The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 was never meant to function as a permanent caste system dividing the world between those allowed to possess civilization-ending weapons and those permanently barred from making them. It was supposed to be a transitional bargain — an uneasy but necessary bridge away from potential annihilation. The non-nuclear weapons states (NWS) agreed to constraints on their nuclear development in exchange for two things: meaningful progress toward disarmament by the NWS; and equitable access to peaceful nuclear technology for the non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS).
More than half a century later, the bridge is still standing. But it's buckling, and for much of the Global South, it now looks far less like a pathway forward than it once did. Indeed, some NNWS that signed the treaty — Japan and South Korea among them — are seriously pondering developing their own nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the five original nuclear weapons states — the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, and China — are all upgrading and expanding their nuclear arsenals despite the NPT's Article VI calling for nuclear disarmament. Additionally, two NWS, the United States and Israel, have attacked a NNWS, ostensibly, but unconvincingly, to keep it from arming itself with nukes. (Along with other contradictory justifications.)
Starting Monday and running until May 22, the NPT Review Conference will undertake its 11th assessment of the treaty's status and future. Such reviews are mandated to take place every five years. In the two most recent reviews, however, the parties to the treaty were unable to come up with a concluding outcome statement. Nothing that has happened since then indicates the current review will succeed on that score.
The frustration lies in the perception growing over two decades that the treaty’s three pillars — nonproliferation, peaceful use, and disarmament — are being unevenly enforced. The first pillar remains robust, backed by inspections, sanctions, and ... military force. The second and third have withered under favoritism and strategic neglect, an imbalance that has sparked rising disgruntlement.
Nowhere is the contradiction more stark than in Washington’s approach to Iran under the Trump regime. Olamide Samuel, who leads network and engagement initiatives at the Open Nuclear Network, pointed out in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the United States is demanding assurances from Tehran that are already embedded in the NPT. “It is quite perplexing,” Samuel observes, “that a significant part of what Washington demands of Tehran has already been written into a treaty Iran signed a long time ago — the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).”
True. But Iran secretly pursued nuclear weapons long after it signed the treaty and lied about it, something that spurred broadly supported international sanctions and considerable mistrust. The sanctions in turn led to 20 months of grueling negotiations by the Obama administration that produced the multilateral 2015 nuclear agreement. That deal, which nearly everyone considers at least somewhat flawed, nevertheless greatly limited Iran's nuclear development and mandated inspections of its facilities, including unannounced inspections for at least 15 years. Every report from the International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring compliance found Iran to be fulfilling its obligations.
That is, right up until Trump in 2018 withdrew from the agreement that he had called "terrible," leaving nothing in its place except his sham promises to produce a better deal. Those familiar with that move may recall that Trump was frustrated with his team for their failing to find Iranian violations of the agreement. Eventually, he just threw up his hands and withdrew without cause. Rather than reinforcing the NPT and improving the 2015 Iran framework through additional diplomacy, he chucked it with zero clue on how to achieve what every president since Ronald Reagan had vowed — that Iran could never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
After he left office and it became clear that the Biden administration wouldn't return to the 2015 agreement given congressional opposition, Iran responded in 2021 by gradually accumulating what is now a huge stockpile of 60% concentrated uranium (U-235) for which there is no civilian use and which could be turned into bomb-grade material quickly. If Trump had not withdrawn from the deal, control over U-235 concentrations and several of other constraining provisions would still be in effect until 2030, the verification regime even longer.
Instead, as David Sanger and William Broad at The New York Times wrote this weekend:
"Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal. Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran lived up to its pledge to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97 percent. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb."
A former Obama National Security Council staffer Tommy Vietor said, "Pulling out of the Iran nuclear [deal] was a catastrophic mistake."
The Trump regime has spent the past nine months oscillating between caveman threats and counterproductive violence that killed thousands. As Samuel puts it with restrained understatement, “bombing Iran and issuing blockade threats won’t lead to a better non-proliferation arrangement.” More pointedly, he warns that “attacking nuclear facilities will not repair a damaged verification picture. It will only deepen the uncertainties around Iran’s nuclear activities.”
Trump's approach undercuts the credibility of the NPT system itself. When a nuclear-armed state attacks the facilities of a non-nuclear state — while invoking parts of the treaty to justify its demands and ignoring another part by upgrading and expanding its own nuclear arsenal — the message to the rest of the world is not one of a trustworthy rules-based order.
For many countries in the Global South, this erosion of trust is most acutely felt in the hollowing out of Article IV. The treaty guarantees an "inalienable right" to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. For many developing countries, this provision was not a side benefit, it was a key inducement. Nuclear power is far from a panacea and has drawbacks besides proliferation, most especially its high price, especially when stacked against solar, wind, and batteries. But countries should be able to make their own decisions about whether to pursue nuclear power. In theory the NPT facilitates access to this technology under strict safeguards. In practice, that access is filtered through export controls, financing barriers, and political considerations that mirror global power hierarchies rather than neutral risk assessments.
A KEY ISSUE: URANIUM ENRICHMENT
Uranium enrichment, the multistep creation of what our scientifically illiterate president calls "nuclear dust," is viewed by Iran as part of the NPT's "inalienable right" to peaceful uses of the technology. Besides the five original nuclear weapons states, The Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, and Germany are NPT signatories that enrich uranium. India, Pakistan, and North Korea are non-signatories that do so. Signatory South Korea is on a path to enrichment, with U.S. assistance.
