“Each of the parties to the treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control. — Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 1968
At the end of 1946, the year I was born — as was Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump — the United States had nine atomic bombs. At the end of 1949, the year the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic device, the U.S. had built 235 of the things, including the two dropped on Japan. That was just the beginning. Soon these two superpowers had built nuclear arsenals bristling with tens of thousands of warheads capable of gigadeath across the planet. Or as Sen. Ted Kennedy put it in 1982, more than enough firepower to make the rubble bounce. The U.K., France, and China also built small nuclear arsenals. Israel too, but without declaring so.
By the mid-1960s, the situation had soared to a terrifying level. The U.S. nuclear arsenal hit its peak in 1967, with 31,255 warheads. By then the Soviets had caught up, with 33,000 of their own nukes, a total that eventually reached ~40,000. There was the growing prospect of a world with a dozen or two nuclear weapons states. The possibility of nuclear annihilation, even human extinction was not just fantasy for novels and films. Then, there was a retreat from the brink. A vast reduction in warheads verified by treaties and pragmatism. Incomplete, to be sure. But reason for a little optimism.
It will be some time before the economic, diplomatic, environmental, and societal damage from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran can be fully assessed, especially since that war clearly isn’t over. But one thing for certain, the nearly six-decade-old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which helped keep dozens of countries from arming themselves with nuclear weapons, was already deeply ailing and now may be terminally ill thanks to Donald Trump’s reckless jingoism and abandonment of multilateralism. Ahead of this month’s NPT’s five-year review coming up in two weeks, a number of critics say it’s already dead.
Trump’s actual rationale for smashing Iran is more creepily psychological than I care to delve into, but his first assertion was that the U.S. attack last month was to obliterate Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Or to re-obliterate them, having already finished them off last June, or so he had previously claimed. Truth and Trump so rarely appear together that determining what’s real and what’s fabrication or delusion is not always simple.
Whatever his real motives, in 2018 Trump withdrew from the Obama administration-negotiated multilateral 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action constraining Iran’s nuclear development. He made that move despite international monitors having by then reported six times that Iran was fully in compliance with it. The JCPOA was not perfect. No serious analyst claims it was. But it rolled back Iran’s nuclear program and imposed what experts described as the most intrusive monitoring and verification regime ever negotiated. And it worked.
Yet Trump still claims with his conman bluster that if he had not withdrawn the U.S., it “would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran. They would have had them years ago, and they would have used them, would have been a different world. There would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now, in my opinion — the opinion of a lot of great experts — had I not terminated that terrible deal.” Ever more these days, new words are needed to describe a guy who can pack so many preposterous, impossible lies into so few words.
Some limits in the JCPOA expired last year. But restrictions on the level of Iran’s uranium enrichment (3.67%), on the stockpile of fissile material, and on enrichment capacity were slated to have lasted until 2030, and International Atomic Energy and Agency monitoring systems would still now be in place with no expiration date set. This would have meant, under the agreement, that the “breakout time” for building a bomb, if Iran had chosen to do so, would be a year, not weeks or months. Verification monitors repeatedly showed Tehran was complying.
As a consequence of the withdrawal and reimposition of old economic sanctions plus some new ones, after announcing it was doing so, Iran began slowly building a stockpile of 60% concentrated uranium (U-235). This is well beyond the levels needed for civilian use and relatively few steps from bomb-grade material of around 90%. For a while, Iran said it was otherwise sticking to the 2015 agreement and would fully comply with it again if the U.S. returned to it. Iran later started limiting inspections, with the same proviso. The enriched stockpile, having grown over the years to nearly a thousand pounds of the stuff, was one of the targets of U.S. attacks last June. The White House regime now claims, after the most recent bombing, that the uranium cache is deeply buried and inaccessible to Iranians under constant satellite surveillance. Maybe so. Maybe not. Obliterated? Re-obliterated? Buried? Moved to a beach resort?
