Global military spending is soaring while the United Nations faces financial crisis, even as conflicts rise and the need for cooperative security becomes more urgent.

We live in a world bristling with nuclear and conventional weapons – with a potential destructiveness unprecedented in history. A nuclear war, for example, would largely be over in one hour, with each second equivalent in destruction to World War II.

Meanwhile, our security is increasingly threatened by skyrocketing global military expenditure while the UN’s capacity to maintain peace is being undermined by member states starving the organisation of funds.

The United Nations and its prescription for a better world

In the aftermath of two world wars, there was considerable hope that humanity would learn its lesson and that each would be ’the war to end all wars’. Indeed, the United Nations was created for just this purpose, as stated in the Preamble to its Charter: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…”

The Charter’s prescription for preventing violent conflict was a solid one. States that joined the organisation had to agree, as an obligation of membership, to resolve their disputes peacefully and to refrain from the threat or use of force against one another.

But before this hopeful blueprint could get off the drawing board, a new danger to global peace and security arose. As detailed in the Report of the Commission on Global Governance: “As the Charter was being negotiated and signed in San Francisco, the atomic bomb was being developed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a thousand miles away…The first atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, just forty-one days after the Charter was signed. By the time the United Nations was established on 24 October 1945, the world that it was to serve had changed in fundamental ways.”

Indeed, for the next 45 years, the nuclear threat and the Cold War hung like a........

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