Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett could become the first United Nations Secretary-General of Indigenous descent. Guyana’s ambassador to the United Nations was nominated as a Secretary-General candidate this week, bringing the grand total of candidates to six as we enter the final stretch of the campaign before the first Security Council straw polls.

Anjali knows Rodrigues-Birkett! They had lunch together not long ago, and in this episode of To Save Us From Hell she explains what Guyana’s UN ambassador brings to this race. We also discuss what we learned from the three-hour General Assembly forum with another candidate, Maria Espinosa.

Remember: We watch these marathon forums so you don’t have to! (Another reason to subscribe to Global Dispatches, which gets you all episodes of To Save Us From Hell)

Finally, we discuss Antonio Guterres’ visit this week to Haiti, and what it suggests about international efforts to support security and stability as Haiti seeks to emerge from crisis.

All those segments are for our paying subscribers only.

But up first: we discuss the UN’s role in the Iran ceasefire — and what this moment means for the UN’s ability to mediate conflicts around the world.

The full episode is available immediately below the fold for our paying subscribers. Please support our unique coverage of the United Nations with a subscription, full price our discount—it all helps!

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Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett could become the first United Nations Secretary-General of Indigenous descent. Guyana’s ambassador to the United Nations was nominated as a Secretary-General candidate this week, bringing the grand total of candidates to six as we enter the final stretch of the campaign before the first Security Council straw polls.

Anjali knows Rodrigues-Birkett! They had lunch together not long ago, and she explains what Guyana’s UN ambassador brings to this race. We also discuss what we learned from the three-hour General Assembly forum with another candidate, Maria Espinosa. (We watch these marathon forums so you don’t have to!)

Finally, we discuss Antonio Guterres’ visit this week to Haiti, and what it suggests about international efforts to support security and stability as Haiti seeks to emerge from crisis.

All those segments are for our paying subscribers only. But up first: we discuss the UN’s role in the Iran ceasefire and what this moment means for the UN’s ability t…

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Jeremy Konyndyk is the president of Refugees International and has deep experience managing Ebola outbreaks, having served as the American point person on the response to the 2014 outbreak in West Africa. We kick off by discussing the trajectory of this outbreak and why U.S. foreign aid cuts likely allowed Ebola to spread undetected, before having a longer conversation about how to get this worsening outbreak under control.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is shaping up to be one of the major global news stories of 2026. Still, it has not gotten the attention it deserves, in my view, as most media is squarely focused on the Middle East. But pay attention to what is happening in Central Africa right now—because this preventable tragedy is about to balloon and impact people far beyond the region.

This episode is freely available right here on Substack and across all your preferred podcast listening platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. However, I would sincerely appreciate —indeed I require — audience support to sustain my work. Please consider purchasing a subscription at full price or using the discount code below.

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As rumors of a potential ceasefire began to swirl, I reached out to Greg to help me understand the nature of this agreement and what it means for U.S.-Iran relations, the region, and the global oil market. We kick off by discussing what we know so far about what this ceasefire obliges Iran and the United States to do, whether he thinks it can hold, and what may come next.

This is a timely conversation that will give you the background and context you need to understand U.S.-Iran diplomacy as it unfolds over the coming weeks. It is freely available to all, but, as always, your support through a paid subscription is what makes this kind of content possible.

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These are all good things — a ceasefire is better than a war. But this was a ceasefire that never should have been necessary because the United States and Israel should not have launched this war in the first place.

Clausewitz famously said, “War is politics by other means” — meaning it is a way to get what you want. In this case, the United States and Israel wanted regime change and an end to Iran’s nuclear program. But what the hawks never seemed to understand is that if what you want cannot actually be gained through military force, you should not start that war in the first place.

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In this special crossover episode between Global Dispatches and the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser Kuo and I use this state visit as an entrypoint to discuss how Chinese foreign policy has shifted in recent years — on the Korean Peninsula, in the Middle East, and at the United Nations.

Kaiser Kuo is the founder and longtime host of Sinica, which has partnered with Global Dispatches so that paid subscribers to Global Dispatches can now get a 50 percent discount on a one-year subscription to Sinica. I’m also happy to announce that if you take advantage of this opportunity, you’ll be helping not just Sinica but Global Dispatches — because the proceeds will be divided between the two of us! This partnership is part of the NonZero Network, of which Sinica and Global Dispatches are both members.

Our conversation is freely available directly on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube — and wherever you get Global Dispatches. The link to a discounted subscription to Sinica is below the fold for my paying subscribers.

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Rather — and this will probably not surprise longtime readers and listeners — the shows I turn to on the regular are those that teach me about parts of the world, ideas, or political debates that are not regularly covered by more mainstream media outlets. Invariably, one show I point to is Sinica, a podcast about China hosted by the insatiably curious and well-informed Kaiser Kuo. I’ve listened to Sinica for years for insights into political debates and cultural trends in and about China, as well as its regular focus on Chinese foreign policy, particularly as it relates to the Global South.

It really is one of my favorite podcasts and Substack publications — and today, I’m happy to announce that paid subscribers to Global Dispatches can now get a 50 percent discount on a one-year subscription to Sinica. I’m also happy to announce that if you take advantage of this opportunity, you’ll be helping not just Sinica but Global Dispatches —because the proceeds will be divided between the two of us! (This partnership is part of the NonZero Network, of which Sinica and Global Dispatches are both members.)

To kick off this partnership, we are co-hosting a livestream tomorrow at 12:30 ET in which Kaiser and I will discuss Xi Jinping’s meeting in Pyongyang with Kim Jong Un, and what it says about North Korea’s nuclear program and Xi’s frenemyship with Putin, among other things. We’ll also discuss China’s growing influence at the United Nations and how China is approaching the Iran conflict.

Paid subscribers to Global Dispatches can take advantage of this special offer below the fold. I hope you do! And I hope to see you on our livestream tomorrow.

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One last thing…I’ll be in Ottawa on Thursday and Friday participating in an event at Carleton University. If you are in Ottawa and want to meet up, send me an email.

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There was a remarkable scene at the United Nations yesterday as the President of the General Assembly and former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock read out the results of a hotly contested race for a Security Council seat.

