The International Court of Justice on Wednesday rejected a suit filed by Marshall Islands against India’s nuclear armament saying that it does not have jurisdiction in the matter.
The tiny South Pacific nation had filed the suit in the United Nations' highest court seeking to urge India to resume negotiations to eradicate the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.
The ruling came as a blow to disarmament activists.
ICJ president Ronny Abraham said that the court does not have jurisdiction because the Marshall Islands failed to prove that a legal dispute over nuclear disarmament existed between the two nations before the case was filed.
"The court upholds the objection to jurisdiction raised by India... and finds that it cannot proceed to the merits of the case," judge Ronny Abraham told the ICJ.
The International Court of Justice is ruling later Wednesday in similar cases brought by the Marshall Islands against Pakistan and Britain.
Marshall Islands began legal proceedings against India at the United Nations' highest court in March, as part of cases against three of the world's nuclear powers -- India, Pakistan and the UK -- in a bid to infuse new life into disarmament negotiations.
The country of 55,000 filed cases against all nine nations that have declared or are believed to possess nuclear weapons -- the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. But only the cases against the UK, India and Pakistan got to this preliminary stage as the other six declined to take part, according to the Marshall Islands' legal team.
The country of 55,000 people had taken India, Pakistan and Britain to court, arguing they have failed to comply with the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Marshalls has a long, bitter history with nuclear weapons, making it one of the few nations that can argue with credibility before the ICJ about their impact.
The island nation was ground zero for 67 American nuclear weapons tests from 1946-58 at Bikini and Enewetak atolls, when it was under US administration.
The tests included the 1954 "Bravo" hydrogen bomb, the most powerful ever detonated by the United States, about 1,000 times bigger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
They fed into an apocalyptic zeitgeist in Cold War popular culture, giving a name to the bikini swimsuit and leading to the development of Japan's Godzilla movie monster.
In "Godzilla", the creature is awakened by a hydrogen bomb test, rising from a roiling sea to destroy Tokyo, in a walking, radiation-breathing analogy for nuclear disaster.
On the Marshall Islands, the impacts of the nuclear tests were all too real.
Numerous islanders were forcibly evacuated from ancestral lands and resettled, while thousands more were exposed to radioactive fallout.
Tony deBrum, a former Marshall Islands foreign minister, launched the Marshall's ICJ action in 2014 with cooperation from the California-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
His actions prompted the International Peace Bureau to nominate him in January for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize, which is yet to be awarded.
