In May of 1955 five individuals instituted a legal action against the Japanese Government to recover damages for injuries allegedly sustained as a consequence of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II. On December 7, 1963, the twenty-second anniversary of the surprise attack by Japan upon Pearl Harbor, the District Court of Tokyo delivered its lengthy decision in the case. The decision has been translated into English and reprinted in full in The Japanese Annual of International Law for 1964. This enables an accounting of this singular attempt by a court of law to wrestle with the special legal problems arising from recourse to atomic warfare.

The student of the constitutional development of the United Nations has certainly had no reason so far to complain of a scarcity of serious problems and dangerous crises claiming his attention: from Mr. Khrushchev’s proposal of 1960 to abolish the office of the Secretary General and to replace it by an executive organ consisting of three persons representing the Western Powers, the socialist states and the neutralist countries, to the long drawn-out and, at the time of this writing, still unresolved conflict concerning “certain expenses of the United Nations,” the application of Article 19 of the Charter and “the whole question of peace-keeping operations in all their aspects.” It therefore comes as a pleasant change if, for once, he can address himself to a development of the constitutional law of the Organization which is clearly of a non-revolutionary character and is being brought about by applying the very procedure which is laid down in the Charter for changes of this kind: the increase, by the procedure regulated in Article 108 of the Charter, of the number of nonpermanent Members of the Security Council from six to ten and the increase of the membership of the Economic and Social Council from eighteen to twenty-seven. This was done by amendments to Articles 23, 27 and 61 of the Charter, which were adopted by the General Assembly on December 17, 1963, and which, by August 31, 1965, were ratified by 93 Members, i.e., a number exceeding two-thirds of the Members of the United Nations, including all the permanent Members of the Security Council. The amendments entered into force on August 31, 1965. While the changes thus made in the Charter have not brought about fundamental modifications in the structure of the Organization, they are of considerable political importance. Moreover, they are the first amendments in the text of the San Francisco Charter and, in the words of Secretary of State Rusk, “this is enough by itself to endow the event with considerable significance.”

If the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations, designated as “International Co-operation Year,” had fallen in 1964 rather than 1965, a general assessment of the evolution of international law and organization since the end of World War II would have justified a measure of cautious confidence. Mankind was still very far from having organized itself against the danger of aggression. The danger of the proliferation of nuclear arms remained without effective control, apart from a partial nuclear test ban to which both the United States and the Soviet Union were parties. The world’s largest state, Communist China, remained outside the United Nations and without diplomatic relations with the United States and a large number of other states. The United Nations remained without effective control in conflicts between major Powers. The special agencies of the United Nations and other international welfare organizations still lacked, with few exceptions, the legal and executive power to cope with the many urgent problems of mankind. In the two most vital and dangerous areas: the conservation of resources, and the stemming of the explosive growth in the world's population, international organization was still embryonic or altogether lacking. But these grave drawbacks and deficiencies.