For months, Portugal, Austria, and Germany had been duking it out behind the scenes at the General Assembly. These three EU allies were competing for just two seats on the Security Council, where they would serve for two years as non-permanent members. They needed the votes of two-thirds of the Assembly to secure those seats, and one country would be the odd European out.

As Baerbock read the results, she sat stone-faced while the General Assembly erupted in raucous applause: Portugal and Austria would be joining the Security Council in 2027. Germany was snubbed.

This was the first time that Germany sought a Security Council seat and lost. What’s more, it was the first time that any of the so-called “G4” countries — India, Brazil, Japan, and Germany — were denied a seat on the Council. Adding insult to injury in Berlin is the fact that, ever since the United States sharply cut foreign aid, Germany has been the largest bilateral donor in the world, according to OECD figures.

So what happened here? Why couldn’t Germany get itself elected to the Security Council this time around? In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, our podcast about the United Nations, we break down the likely reason that Germany fell from a shoo-in for the Council to losing an election to much smaller European countries. But first, we discuss the “hustings” in the race for UN Secretary-General, hosted in London by the United Nations Association of the United Kingdom. Four of the five declared candidates for UN Secretary-General took rapid-fire questions before a live audience in London. We break down what we learned about the candidates — and what their answers suggest about who might become the next UN Secretary-General.

The full episode is available immediately below the fold for our paying subscribers. You can subscribe with the discount link below.

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There was a remarkable scene at the United Nations yesterday as the President of the General Assembly and former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock read out the results of a hotly contested race for a Security Council seat.

For months, Portugal, Austria, and Germany had been duking it out behind the scenes at the General Assembly. These three EU allies were competing for just two seats on the Security Council, where they would serve for two years as non-permanent members. They needed the votes of two-thirds of the Assembly to secure those seats, and one country would be the odd European out.

As Baerbock read the results, she sat stone-faced while the General Assembly erupted in raucous applause: Portugal and Austria would be joining the Security Council in 2027. Germany was snubbed.

This was the first time that Germany sought a Security Council seat and lost. What’s more, it was the first time that any of the so-called “G4” countries — India, Brazil, Japan, and Germany — were deni…

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On the other hand, over the last few years, that progress has suddenly come under threat. COVID upended HIV/AIDS programs in much of the world, and more recently, sudden and swift funding cuts, including from the United States, are shaking the foundation upon which previous decades of progress were built.

On June 22 and 23, these two competing forces will come to a head at the United Nations, where diplomats are gathering for a major meeting on HIV/AIDS. According to my guest today, Mitchell Warren, the High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS at the UN presents a unique opportunity for multilateral coordination toward the goal of ending HIV/AIDS as a public health threat, but that goal may be stymied. Key countries that previously led the global fight against HIV/AIDS, including the United States, are stepping back from their leadership roles, potentially upending decades of progress.

Mitchell Warren is the executive director of AVAC, an advocacy group. We kick off by discussing some of the exciting new scientific innovations that may accelerate progress toward ending HIV/AIDS as a public health threat, then have a discussion of how cuts in funding and eroding political commitments are hitting just as these promising new scientific innovations are coming online. We then have a long conversation about how this dynamic may play out at the UN — and what to expect from the High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS.

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This episode freely available across all podcast listening platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg: Welcome to Global Dispatches, a podcast about foreign policy, international affairs, and often, as in today, global health. My name is Mark Leon Goldberg. I’m the host of this podcast. Mitchell, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Mitchell Warren: Great to see you, Mark.

I’m Mitchell Warren. I’m the Executive Director of AVAC, an organization that focuses on HIV prevention and the broader HIV-AIDS response.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Mitchell, we are speaking ahead of a major international meeting at the United Nations on June 22nd and 23^rd — a high-level meeting as it’s known in UN parlance, which is intended to be a major inflection point on the future of the global fight against HIV and AIDS. And I want to focus our conversation on that meeting.

But before we get there, I’d love to have you set the stage for us a little bit. Where do we stand today in the global fight against HIV and AIDS?

Mitchell Warren: We stand at kind of a remarkable point in the AIDS response and in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. And I have a hell of an imagination, but certainly, the last 16 months have defied even my imagination. And we’re at a place where we should be talking in 2026 about progress towards a UN target to end HIV as a public health threat, was the term of art at the UN a couple of years ago, to end it as a public health threat by 2030.

And we, by 2024, early 2025, we were already off track for a number of reasons, which we can talk about. Some of it was still coming out of the emergency period of COVID, which derailed a lot of progress in HIV. But getting back on track, looking ahead to 2030, and then, of course, the disruption beginning on January 20th, 2025. And it’s coming at one of the, I would argue, one of the cruelest ironies of the moment is that we have some of the most exciting science and HIV in 45 years of the epidemic, coming at the most politically and economically challenging times that may cause us to miss the moment of opportunity.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, let’s break down those kind of competing trends, as it were. On the one hand, exciting scientific developments. On the other hand, a kind of retraction of financial and political support towards those scientific developments. So, what are some of those exciting scientific developments of the last several years that you would cite as particularly impactful?

Mitchell Warren: So, it starts with the power of antiretroviral treatment. And we’ve known about antiretroviral treatment now for 30 years. But what we began to see in, even in the midst of COVID, is progress towards a global target created by the UN, endorsed by member states to get what were called the 95-95-95 targets. So, to make sure that 95% of people living with HIV knew their status, that 95% of those that knew their status got on antiretroviral treatment, and that 95% of those on treatment were virally suppressed, because we know that if you’re virally suppressed, you won’t transmit the virus.

And so, there were a number of countries in 2024 that actually began to achieve that 95-95-95 treatment target. But we still see the rate of new infections. And that’s where the exciting science came in, because in 2024, just about two years ago, we saw the results presented of the latest form of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, in the form of an injectable that you get every six months called Lenacapavir, providing nearly perfect protection in the clinical trials.

And that product was then approved by a number of regulatory agencies in record time, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The product was meant to be delivered at the end of last year and early this year. And it is now reaching the first dozen countries in Africa right now. And that’s where we get into the challenging moment. But the science of Lenacapavir, you know, partnering with the power of antiretroviral treatment, really gave us a view that you might be able to think about ending this epidemic by 2030.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Yeah, I mean, the power of that injectable seems to be premised on the idea that, you know, behavior change is a much more difficult public health endeavor than just taking a medicine that will prevent you from spreading HIV.