To reiterate, if he had not withdrawn the U.S. and the IAEA’s monitors had continued to verify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, this could peacefully have avoided the very situation Trump claimed was his reason for raining hell on the place. Instead of abandoning the original deal, he could have used the trust built up during the Obama-initiated negotiations and Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA limits to expand on the diplomatic and practical success of the agreement that he continues to label “terrible.” What we got instead is now visible on the marquee of every gas station in the U.S. and in the rubble in Isfahan, Tehran, and 13,000 other Iranian targets, including numerous schools, universities, and hospitals. Hundreds dead. Tens of billions of dollars spent. Trillions of dollars in damage. Generations of grudges established.
Against this backdrop, delegates from most of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s 191 signatory nations will meet for their regular five-year treaty review beginning April 27 in New York. This takes place in the shadow of the two most recent reviews, acrimonious affairs neither of which generated a final consensus paper as the parties had done in every previous review since the 1970s.
That’s not, of course, the only shadow.
Three nuclear-armed states — Russia, the United States, and Israel — are making war on two non-nuclear states — Ukraine and Iran. That delivers a message about deterrence.
Meanwhile, the only five nations that had declared they had nuclear weapons as of 1968 when the NPT was first signed are engaged in trillions of dollars of upgrades and expansions of their nuclear arsenals. They are adding new technologies — hypersonic delivery systems, advanced missile defenses, AI-enabled command structures — many of which compress decision times and increase the risk of miscalculation. This modernization comes after 50 years of Russia-U.S. verified reductions have now ended with the expiration of the last arms-capping treaty, New START. Without the limits on the number of warheads set by that treaty, Russia and the U.S. may quickly deploy more of them in missile silos and submarine missile tubes that were previously constrained.
Politicians in at least a half dozen other countries, from Seoul to Germany to Japan, are talking seriously about adding nukes to their arsenals.
Many nations in the Global South have become irked after decades of what they feel has been an inequitable approach that has limited their “inalienable right” to peaceful uses of nuclear power in violation of the treaty’s Article IV. This didn’t just start yesterday. Back in 2019, for example, Türkiye President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was tired of the obstacles still being thrown in the way of achieving the treaty’s third pillar of spreading the peaceful uses of nuclear power to the non-nuclear weapons states.
From The International Spectator in 2023:
… the NPT has been a fundamental and powerful instrument for preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons, but it is now facing growing criticism and contestation from many countries, most prominently from the Global South. The rising discontent with the NPT in the Global South comes mainly from a realisation that the Treaty is no longer committed to its original purpose of promoting change within the nuclear non-proliferation regime and has instead shifted its purpose towards maintaining the nuclear status quo and prioritising the interests of the P-5 – the five original NWS [Nuclear Weapons States] as recognised by the NPT. Global South NNWS [Non-Nuclear Weapons States] also complain that the NPT has given disproportionately greater emphasis to non-proliferation efforts rather than the other two pillars — disarmament measures and equal access to peaceful uses of nuclear energy (Mutimer 2000).
Furthermore, the imbalanced structure of the NPT, with its distinction between NWS and NNWS, has prolonged conflicts within the non-proliferation framework. Many have pointed out that the NPT, just like the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), no longer reflects the realities of the contemporary nuclear order.
The NPT came about when four of the five declared nuclear weapons states — the U.S., U.S.S.R.. the U.K., and France (excluding China) — joined other nations to build formal constraints. The NPT was designed on a three-point balance: 1) The nuclear weapons states agreed not to transfer nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states or assist them in any way to build or obtain such weapons but to assist other countries in peaceful uses of nuclear energy. 2) The non-nuclear states agreed not to seek nuclear weapons. 3) The nuclear weapons states agreed to work toward nuclear disarmament.
China, which exploded its first atomic bomb in 1964, did not join the NPT until 1992. Israel, which built its first bomb in 1966 or 1967, has never joined, and neither has India (first bomb in 1974) or Pakistan (first bomb in 1998). North Korea originally signed but left the NPT in 2003, (first bomb in 2006), South Africa dismantled its six nuclear weapons in 1989 with the collapse of apartheid, and Ukraine and Kazakhstan gave up their nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, although command and control of those weapons had never left Moscow’s control.
Not the worst record by any means. What experts thought 60 years ago might soon be a couple of dozen nuclear-armed countries, with all the attendant risks of such widespread adoption, turned out to be only nine. Together they have about 12,000 nukes. That could change.
