia's weapons, the existential potential repercussions, the repetition of broadscale heads-in-the-sand, unable to see the obvious, closed eye optimism---such systemic failures of restraint and cognition that Moxley so painstakingly details hearken back to systematic failures on a societal scale that led to the financial crisis. We ignore warning signs at our peril. In securities parlance, a ""fat finger"" means a mistaken pushing of a button by a trader, resulting in a huge unintended trade. In the military's command and control system, a fat figure could have repercussions far beyond the financial and be irreversible, yet, with the United States' and other states' policies of deterrence and high alert levels, such an unintended use and potential nuclear responses and escalation are only moments away. Moxley's message of the need to restructure our defense policies in recognition of these risks compels our attention. Moxley's central point--that law offers us an important way to address risks of nuclear weapons--is a fundamental one. Law is more than a body of rules; it is the glue that holds a society together, the norms that are shared, in effect the codification of the culture. Moxley's reminder is timely as to its importance to nuclear weapons and our defense policies. --Tom Russo, General Counsel, AIG, 2010-2016; Chief Legal Officer, Lehman Brothers, 1993-2008 Charles Moxley's Nuclear Weapons and International Law combines rigorous legal scholarship with the acumen of a seasoned practitioner, offering an authoritative critique of nuclear deterrence and a persuasive, urgent argument for the disarmament imperative under international law. --Hon. Mary Smith, President, American Bar Association 2023-2024 Professor Moxley has written a thoughtful, well researched and clearly stated exposition of a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century, the confrontation of a policy of nuclear deterrence and use of instruments of mass destruction with the rule of law as presently understood and acceptable standards of safety. --Lawrence E. Walsh, Independent Counsel, Iran/Contra, 1986-1994, President, American Bar Association, 1975-1976 Charles Moxley has an extraordinary legal mind, able to grasp and synthesize the most complex of factual and legal situations. A leading arbitrator and mediator of complex high-stakes disputes in New York, Moxley is fair-minded and objective. His years-long effort to pull together the facts and law as to risks posed by nuclear weapons commands the attention of everyone who believes in the capacity of law to be a catalyst for overcoming threats to human life and civilization. --Hon. Ariel E. Belen, Justice, New York Supreme Court (Ret.) Charles Moxley has given us an incredibly thorough study of international law, its nature, its strengths, its weaknesses, and the need to find adequate ways to make it enforceable if the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons and consequent disaster are to be avoided. --Alan Cranston, U.S. Senator, 1969-1993 Charles Moxley is a brilliant lawyer and his treatise on nuclear weapons and international law could not be more important and timely. His distinguished career as a practitioner, professor, and arbitrator makes him uniquely well qualified to analyze complex and sensitive factual and legal issues in a manner that is both objective and fair minded. He is a well-known and respected authority in the legal world. I have the highest regard for Moxley's scholarship and his insightful and critical thinking. --Hon. Shira A. Scheindlin, United States District Judge (Ret.), Southern District of New York Charles Moxley's thesis that nuclear weapons violate international law may be this century's most important advance towards a peaceable world order. His book should make you worry, make you think and above all, impel you to make his case against nuclear weapons your case. --Jerome J. Shestack, Past President, American Bar Association No greater threat to human life and wellbeing exists than nuclear weapons. In this compelling and comprehensive study of existential risks posed by nuclear weapons and requirements of international law, Charles Moxley gives us reason to hope that, as with the abolition of slavery, advancement of rights of women, and so many other areas, law can help provide a way forward towards genuine human security. --Jonathan Granoff, President, Global Security Institute, Senior Advisor and U.N. Representative, World Summits of Nobel Peace Laureates Professor Moxley's book is a broad-ranging treatment of a complex subject that will contribute to the debate. The combination of international law, nuclear weapons policy, and technical analysis makes interesting reading. --Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State, Carter Administration"

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Charles J. Moxley, Jr. teaches nuclear weapons law at Fordham Law School and has written about international law restraints on the threat and use of nuclear weapons for over twenty years, starting with his 2000 book, Nuclear Weapons and International Law in the Post Cold War World, of which this book is the second edition.

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