Mitchell Warren: Yeah, that is true. And there is a behavioral component of every intervention. I think one of the things we’ve certainly learned in the last decade is for all the talk of biomedical advances — We had oral PrEP approved first in 2012. Then we had different forms of PrEP leading up to Lenacapivir. And there are remarkable technologies, each of them in their own right, very safe, very effective products.

And we think of them as biomedical interventions. But we also know that getting into the clinic to take an HIV test, to get a prescription and then take a pill every day also has a behavioral component. The advantage to this every six-month injection is that you kind of delink it from the daily reminder that you might be at risk of HIV, of condom use, or of oral prep. And so, for many people, that idea of the injectable was, is tantalizing and powerful.

The one other thing that’s really interesting, and we’re beginning to see it in some of the early programs delivering Lenacapovir, is that it’s bringing new people in to find out their status, to find out if they’re living with HIV or not, because they think if they’re not and they’re at risk, they might get Lenacapivir. And at least in the early programs, we’re seeing people newly diagnosed, which is important because the sooner someone’s diagnosed, the quicker they get on treatment, the better for their health. And so, Lenacapivir really is this opportunity for both diagnosing, treating, and preventing.

Mark Leon Goldberg: You mentioned earlier that there were a few African countries in particular that were on track for that 95-95-95 target. Which countries were they, and what were they doing right?

Mitchell Warren: So, there are a number of countries that are near or achieving that 95-95-95 target — Botswana, Eswatini, a number of other countries in the region, and also countries in Asia and Latin America. The success of treatment really comes down in many countries to the power of investing in health systems and in HIV programs. A lot of the countries that achieved the 95-95 targets were PEPFAR recipient countries.

PEPFAR, along with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, over the last 20 years have driven incredible progress. And so, where you see those investments, you see impact. And I think one of the things that was really important about the PEPFAR approach was not just procuring drugs and delivering into clinics, but the data systems of PEPFAR were really a crown jewel, which is now being destroyed, but a crown jewel of being able to see when you were reaching your targets, but also in a district or a clinic where you weren’t and what you needed to course correct on.

And so, data for decision making, not just to track progress, but to actually find, in a continuous improvement approach, has really been a secret to success, not so secret, but a key component of success.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, it seems, and you’ve just intimated this, that sort of running head long against this scientific progress and policy innovations is this new kind of funding environment in which PEPFAR, the George W. Bush era president’s emergency plan for AIDS relief, which is a huge injection of funds into the global fight against HIV and AIDS, is being dismantled in certain ways. Can you just describe the headwinds against the progress that you’ve seen over the last several decades?

You described this amazing scientific progress, but now we’re in this odd moment in which you have these amazing scientific innovations and policy innovations, all of a sudden, in a much different political and funding environment.

Mitchell Warren: So, we should be building on strength and success. And instead, we are really clinging on to the vestiges of the PEPFAR program that are really imperiling that progress. And I think there was a moment last month that kind of describes the cruel irony incredibly well. So, in mid-April, PEPFAR, along with the Global Fund and Gilead Sciences, the company that made Lenacapivir, they announced an increase in commitment from 2 million people getting access to Lenacapivir over the next three years to 3 million.

So, a 50% increase with great fanfare. This is a huge priority for this administration. And that’s great news. And in fact, it’s maybe the only policy of the Biden administration, who originally created the partnership with Global Fund around Lenacapavir, maybe the only policy that this current administration kept from the Biden era. So that’s the good news. Five days later, though, PEPFAR released the first data in over a year.

And again, PEPFAR was very proud of their not just the data collection, but the transparency of that data. And it was available every quarter to all stakeholders. And they hadn’t done that for over a year in the new administration. And lo and behold, five days after the big Lenacapavir announcement, they shared the data. And they did it with great fanfare and said it was showing that they were back on track.

But that’s what the press release said. But you don’t do data by press release. You do it by looking at the data. And what we found in the data is that the PrEP programs, that PEPFAR has been the lion’s share of investment in PrEP around low and middle-income countries, about 90% of PrEP programs have been funded by PEPFAR in low- and middle-income countries.

There was a 40% reduction in PrEP access under PEPFAR programs year on year between late 2024 and late 2025. So, just as we see this excitement around Lenacapavir, the foundation on which to deliver it is being decimated. And it’s pretty clear to me that in that five-day window, the folks who made the positive announcement about Len and then released the data didn’t see what the rest of us are seeing, this incredible disconnect.

How do you deliver this new technology when you’ve just gutted the programmatic infrastructure that’s meant to deliver it? And the one other piece that’s particularly challenging is that a lot of that PrEP programming was focused on what are called in HIV programs, the key populations, or key and vulnerable populations — gay men, transgender individuals, sex workers, people who use drugs. PEPFAR pretty much dismantled all of those key population programs in which it had previously invested and is no longer even keeping track of the data disaggregated by those populations.

So, we see this, you know, cut by 40% of the program and the erasure of the populations who can most benefit from PrEP. So, it’s, it is that cruel irony of, of, of the current state.

Mark Leon Goldberg: You know, beyond sort of American cuts in HIV/AIDS response, and again, as you said, PEPFAR was like the lion’s share of some of these key interventions, have you seen a retraction from other governments as well? Are they kind of following Americans lead at this point?

Mitchell Warren: Well, it’s an important question because this current environment is not just about the U.S. government. It is a global trend that we’re seeing. And I think one of the great illustrations of that is in what happened late last year around the Global Fund. And every three years, the Global Fund does what is called a replenishment. So, they basically get pledges for the next three year cycle.

And Congress, 20 years ago when Global Fund was created, created legislation to support the Global Fund in addition to PEPFAR. It’s a fabulous partnership between the two funding entities. And the U.S. government can give up to one third of the Global Fund budget. And that’s written into law by Congress. And the good news last December at the replenishment is that the U.S. government, surprising many of us, actually doubled down on their commitment to the Global Fund.

And they’ve really prioritized the global fund as a key partner, which is great. But the Global Fund, ahead of the replenishment, put out their kind of need forecast of the next three years. And they were hoping to raise $18 billion for the next three years, which would have been an increase from this last three-year cycle of about $14 billion. Sadly, the pledges, so far, are sitting somewhere around $11 billion for the next three-year cycle. So, far, far short of that commitment.

