It was an act of courage on the part of Myres S. McDougal to undertake, in the 1950s, a book about the law of war. It was the height of the Cold War. Large numbers of nuclear weapons were poised to destroy the United States, the Soviet Union, and much of the rest of humanity. The clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists read two minutes to midnight. Public perception of the danger was acute. School children in the United States were undergoing not the ordinary fire drills, but nuclear attack drills. People were building bomb shelters in their backyards, underneath the barbecue grills. When we began our study, scholarship on the law of war was almost evenly divided between two camps. One camp, the Realists, assumed that a law of war had become impossible. A very distinguished Belgian jurist, Charles de Visscher, in his influential Theory and Reality in Public International Law, counseled his academic colleagues:

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在悼念

迈尔斯·S·麦克杜格尔 (Myres S. McDougal) 在 1950 年代撰写了一本关于战争法的书，这是一种勇气。那是冷战的高峰期。大量核武器准备摧毁美国、苏联和大部分人类。原子科学家公报的时钟读到午夜两分钟。公众对这种危险的看法是敏锐的。美国的学童进行的不是普通的消防演习，而是核攻击演习。人们在自家后院的烧烤架下面建造防空洞。当我们开始学习时，关于战争法的学术研究几乎平分于两个阵营。一个阵营，现实主义者，认为战争法已经变得不可能。一位非常杰出的比利时法学家，Charles de Visscher，