Eleven months after the June 1944 invasion of Fortress Europe at Normandy, the Western industrialized world and its allies had crushed a barbarian who had arisen from within and who had been feared to be close to making an atomic bomb. Three months later, atomic bombs were used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In June 1945, in San Francisco, the Conference on a United Nations settled the terms of the charter of the new organization. In August 1945, Mahatma Ghandi was released from jail and shortly thereafter was received at the Viceroy’s Mansion at Delhi. The age in which we have lived—the age shaped by the Second World War, as well as by the rules of conduct laid down in the Charter of the United Nations and in the process of decolonization—has brought us two challenges of irreducible importance—the atom and development. The point of intersection of these two great challenges has been the NPT.