The U.S. is still committing significant resources, but we saw reduced pledges from pretty much every other country. And that signals that this is not just a U.S. government issue. A lot of the European donors are obviously very focused on their borders and on investments in supporting Ukraine, which is a good decision. But it’s meant that global health investments are shrinking.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, I think this was like a really good setup for a conversation I want to have with you about this key meeting at the United Nations, the high-level meeting on HIV AIDS taking place June 22nd and 23rd. What is this meeting and what do you see as its potential significance?

Mitchell Warren: Well, it’s incredibly significant. And this high-level meeting follows a series pretty much every five years since 2001. And the 2001 was called UNGASS, the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV and AIDS. It was the first time that a health issue commanded a special session of the General Assembly. And it changed the trajectory of the epidemic. It is because of that political declaration in 2001 that Global Fund and PEPFAR really were galvanized in their financial support.

And that all the member states supporting the high-level declaration in 2001 setting targets. And so, every five years, these high-level meetings have really been both a kind of a way station, a checkpoint on the progress of the past five years. But more importantly, a vision of what the next five years can look like. And so, this year’s high-level meeting is a critical moment. And it’s coming at a time where, frankly, when we saw the last high-level meeting in 2021, it was right in the middle of COVID. It was mostly virtual.

And it codified the targets for the AIDS response, these UN targets around treatment and prevention, looking for 2025 to have reached certain targets, and then this idea of 2030, ending HIV as a public health threat. And what we know we’re going to see presented in June is that we are off track.

We didn’t meet the 2025 targets, and we’re way off track for 2030. The member states, we expect, will endorse a new global AIDS strategy, which was led by UNAIDS, which is the joint United Nations program co-sponsored by a bunch of UN agencies. Global AIDS strategy is a powerful document. It sets up commitments around treatment and scaling up Lenacapavir and other prevention methods. It talks a lot about human rights.

And so, there’s a lot of anticipation because we know in the current environment, there are a lot of countries, including the United States, that are no longer interested in supporting rights-based AIDS responses. And so, the declaration that will come out in June, will include the protection and support of people living with HIV, of gay and transgender individuals, of sex workers, of people who use drugs. Because those populations are often marginalized and sometimes even criminalized in some countries. And now the United States, the largest supporter, is giving pretty good support for that kind of rights-denying approach.

And so, they’re all not just watching the high-level meeting, but engaging in the high-level meeting to push for a declaration that has teeth, that does get member states to recommit to a strategy about ending the epidemic. It’s very easy to do a declaration of niceties, of saying nice things. Is it going to reflect what happened in 2001 about actual political commitments, financial commitments, rights-based commitments in the AIDS response? And so, there’s a lot riding on this one.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So that’s interesting. I’ve covered many a UN conference over my 20 years of covering the United Nations. And I presume this conference, like those similar to it, kind of operate on this consensus idea that in order for a political declaration to be adopted, all countries need to get on board. And any one country or group of countries can derail the outcome document, as it’s known from these conferences, can prevent it from being adopted by consensus.

And it seems, as you’re describing it, that there’s a conflict that’s being set up heading into this conference insofar as you have some countries, you name the united states as maybe not backing in the same way it used to, what you mentioned as a rights-based approach is that approach that you this idea that you ought to target particularly vulnerable populations — men who have sex with men or injecting drug users, or whatever it is —in order to um spur progress on the global fight.

And then you also have this funding idea that’s hanging over the whole project of global fight against HIV and AIDS. How do you see those kind of political dynamics playing out over the course of this two-day conference?

Mitchell Warren: I do fear that they’ll play out badly, and I would like to be optimistic that we will get a strong declaration that does have consensus and commitments. Just a few weeks ago, there was a multi-stakeholder hearing in the lead-up to the high-level meeting. It took place in the UN.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And actually, that’s UN speak for civil society participation in these kinds of conferences. I can translate UN speak all day, Mitchell.

Mitchell Warren: They called it multi-stakeholder. It was 90% civil society, a little bit of private sector. And it is under the auspices. So, the conveners from the UN, the two countries that are leading are Botswana and Georgia. And their political leaders were there overseeing this hearing and being part of it. But it was very much about civil society. But historically, you would have seen the U.S. government represented there. PEPFAR would have been there. They were not in the room.

And so, we don’t know where the U.S. will actually push and pull. We obviously have seen over the last 16 months, this administration express a great deal of animosity toward the multilateral system and to the UN. And historically, for the past high-level meetings, beginning in 2001, the U.S. was a major driver, helping to develop the zero draft and really contributing to it. And I do expect it will be contentious and potentially obstructionist in the conversations over the next three and a half weeks.

The zero draft, the UN speak for that first version that is out for member states to review is available. And it will be interesting to see the track changes, what gets cut, what gets edited, what gets added. And will we get to a consensus document that matters, that actually commits member states to an AIDS response that is robust and that meets this moment scientifically and politically and financially?

Mark Leon Goldberg: That’s interesting because it leads me to, maybe like a broader question about the value and significance of multilateral platforms on global health in general and HIV AIDS in particular. Why is it, in your view, that a meeting like this matters big picture? I mean, does it really compel states to take certain actions? What does it actually do? What does it achieve?

Mitchell Warren: It’s a great question. And I would say, historically, certainly from the HIV AIDS response over the last two decades, we have seen multilateralism and these high-level meetings and the UN family and the co-sponsors of UNAIDS and the member states collectively prioritizing, committing, and delivering great progress. If you had said to anybody in 2001 that we might actually even be able to utter the words ending an epidemic in the 25-year period, you would have said that’s pretty ambitious and maybe even delusional.

So, the progress achieved over the last 25 years is nothing short of historic. The fact that 30 million people access antiretroviral treatment, the fact that PrEP exists in multiple forms and has been delivered, the fact that many countries have created rights-based key population programs, it’s because of the multilateral system. Obviously, it’s also because of PEPFAR and the Global Fund and private philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, and others supporting the investments.

But it all stems from shared strategy that these high-level meetings and that the multilateral system have codified. And so, I believe that this high-level meeting is not just a check-in on progress and a forward-looking strategic declaration. It’s a test of the concept. It is a test of the will of political leaders and of civil society. Are we still in a global discourse about ending an epidemic? Or are we closing borders and shutting down and leaving every country and every community to do it themselves? Because if we are, the end of this epidemic is going to be pushed out many, many years. And that’s the test of concept ahead of us.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So again, having covered many UN conferences like this, it tends to be the case that certain groups of countries band together to pursue common positions. Some groups of countries are potentially more ambitious in what a conference can achieve. Some are less ambitious. What are some of the key negotiating blocks that are coming together ahead of this conference?