Few outside Iran wants that country, whoever leads it, to build nuclear weapons. However, watching as two armed nuclear states devastate Iran — one a charter signatory of the NPT and the other having refused from the outset to sign it or admit it even has nukes — must surely be adding to the growing displeasure the non-nuclear states have with the treaty. It was meant to provide a framework for stepping back from the brink, but is instead being sidelined. For non-nuclear states, the frustration has moved beyond impatience to something closer to disillusionment. They have kept their side of the NPT bargain. Decades later, they’re still waiting for the nuclear weapons states to keep theirs.
As George Perkovich writes in How the Iran War undermines the nuclear nonproliferation regime:
All of this highlights the shakiness of the NPT as an organizing construct for managing security, nuclear energy, and nonproliferation going forward. If nuclear-weapon states have clearly abandoned their commitments under Article VI of the NPT to cease arms racing and pursue nuclear disarmament, and nuclear-armed states have attacked other non-nuclear countries in violation of international law, why wouldn’t more countries feel justified to seek their own nuclear deterrents? If powerful countries have made trade and security accommodations for nuclear-armed India, how should others seek to apply limits on nuclear fuel-cycle activities?
The long negotiations that led to the JCPOA were premised on the idea that by foregoing nuclear weapons Iran would reap benefits from the few states that have them. This included hard-won toleration of a heavily regulated and monitored enrichment program that was Iran’s leverage against anyone who would break the deal.
More than threatening the NPT, the US-Israel war on Iran has removed bargaining from adversarial international relations more broadly. Washington and Tel Aviv demand that Iran stop all fuel-cycle activity, surrender all enriched uranium and ballistic missiles, end clerical rule, disarm the Revolutionary Guard, and cease supporting other regional actors that threaten Israel. The American and Israeli governments offer Iran no immediate or near-term benefits in response, except the possible end of military attacks and vague promises of Western corporate investment to help revive the Iranian economy. Essentially, the demand is for unconditional surrender. This is a different model of international affairs than the NPT was predicated on.
Article VI’s committing all parties to pursue nuclear disarmament was never a model of precision. But it was supposed to be a direction of travel. A shared horizon. A promise that restraint would eventually be mutual. Instead, what many see is a permanent hierarchy: a world divided between those allowed to possess civilization-ending weapons and those permanently forbidden from doing so while obstacles are placed against peaceful uses.
The Cold War logic of deterrence was always a gamble. No nuclear armed state would dare attack another nuclear-armed state because the retaliation would be so horrible with bombs 30 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Too awful to use. But for three decades there’s been a push in some U.S. circles to adopt nukes with smaller yields that a commander in chief might view as not too awful to use. Having nuclear weapons prevents nuclear war, deterrence strategists argue. Not only, they say, is abolition of such weapons a pipe-dream, it’s dangerous strategically. As dangerous as 25 nations armed with nukes?
In the eyes of some, the whole abolition concept is extremist, even unAmerican. That would be news to these guys:
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953): “The world must learn to work together, or finally it will not work at all.” (context: nuclear annihilation risk)
John F. Kennedy (1961):
“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
“Men no longer debate whether armaments are a symptom or a cause of tension. The mere existence of modern weapons--ten million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on earth--is a source of horror, and discord and distrust. Men no longer maintain that disarmament must await the settlement of all disputes--for disarmament must be a part of any permanent settlement. And men may no longer pretend that the quest for disarmament is a sign of weakness--for in a spiraling arms race, a nation's security may well be shrinking even as its arms increase.”
Lyndon B. Johnson (1968): “[The NPT] commits the nuclear powers to redouble their efforts to end the nuclear arms race and to achieve nuclear disarmament. [...] On behalf of the Government and the people of the United States, let me congratulate all who have contributed to this historic event. But we should not linger long in mutual congratulations. The quest--and the need-for disarmament is too urgent for that.”
Ronald Reagan (1985): “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” (Part of a joint statement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during Reykjavik Summit on arms control.)
Barack Obama (2009):
“Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.
“Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival.
“Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -– that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
“Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. And as nuclear power –- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly –- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, "Yes, we can."
It’s easy to succumb to the view that since the nuclear genie cannot be put back into the bottle, neither can nuclear weapons no matter what presidents say. And besides, say abolition critics, 80 years on and only two of these beasts have ever been detonated in anger, proving the deterrence regime works. This ignores how different the world is now.
