Never was there a more moralistic conflict than the Second World War. As a contest between Good and Evil, it was seen to be at the furthest possible remove from the positivist conception of war of the nineteenth century, with its amoral focus on clashes between parochial state interests. In 1939–45, humankind itself was the cause. With the spirit of righteousness as heavy in the air as the stench of corpses, it was hardly surprising that just-war ideals should strongly pervade the immediate post-war era. And this time, the task would be far more thoroughly done than in the interwar period. The drafters of the United Nations Charter sought to go beyond the League Covenant and the Pact of Paris, by banning all resorts to armed force and thereby effacing the legal distinction between war and measures short of war. The result was the establishment of a thoroughgoing general norm of pacifism in international relations, directly reminiscent of the pacifistic vision of the early Christian era which had lain at the heart of medieval just-war doctrine.