Mitchell Warren: Well, I think you’re seeing two really important things that will emerge. One comes, most importantly, from many of the African member states. And you’re seeing a lot of the conversation, just last week was a different UN structure, the World Health Assembly, and a lot of the conversations about African sovereignty, about the Accra reset, looking at global health more broadly. I do think one of the important elements too, is that we talk about HIV and the HIV high level meeting, but it is increasingly needed to be embedded in a larger health systems approach.

Because this is not just about HIV. There’s TB, there’s malaria. There are pandemics. We’re sitting here with an Ebola outbreak of epic proportion right now. But we’re seeing African countries with the Africa CDC, with the African Union, playing hugely important roles, not just as recipient countries of donor largesse, but rather as sovereign nations determining the health systems they want in their countries. And I think we’re going to see, I hope we’re going to see very strong language and very strong commitments from a number of African countries individually and then collectively as a block.

I think, historically, we’ve seen the European countries be particularly strong when it comes to rights-based language, and particularly the embedding of sexual and reproductive health and rights issues within the HIV response. HIV, of course, is an infectious disease, but it is transmitted in large part through sexual contact. So, you can’t delink it from sexual reproductive health and rights, although many countries would like to, because there are a lot of countries that would love to deny bodily autonomy, including the United States.

So, I think you’ll see hopefully European countries, as they have historically, be the strong voices for comprehensive sexuality education. And there’s often been good language in declarations. And I would hope that that continues, because without that, we also are going to inhibit our ability to succeed.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, what will you be doing during those two days?

Mitchell Warren: Well, not a member state, although civil society, both in the run-up to the high-level meeting and on the margins of it — monitoring, holding people to account, making sure that the member states and the UN agencies that say the right things actually deliver on the right things. And really, this issue of accountability, I think civil society plays a critical role. And very often, advocates, we all have demanded things.

But advocacy is not just about making demands. Advocacy is at its heart about accountability. And so, we need to hold all stakeholders to account for commitments past made and for commitments to come. And so, a lot of what happens around the high-level meeting is holding people to account for the past and holding their feet to the fire for the future.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Maybe, lastly, to what extent is the goal of ending HIV-AIDS as a public health threat by 2030 contingent upon a successful outcome of this meeting?

Mitchell Warren: If there were not a political declaration a month from now, I would not say, “Oh, we can’t possibly deliver on the goal.” But it will facilitate many things because, again, back to accountability, it will allow civil society and other countries to hold each other to account for commitments made. I would say it is not the end-all and be-all. A political declaration is not an epidemiologic rights-based, well-funded AIDS response, but it is a foundational element of it.

And I would say that we might still be able to deliver on our target with a bad declaration, but it would certainly put one more hand tied behind our back. And we’ve already had a couple of our hands tied behind our backs these last 16 months because of such political disruptions and destructions. So, not having a good declaration would certainly make it harder. It wouldn’t make it impossible. And I think that’s one of the things.

You don’t work in HIV for three decades, as I have done, without being an optimist on some level. We cannot miss this moment. I believe a declaration will make meeting the moment easier. And I hope we get a good declaration. But we need to meet this moment with or without a declaration.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, Mitchell, is there anything else you wanted to add or mention before I let you go?

Mitchell Warren: Well, I would just say that it is a historic opportunity. I mean, again, if you had said to me 25 years ago, do you think you’ll see the end of the epidemic in 2030? I would have said, “No way.” We certainly are not on track for it now. But the idea that we’re even having the conversation is progress. And I guess I’d say never confuse progress with success. We have not succeeded, but we’ve made such progress, and we cannot go back. We have to go forward.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, Mitchell, thank you so much for your time. This was really helpful and interesting, kind of setting the scene for this key meeting. So thank you.

Mitchell Warren: Well, thank you for having me. It’s great to talk to you.

I spent much of last month at the United Nations covering the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This is a conference of all members of the NPT that happens every five years. Countries come together to assess progress toward the treaty’s goals and plot ways to enhance the treaty’s impact and effectiveness in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, reducing nuclear stockpiles, and supporting the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

That’s the idea. But on Friday, as the conference gaveled to a close, the 191 states parties could not come to an agreement. The conference failed to achieve consensus on a way forward for the NPT. And this failure comes amid a host of other challenges in the nuclear security landscape: China’s rapid buildup; the end of all bilateral arms control agreements between the United States and Russia; the U.S.-Israel war on Iran; Russia’s war on Ukraine; the increasing integration of AI into nuclear weapons systems; and more and more countries openly suggesting that nuclear weapons may be a solution to their security challenges.

My interview guest today is Alexandra Bell, head of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — the organization perhaps best known for the Doomsday Clock. We kick off by discussing what the NPT has achieved since it entered into force more than 50 years ago, and what this major conference at the United Nations suggests about the state of global nuclear security today?

The NPT has long held the global nuclear order together. A failed review conference shows just how much pressure it is now under.

This episode is produced in partnership with Ploughshares, a foundation committed to reducing and ultimately eliminating nuclear threats. This episode freely available across all podcast listening platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg: Welcome to Global Dispatches, a podcast about international affairs and foreign policy. I’m your host, Mark Leon Goldberg.

Global Dispatches is the longest-running independent international affairs podcast. We cover foreign policy, global development, human rights, and often nuclear security – the topic of our conversation today.

Alex, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Alex Bell: Yeah, I am Alex Bell. I’m the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And one of my go-to nuclear security experts. I’m really excited to talk with you today about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the review conference of which just ended at the United Nations on Friday, May 22nd. We’re recording this on Wednesday, May 27th. And Alex, I was at the UN for much of this NPT review conference, the RevCon as it’s known. Now, this conference gathers all of the members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty every five years to assess progress towards the treaty’s goals and plot pathways to strengthen the treaty.

That’s the idea, at least, and we’ll talk about why this particular conference might have fallen short of those aspirations. But to kick off, Alex, can I just have you remind listeners, remind viewers what the NPT is and why it’s a significant part of our nuclear security architecture?

