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After reading the above comment Brian Wicker of Pax Christi has sent in a valuable paper on the Double Effect argument which argues that a correct analysis of action and intention makes proportionate and discriminate use of nuclear weapons impossible. You can read this here >
I also disputed the UK’s position before the Court that arguments for the illegality of nuclear weapons relied on their inevitable violation of the requirements of Discrimination and Proportionality. I suggested that violation in every conceivable case was not essential for us; only the likelihood, amounting to near-certainty, in most conceivable cases.  This too was not contested by the officials.  
The first sticking point came with the judgment of the Court – which the officials seemed to accept as authoritative.  However, they said that the ICJ did not finally declare threat or use illegal.  I offered the contrary: that neither did they declare it legal; and that the majority of the judges had argued for illegality and had voted against the dispositif accordingly.  I also suggested that a question to the Court based on a specific nuclear weapon system might well have resulted in an illegality decision.  The officials seemed to find this thought interesting.   
I also made it clear that we could by-pass arguments for the criminality of nuclear threat – defining this as a stated conditional intention to use them, bearing in mind the uncertainty caused by the result of the Lord Advocate’s Reference.  It was sufficient for us to argue that Britain is deploying a system which could never be used lawfully.  
The final link in the chain of argument in the briefing is that no one can reliably predict the fallout effects of a nuclear strike.  This is because of the vagaries of wind at the moment of detonation. Therefore he or she cannot carry out the duty prescribed by the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention to exercise the care necessary to avoid violation of Proportionality and Discrimination.  The officials suggested that this casts the net so widely that it catches all weapons.  My immediate reaction is that the radiation effects make nuclear weapons special.  They are not just very big bombs. However, their unpredictability puts them in the same category as chemical and biological weapons, which are already banned by treaty.
There was some discussion about the difficulty of applying current law to nuclear weapons.  I suggested that the law had been developed for a simpler world but the existence of nuclear weapons threatened the very concept of law.  The law needs to catch up. This provoked some interest on the part of the officials.
One of the officials offered to act as a direct contact point between myself and the Ministry.