Transboundary Nuclear Accidents: The Post-Chernobyl Multilateral Legislative Agenda

The nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl profoundly highlighted the global scale of states' environmental interdependence. The shift in perception wrought by the accident attests to its powerful impact. Until Chernobyl, the safety aspects of constructing, siting, and operating national nuclear power reactors' generally were considered matters of domestic concern, with neighboring countries possessing only a limited legal interest. The accident seriously undermined the viability of this view by demonstrating that the hazards of nuclear power operations are' intrinsically international in dimension. People the world over realized that national boundaries are chimerical in an age of nuclear power production. Accompanying this startling realization was the disturbing discovery that the international community is ill prepared to cope with the heightened interdependence entailed by modern life. The diminished autarky of contemporary states has not led to a commensurate development of international institutions and processes necessary to manage and control the problems characteristic of increased global interdependence. Chernobyl brought into sharp relief the need to internationalize the nuclear decisionmaking processes of nation-states to the extent national decisions implicate the legitimate safety interests of other countries and of the world as a whole. Chernobyl also made abundantly clear that pres-