assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. The regular question asked of my generation was: ‘where were you when you heard the news?’ Everybody could remember, just as, for a later generation, the news of ‘9/11’ and the attacks on Washington and New York would provide similar memories. And yet Kennedy’s death overshadowed an equally momentous date, the night of 27/28 October 1962, when the world was on the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a schoolboy, I can remember going to bed that night wondering whether there would be a morning for me to wake up to. We lived that night in fear of nuclear annihilation. Later, as a serving officer, I would be part of the forward UK division on the Inner German Border. Our task was to resist an invasion for as long as we could, though we knew in such an event our position was suicidal. Later at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, I took part in exercises to resist such an invasion and such exercises almost inevitably ended in a nuclear exchange. On one such exercise, the first nuclear explosion in the UK missed its intended target, Greenham Common, and landed on a nearby villageA€– where my family lived. It was a sobering moment. Today the nuclear shadow cast during the Cold War has evaporatedA€– but the danger has not gone away. The fear of nuclear proliferation remains and the new danger of nuclear technology falling into the hands of non-state actors is grounds enough for taking the issue seriously. As Gro Nystuen says in her conclusion, ‘[a] strongly polarised debate over nuclear weapons and their legality has taken place over the past decades’ and almost twenty years have passed since the International Court of Justice gave its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons. That Advisory Opinion did little to stem the debate, except that there emerged a new factor: ‘both sides taking the Advisory Opinion as evidence that they were right.’