Alex Bell: The NPT, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is generally just referred to by that acronym, is the most important treaty that many people have never, never heard of. And it really is the glue that’s holding our nuclear security framework together. And it came about because countries in the 1960s were worried that we would be seeing 30, 40, 50 nuclear-armed states and were worried about the instability that we were heading towards.

So, in 1968, countries got together, started to negotiate a treaty that would lock in the set nuclear weapon states — so that’s the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, China — and then everyone else in the world would remain a non-nuclear weapon state, not seek nuclear weapons, as long as the nuclear armed states were working in good faith to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals. And, as part of that bargain, every country in the world in good standing with the treaty would have access to civil nuclear technology. So, it’s referred to as a grand bargain. And for better or for worse, the treaty has worked as designed.

There are four other nuclear armed states that have come along since the treaty was opened for signature and ratification in 1970. That is not a perfect score, but no treaty is ever perfect. And by and large, this held back the tide of proliferation that we were so worried about. And the reason there’s a review process is because treaties aren’t perfect, because they do need strengthening, revision, reinterpretation to make sure they’re fit for purpose for the time. And so that review process was really built into the system.

And it was back in 1995 at a review conference that the treaty was extended indefinitely. The world decided that this was a mechanism that we liked. It was working. We want to keep it. Now we’re in a situation where some countries are starting to doubt the effectiveness of the treaty. Some countries are ignoring the purpose of the treaty. And so, we’re now in a pretty dangerous situation, but not a hopeless situation.

Mark Leon Goldberg: I saw a lot of those dynamics that you just described play out over the month at the United Nations during this review conference. And the review conference itself is sort of deemed to be a failure by the standards set out by the president of the review conference, the Vietnamese ambassador to the UN, who chaired this month-long meeting at the UN. And he deemed it to be a failure because it failed to achieve a consensus outcome document. This idea that all members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty need to agree on all aspects of what they discuss, what they decide at this review conference, which again is intended to think through ways to make the treaty relevant to 2026.

A treaty that was, you know, came into force in 1970 now needs to be relevant in 2026. How do we do that? This review conference was intended to hash out that structure that way, but it was not able to achieve consensus. So, what, Alex, do you think went wrong here? Why was consensus unable to be achieved at this review conference?

Alex Bell: I think we’ve set the bar for ourself at an unattainable place at the moment. And that is because outside factors, outside tensions, have now, three times in a row, affected our ability to create a consensus document. It’s very hard to get 191 countries to agree on anything, much less a very large document with a lot of, sort of, in the business we would refer to as Christmas tree ornaments that are particular things that people want to see on this larger product. I think we’ve sort of set ourselves up to be in this situation.

That’s why I was calling multiple times before the conference began of maybe we don’t need a consensus document to agree that the treaty has value, that it’s important to our mutual security, and that it needs to be strengthened, and that some countries are falling short of their goals. The ambassador Viet, who was the RevCon president, I think, did as good of a job as anyone could have expected, given the circumstances. And he really tried to hammer out something that could be agreed to, where everyone’s sort of views were accounted for.

But unfortunately, the same sort of issues that have been affecting the last few review conferences, which is outside conflict and tension, whether it’s Ukraine, whether it’s Iran, that, eventually, sort of, you know, overtook any ability to get that broad consensus. I hope that no parties to the treaty actually think that we would be better off without it. So, I think maybe trying to find ourselves a way to back out of this idea that a consensus document is the only way to demonstrate support for and the need for the treaties is what we should think about going forward.

It’s not actually even a part of the treaty text. It just sort of evolved as part of the review process. That said, I think we need to be honest about whether or not countries are working in good faith, particularly the nuclear-armed states. It is hard to make a case that any of the nuclear-armed states recognized under the treaty, nuclear-weapon states, are actually acting in good faith at this moment, trying to find ways to reduce tensions between them that could eventually lead to the kinds of agreements that in the past have brought the number of nuclear weapons in the world down to such a significant level.

Mark Leon Goldberg: You referenced that this is now the third time in a row that this particular conference was unable to reach a consensus agreement on the way forward on the NPT. And the previous time, the challenge, the issue which broke consensus was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which included attacks on the nuclear sites, the nuclear civilian nuclear sites in Ukraine. And so, Russia essentially blocked consensus there. This time around, as you said, it was another outside conflict, Iran, which blew up the conference at the very end. The United States wanted a specific condemnation of Iran in the outcome document.

Iran, naturally, didn’t want that. There were other issues that were complicating the conference, but this is the one at the very end, in which Ambassador Viet, who I agree was an extremely skilled diplomat. I mean, you could not have asked for a better sort of conference president who was trying really earnestly and diligently and creatively to bring these sides together, just couldn’t square the circle. So, this is what kind of blew up the review conference. But another thing you said also deeply resonates, which is that one ought not confuse like a month-long meeting at the UN every five years to assess the NPT with the NPT itself. And that, to me, at least, I think needs to be center of the conversation.

Alex Bell: Outside tensions do affect international proceedings. I was a part of the team, the U.S. delegation in 2022 when we failed to get a consensus. But to me, that review conference was reflective of 191 countries saying, “We agree on a general approach on what we need to do, on how we need to account for failures.”

And one country, you know, putting the situation in Ukraine, that was Russia, above every other country’s sort of view of how to maintain and strengthen the treaty. And that happened at the very last minute. And I think this latest review conference, there were other countries that had issues about Iran, but I think, you know, falls on the shoulder of the United States more than anyone this time. But had the United States not objected, would there have been another country, Russia or China, to step out on some other language? It’s hard to tell.

What I think everybody needs to do going forward is not lose faith in a treaty that has been imperfect, but overall important to our security. That keep in mind that it’s easier to break things than it is to build them. And that the countries who feel like NPT is not living up to their expectations, I think, have to think about, you know, what we’re capable of at this moment. In some sense, I think that the entire process of bringing down nuclear threats and watching them go back up and trying to bring them down again is an exercise in vigilance. And we shouldn’t expect these structures that we’ve created to just magically make everything work.

It’s up to us. It’s up to our elected leaders to put in the actual effort to figure out, okay, like what is going wrong here? And as I said, it’s very hard to not point squarely to the recognized nuclear weapons states, the lack of progress on disarmament, the undermining of structures and agreements that help us manage the nonproliferation threat. And continued concerns about access to civil nuclear technology at the same time, some diminished attempts by countries to actually put the safeguards and structures necessary into their civil nuclear programs to make sure they can’t turn nuclear.