Sue Miller is a member of the Liberal Democrats in Britain who is also co-president of the international Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. The Guardian reports:
Non-proliferation hasn’t been jettisoned as a goal, Miller says, but “there’s a slight doublespeak, because the original treaty in 1970 really only looked at numbers – it was much more primitive”. If you have fewer weapons that are much more powerful, that counts as non-proliferation even while posing a much greater threat. Also, Miller points out, the harder it becomes to detect nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that other missiles will be mistaken for them. “I thought the danger of hypersonic weapons was in their speed, but apparently it’s in the stealth,” she says. “They’re much harder to detect.”
Of the four nuclear nations outside the P5, the conflict that broke out between India and Pakistan in May 2025 was accompanied by nuclear brinkmanship that made neighbouring Bangladesh very nervous, and should have made us all more nervous. North Korea’s nuclear buildup continued throughout last year, “and we’re allowed to talk about Korea’s nukes. We’re not really supposed to talk about the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons,” says Miller. The only country with a no-first-use policy is China. “There is a … complete absence of communication on strategic stability among nuclear adversaries,” the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists notes.
And that’s all the risk governments are unleashing on purpose. “If you look at the Chatham House study on near-misses and risks,” Miller says (this runs from the cold war to the 21st century), “there are things that would have been disastrous each time but for an individual who decided that it wasn’t an attack. One time it was geese, flying in formation.”
Obama could be right that he may not see an end to nuclear weapons in his lifetime. Making it happen on any time-scale, however, requires steady steps in the opposite direction that all the nuclear powers are now headed with modernizing, expanding, and enhancing nuclear arsenals.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which that came into force in 2021, after 122 nations signed on, might seem the appropriate approach. But not a single one of the nine nuclear states have signed on, and several — the U.S. included — aggressively opposed it. That doesn’t bode well.
SOME ITEMS FOR ACTION
The risk-reducing process that began with the first nuclear test ban treaty more than 60 years ago needs a reboot, not the retreat now underway. Here are some specifics on how we might achieve this:
- Set clear, time-bound commitments to reduce arsenals — not just manage them.
- Make verified limits that apply across all major nuclear powers, not just bilateral leftovers from a different era.
- Call a halt to the qualitative arms race — no new systems designed to make nuclear war more “usable.”
- Demonstrate credible movement toward regional nuclear-weapon-free zones, especially in the Middle East.
None of this is technically impossible. Much of it has precedent. New START, for example, built trust through good communication, intrusive verification, and a deliberative process for unsnarling implementation disputes between Moscow and Washington. But, of course, politics frequently don’t align with technical capability. And the NPT’s non-proliferation successes won’t be added to without serious attention being paid to the legitimate complaints from non-nuclear nations about obstacles being thrown up to their peaceful use of nuclear power. If that and the disarmament goal of Article VI aren’t dealt with forthwith, we might see a few walkouts after the NPT review that starts in two weeks.
That doesn’t mean an overnight unraveling. Treaties rarely die that way. Rather the additional decay could create something more insidious: a rise in hedging behavior, an increase in latent nuclear capabilities, and eventually, the normalization of proliferation as nations quietly explore nuclear options of their own. Not the majority. Not even a sizable minority. But instead of a world of nine nuclear weapons states, one of maybe 20 or more. That is the nightmare scenario the treaty was designed to prevent.
The defenders of the NPT are not wrong. The treaty has helped prevent widespread proliferation. It has created a framework for inspections. It has helped keep the number of nuclear-armed states below what many feared in the 1960s. But it was not meant to be a permanent management system for nuclear inequality. Nor as a greenlight for nuclear-armed states to attack non-nuclear states. It was meant as a bridge to a world in which nuclear weapons would be eliminated.
To all who say the goal is a fairytale, let me again quote former President Obama: “Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”
See also:
Why a nuclear weapons ban would threaten, not save, humanity
Nuclear deterrence is the existential threat, not the nuclear ban treaty
When Nuclear Weapons Fail to Deter
How the Iran War undermines the nuclear nonproliferation regime
United States nuclear weapons, 2026
United Kingdom nuclear weapons, 2024
Pakistani nuclear weapons, 2025
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