There has, it seems clear, been a change, in quality and in degree, in the general condition of relations between the two main competing social and economic systems, Soviet and Western, since the October, 1962, crisis, which brought us all so close to the edge of nuclear war. The crisis itself, whatever the original motives which induced Premier Khrushchev to venture his offensive, ground-to-ground, nuclear weapons into Cuba, was terminated happily, with an unusual display of reasonableness and self-restraint, and mutual give-and-take, as between the two competing systems. It may be correct to conclude, as Walter Lippmann (echoing President de Gaulle) does, that the peaceful resolution of the October, 1962, crisis marked the “end of the Postwar period.” On this view, the Moscow Partial Test Ban Treaty of August, 1963, simply ratified and concretized in certain particulars a fundamental accommodation or détente that had already occurred de facto between the two systems; while the more recent achievement of the so-called “Hot Line” system for direct, emergency communication between the Kremlin and the White House and the additional accord on preventing the orbiting of nuclear weapons in space vehicles, for their part, served to confirm and extend the détente in some further practical details.

International law recognizes that boundaries are fundamental to the bases of national power and therefore projects various prescriptions for their protection as the demarcation lines of territorial integrity and exclusive control. By far the most important principle is that prohibiting the use of coercion in reshaping boundaries. This principle assumes, however, the effective application of other principles or norms for establishing and identifying boundaries. Fundamental general community policies require that states do not employ coercion in the settlement of boundary disputes, but rather make positive efforts to honor reasonable demands and expectations of other states concerning their political independence and territorial sovereignty. Effective implementation of these policies can be achieved only when states refrain from unilateral imposition of territorial claims upon other states and assert their freedom of decision in a way not to interfere with a comparable freedom of others.