Mark Leon Goldberg: What to you is the significance of the failure of this review conference to the NPT itself today? I mean, earlier you described the NPT as the glue that’s holding together our nuclear security architecture. Is that architecture like a little more frail today than it was, you know, a month ago? What does this kind of moment in nuclear security suggest to you?

Alex Bell: I would say there was a fair amount of pessimism coming into the proceedings and almost an assumption that we wouldn’t be able to get past one or two countries breaking consensus. And even if people were trying to put on a brave face, I think that goes to my idea that maybe we shouldn’t be assessing the health and strength of the treaty on a massive document that has something in it for everyone. Maybe we need to go back for a little while, at least to the brass tacks of what we did in forming this treaty in the first place, which was trying to stop a massive expansion of proliferation.

We have multiple countries now talking about proliferation, not in whispers, not behind closed doors, but out in public, and dealing with those problems head-on, talking about why it is that we decided all those years ago that a world awash in nuclear weapons states was one that was going to be more dangerous for every single human on this planet. And go back to those fundamentals and focus on that as opposed to this, again, this bar that we set for ourselves that just may be difficult to reach given our current security environment. Things change, cycles change, countries change. But maybe we should stop sort of tilting at a windmill that we ourselves created.

Mark Leon Goldberg: That seems like reasonable after having spent most of the month at the UN watching diplomats bang their heads against the wall. So, I do want to ask you, though, about the proliferation threats that you see in the world today. I mean, Iran was kind of the key proliferation threat that everyone had focused on. But then there are others, oftentimes of countries that you wouldn’t maybe associate as being nefarious actors in international affairs, but ones that might view this moment as one in which acquiring nuclear weapons would give them increased security and less international approbation than they might otherwise have experience in previous eras. So, kind of walk me through your list of the countries or the circumstances for proliferation that concern you most today.

Alex Bell: Yeah…

Mark Leon Goldberg: You’re out of government now. I assume you’re allowed to name names.

Alex Bell: Yes. No, I mean, it’s not a matter of me naming names. Countries are saying this out loud. And there are multiple reasons for that, but it’s a lot of U.S. allies, let’s just be frank, who are looking at this option of proliferation having stood against it for so long — Poland, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Canada, multiple countries have talked about this, you know, multiple countries in Brussels who are NATO members, talking about their concerns about the U.S. commitment to extended deterrence so that the nuclear umbrella that the United States extends over allies and partners, you know, partly this is happening because the U.S. is doing things as a government, as an administration right now to make people doubt their commitment that the U.S. would actually follow through on its extended deterrence guarantees.

But that’s not happening in a vacuum. There are countries like Russia, like China, that are expanding their nuclear arsenals, expanding their delivery system capabilities that are making countries feel insecure and like they may need to get their own deterrent because they can’t trust any of these larger nuclear armed states that unfortunately, they have to be accounted for. And I think in terms of the NPT itself, there was a lot of criticism that came up about the U.S. extended deterrence.

Really first, at the 2015 RevCon, when Russia started to make a lot of fuss about the U.S. extended deterrent, happened to be at the same time that they were involved in their initial incursion into Ukraine and their own violation of the Budapest Memorandum that committed Russia to not changing the territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine transferring the nuclear weapons on their sovereign territory back to the Russian Federation. So, unfortunately, a lot of countries bandwagoned on saying that this extended deterrence structure was a problem.

It didn’t really make any sense because the U.S. extended deterrent guarantees were in place in ‘68 when the treaty was being negotiated, in place when the treaty entered into force, and in place when the treaty was indefinitely extended. And I think for a lot of the countries that were sort of joining in a Russian-Chinese argument against the United States and its allies, I mean, I think the question is, U.S. extended deterrence as we continue to try to figure out how to reduce tensions with Russia and China or a lot of countries proliferating? And I was surprised to hear some people at the RevCon saying, “Well, those countries are just bluffing.” That’s not a risk I’m willing to take. That’s not a world that I just want to enter over principle. Let’s figure out why these countries feel this way. Let’s have a real conversation about what’s driving these proliferation threats.

And let’s figure out how to deal with those threats on an individual scale. If it’s having a massive rethink of the U.S.’s role in this world, then we need to do that, too. But I don’t think we get anywhere from pointing fingers at each other. In my experience as a delegate at the NPT, I was surprised at the lack of empathy that countries kept for each other. The nuclear threats and how you perceive them are largely dependent on multiple factors, where you are geographically in the world, the tensions that you have with potential neighboring countries.

And also, the feeling, on the flip side, the feeling of helplessness, that there are nuclear tensions all around and there are countries making decisions that affect the security of everyone, but the inability to do things to influence it. So, I think, coming out of this RevCon, maybe one of the things we need to do is try to see things from other countries’ perspectives and why they’re making the choices that they’re making, why they feel the necessity to move in certain ways. And then we can actually, you know, maybe find a way back to consensus.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, what you said earlier kind of resonates with me also, based on what I saw at RevCon in terms of it being like another example of kind of what Mark Carney in Davos kind of identified as the kind of end of the U.S.-led international order. We’re in, whether you agree or not, we are probably in this transitional phase in geopolitics for a number of different reasons. And, Mark Carney’s speech was maybe an exclamation point, trying to identify part of that phase.

But that previous era did create the NPT. It did severely limit the number of countries that acquired nuclear weapons. You said just four, that was India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. They’re the only countries outside the NPT that have nuclear weapons, which, based on what expectations were at the time, is like a pretty good track record. But now the old order is no longer as sure-footed, and we’re in this potentially transitional phase. And so, I’m wondering from you is how you might design a better nuclear security architecture, or one that might be able to withstand this transitional phase that we’re in today.

Alex Bell: Yeah, very carefully. Actually, I don’t know the answer, and I’m okay with that. What I know is that we are capable of building structures to account for security concerns because I know we’ve done it over and over again. What we lack right now is sort of political will, political courage, and sort of leadership. And I think, as the U.S. has, I think, undoubtedly undermined its own reputation in the world and made people doubt our word, which I think is a severe own goal. World Cup coming up, I’m thinking in football terms. But we didn’t have to make these points…

Mark Leon Goldberg: You could say soccer. I’m in Denver.

