NextFin News - The 11th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) collapsed late Friday at the United Nations, as member states failed to reach a consensus on a final declaration. After weeks of negotiations in New York, the conference president, Do Hung Viet of Vietnam, withdrew the draft text after four revisions failed to bridge the widening chasm between nuclear-armed powers and non-nuclear states. This marks the third consecutive failure of the quinquennial review process, following deadlocks in 2015 and 2022, signaling a profound erosion of the post-Cold War security architecture.
The failure occurred despite a final draft that had been significantly diluted to accommodate the interests of the major powers. According to Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group, the text had become increasingly detached from current geopolitical realities, including the escalating risks associated with Iran and North Korea. Earlier versions of the document contained specific references to Iran’s compliance obligations and calls for the United States and Russia to negotiate a successor to the New START treaty, which expired in February. By the final hours, these mentions were stripped away, leaving a document that Gowan described as "watered down" to the point of irrelevance.
The collapse highlights a deepening rift between the five recognized nuclear-weapon states—the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France—and the rest of the world. Seth Shelden, representing the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), accused a "handful of states" of undermining the treaty by expanding their arsenals while blocking disarmament efforts. This sentiment was echoed by Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, who warned that the foundations of the NPT are "cracking" due to intransigence and a lack of leadership from Washington and other nuclear capitals. Kimball, a long-time advocate for arms control, has frequently criticized the slow pace of disarmament, and his assessment reflects a growing concern among policy experts that the treaty’s legitimacy is at a breaking point.
Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) underscores the stakes of this diplomatic paralysis. As of January 2025, the nine nuclear-armed nations—including India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—possessed an estimated 12,241 nuclear warheads. Approximately 90% of these weapons remain in the hands of the United States and Russia. With the expiration of New START and the failure of the NPT review, there is currently no active bilateral or multilateral framework limiting the expansion of the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles. This vacuum creates a precarious environment for global markets, as geopolitical risk premiums are likely to remain elevated in the absence of a predictable arms control regime.
While the NPT remains legally in force, the repeated failure to achieve a consensus outcome threatens to drive non-nuclear states toward alternative security arrangements. Some analysts suggest that if the NPT is perceived as a "frozen" instrument that only protects the status quo for nuclear powers, the incentive for other nations to remain non-nuclear may diminish. However, a counter-perspective remains: the NPT continues to provide the only universal framework for peaceful nuclear cooperation and IAEA safeguards. Even without a final declaration, the technical work of the treaty continues, and many diplomats argue that the lack of a document is preferable to a weak one that validates the current lack of progress on disarmament.
The immediate fallout of the collapse will likely be felt in the heightened rhetoric between the U.S. and Russia, as well as in the regional tensions surrounding the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East. Without a clear roadmap for the next five years, the international community enters a period of strategic ambiguity. The inability of the UN’s cornerstone nuclear treaty to adapt to a multipolar world suggests that the era of grand bargain diplomacy may be giving way to a more fragmented and dangerous security landscape, where bilateral competition takes precedence over collective stability.
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