At New Delhi's Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, Hina Pandey writes:
Unfortunately, the text of the Treaty (Article IV) neither specifically recognises the right to uranium enrichment nor explicitly prohibits it. Thus, the ambiguity about Article IV’s ‘inalienable right to peaceful nuclear energy’ has been interpreted as ‘to pursue all steps of fuel production, including uranium enrichment’ by Iran. Is this legally incorrect? Perhaps not. Interpretations of the State Parties differ. The US position on Article IV, as also reflected in its Statement to the 2005 Review Conference of the NPT, argues that ‘right to peaceful nuclear energy’ is not ‘unconditional’ and contingent upon Article I and Article II of the NPT. The language of the text of the Treaty, however, categorically mentions the word “inalienable right”, which means “something that cannot be taken away or given away” by the possessor. By some definition, in international law, “inalienable rights… are those rights that cannot be surrendered, transferred, or revoked… often include the right to life, liberty, and personal security…”.
Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and served as the Pentagon’s deputy for nonproliferation policy from 1989-1993. He also notes in a recent piece that the NPT never explicitly grants a right to uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing. Such capabilities, he says, should be curtailed because they bring states dangerously close to weapons production. Enrichment and reprocessing can, of course, shorten the path to a bomb. But the issue isn't simply what the treaty says. It's in how it's applied.
When Washington signals support for enrichment capabilities in countries like South Korea or Saudi Arabia while insisting that Iran must dismantle its entire fuel cycle, the distinction begins to look less like a principled interpretation of Article IV and more like a geopolitical carve-out. The law may be neutral on paper. In practice, it is anything but.
And for countries already navigating energy insecurity and the accelerating pressures of climate change, that inequity is not theoretical. It shapes development pathways. It turns what was supposed to be a shared technological future into a contested privilege.
That view feeds directly into a broader and more consequential grievance: the failure of nuclear-weapon states to fulfill their obligations under Article VI. This provision gave the treaty its moral balance, committing all parties to pursue negotiations in good faith toward nuclear disarmament. It was never a precise roadmap, but it was intended as a clear direction of travel. Today, not so much.
The post-Cold War reductions that once lent credibility to the disarmament project have reversed. Modernization programs across the big nuclear powers are enhancing arsenals with new delivery systems, improved accuracy, and faster response times. All this boosts the possibility nukes will be used not only as deterrent, but also as battlefield weapons.
BUILDING NEW AND MORE NUCLEAR WEAPONS
As Frank von Hippel and Seyed Hossein Mousavian write in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the optimism that followed the Cold War has given way to stagnation and reversal: “Unfortunately, during the past decade, the shrinkage of the global warhead stockpile stopped with about 10,000 warheads still in existence, and it has begun to grow again as China builds up.”
The non-nuclear states upheld their side of the bargain. They renounced nuclear weapons — often at significant strategic cost — in the expectation that the nuclear powers would move, however gradually, toward eliminating theirs. Instead, what they see is modernization and expansion in an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment. From their perspective, this is betrayal. The NPT bound them to forgo the ultimate weapon indefinitely. In return, they were promised that those who already possessed nukes would move — however gradually — toward relinquishing them. Instead, what they see is entrenchment: a world in which nuclear weapons are being refined, not retired, and in which the gap between nuclear and non-nuclear states when it comes to peaceful uses is being stabilized rather than narrowed.
The current geopolitical context has only sharpened that disillusionment. Russia’s war in Ukraine, the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, and the implicit normalization of military strikes against non-nuclear states by nuclear-armed states all reinforce a dangerous lesson: nuclear weapons appear to confer a form of immunity that treaty compliance does not.
Olimide Samuel captures the risk succinctly when he warns that current policies may lead states to conclude that “If Iran-style threshold nuclear latency does not protect against attack, if international safeguards do not shield declared nuclear facilities, and if coercion remains the answer even when diplomacy is attempted, some states may begin to conclude that only actual weaponization … is what purchases security.” That is precisely the conclusion the NPT was designed to prevent. Von Hippel and Mousavian also warn of the impact of this dynamic, writing that “any country faced with such a threat would want its own nuclear deterrent.”
That is the nightmare scenario. Not an immediate cascade of proliferation, but a gradual shift in strategic thinking — a world in which more states hedge, more states inch closer to the threshold and the norm against nuclear acquisition erodes.
If the NPT is to endure as more than a formal relic, its foundational bargain must be restored. That requires, first, a recommitment to diplomacy and verification as the primary tools of nonproliferation. Attacks on nuclear facilities — especially those under safeguards — not only risk environmental catastrophe but also degrade the very inspection regimes that make peaceful nuclear activity credible. As IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has repeatedly warned, such strikes should never occur because of their potentially “grave consequences.”
None of this negates the NPT’s achievements. The treaty has, by any reasonable measure, limited the spread of nuclear weapons far more effectively than many feared in the 1960s. That success matters. But it's not enough.
A system that enforces nonproliferation while neglecting disarmament and constraining peaceful development except among favored nations cannot sustain legitimacy indefinitely, particularly among the majority of its members. The Global South is not rejecting the idea of nonproliferation. It is rejecting the asymmetry with which it is implemented.
If the NPT is to endure as a living framework rather than a hollow shell, its foundational bargain must be restored in substance. Article IV must be made meaningful in practice, not just in rhetoric — expanding equitable access to peaceful nuclear technology under strict safeguards rather than treating it as a conditional privilege. Most critically, it demands visible, measurable progress under Article VI: renewed arms control negotiations, verifiable reductions and a halt to the qualitative arms race that is making nuclear weapons more adaptable and therefore more dangerous. These are not radical proposals. They are the treaty’s original terms.
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