Alex Bell: We didn’t have to choose this path. And now that we have,I don’t think there was any going back. I do think that there is building something new, because I do think that when the U.S. is thinking about its place in the world and thinking about that the power of our alliance structure and all that it brought to us in terms of security, I think there is something different and potentially better on the horizon. I think some of our relationships weren’t exactly the healthiest relationships. Friends tell each other the truth. And I feel like some of the relationships that the United States had weren’t necessarily saying the things that needed to be said, including, just firmly and clearly, the U.S. will not accept proliferation from anyone, whether they’re an ally or not ally, no proliferation of any kind. And that kind of affirmative statement, I don’t know that people were necessarily hearing it and not hearing it.

How did that affect people’s thoughts about what we saw as the right and wrong thing when it came to proliferation? I think those are things that we have to think about internally as a country. And then I have to hope that other countries are thinking, well, maybe we were leaning too hard on one country to be everything and anything in these international fora. And maybe we weren’t being honest about what we wanted in the past, or what we expected, or how we were receiving messages. I think this breakdown in structures is an opportunity that we could use to our advantage, that we could build something better out of.

But we have to choose those things. It’s not going to be given to us. And there’s no magic wand that’s going to fix the NPT for us. We have to agree. And I think most overwhelming number of states parties, the NPT, agree that it is worth having, it is worth preserving, and if necessary, worth augmenting to better account for the way the world’s going to look. But as I said, breaking things is so easy. We’re seeing that all the time. Building things is hard, and we’re better off trying to preserve the structures that we know are good for us, even if that’s a difficult process, even if it will take time, even if it will be very frustrating along the way.

And I think the diplomats at the NPT don’t get enough credit for what they carry on their shoulders for their fellow countrymen and women at home, laboring mostly in obscurity, trying to protect the world from the worst of all possible futures.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And I would say there were like very earnest diplomats there who really do care about these issues and are there day in, day out because they deeply believe in the importance of their work. And it is important. You’re saying that there might be like new structures that are emerging is kind of reminds me of maybe one potential bright spot of this conference from the perspective of those who believe that multilateral cooperation is important to reducing nuclear threats.

And that was a kind of rallying around, in some circles, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the so-called Nuclear Ban Treaty, a conversation around which was injected into a lot of conversations around RevCon. You saw certain member states like Austria kind of promoting this at every turn, a lot of civil society as well, trying to use the RevCon as an opportunity to kind of raise awareness and raise momentum around this kind of ban on nuclear weapons that they’re seeking to achieve. And that kind of dynamic, at least to me, was an interesting one to note through the conference.

Alex Bell: Here I might disagree. I am a little worried that there are countries that see the TPNW as an alternative or perhaps a better system. And I’ll be frank, I think the TPNW is legally flawed. I think there are three members of the TPNW in active violation of the treaty, and no one seems to care about that. Unfortunately, when I was talking about there’s no magic wand to fixing the NPT, there’s also no shortcut to a world without nuclear weapons. The TPNW sought to sort of get ahead of what they saw as… I understand the frustration that sort of led to thinking that we needed to take this step.

But it has different measures for different countries. I’ve heard a massive proponent of the treaty once said they didn’t expect a nuclear-armed state to ever join. And my general take on that is, well, then what are you doing this for? I’m actually trying to figure it out. And, at the end of the day, that a full-out ban, a successful ban, that’s the end of a process. Not something you start in the middle. We still haven’t gotten universalization of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. We still don’t have a verifiable, and we have a treaty. We call it the material cutoff treaty. That’s not actually even a thing yet we haven’t even negotiated how to stop the means of production, much less how to figure out verification at extremely low levels of nuclear weapons. That’s not to say there’s not a solution there. But you don’t just sort of put the cart before the horse, but the hard work will be hard.

I support countries that have now thrice over committed to a world without nuclear weapons, which pretty much every TPNW member has, which is through the NPT, through a nuclear weapons free zone, and through the TPNW. Great. That’s a fantastic sort of demonstration of a commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. But the hard work, all the other measures that I talked about, the verification, the bans on testing, the bans on production, that needs to be done too. And it can’t be done by fiat. It can’t be done with a signature on a piece of paper. It’s hard work that will require all states contributing, most importantly, nuclear-armed states. And if they’re not in the conversation, then it’s not actually working.

And I think you see that demonstrated through things like the Ottawa Treaty that were used as an example. And that treaty is under duress.

Mark Leon Goldberg: This is the landmine treaty that you’re referring to.

Alex Bell: The landmine treaty, exactly. It was used as sort of an example of like, here, this worked, and now we’re going to do it again. It’s not working. Countries are withdrawing from that treaty because they were prioritizing their security and the security they think they gain from having landmines above that international agreement. We’ve got to change the way we’re doing security and figure out what replaces nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence and all of those other arms control measures I talked. And then you’re in a place where you can say, “Now there’s a ban.” A ban that doesn’t involve the nuclear armed states or the nuclear weapons states, is that actually a ban?

Mark Leon Goldberg: Looking ahead the next weeks or months or years even, what will suggest to you how strong the NPT is when faced with the realities of the world today and the geopolitical challenge that we have with modernizing American and Russian forces, China rapidly increasing its nuclear weapons, other countries making moves. How will you know if the NPT is holding up?

Alex Bell: Overall, I’d like to see countries reject despair, reject the idea that, you know, or even the sort of like trope that like it’s three failures, that’s three strike, it’s obviously not working. It’s our job to make it work. So, reject defeatism, pessimism, fatalism, as Barack Obama called it in his famous Prague speech that fatalism is a deadly adversary. So, reject the idea that we can’t do better. Of course we can do better. But part of that is on regular people demanding answers from their elected leaders. Nobody calls the Hill asking about, “Hey, why did the U.S. object to the consensus on NPT? I am concerned that we were putting a regional tension issue above an international treaty.”

Nobody calls and says that. If they did, a member of Congress might actually feel the motivation to get smart on these issues again. Because the lack of knowledge on Capitol Hill, and I’m guessing in legislatures around the world, pretty low at this point because people aren’t engaging in this conversation.

Mark Leon Goldberg: The lack of media attention, too. I was one of two American journalists, as far as I could tell, they’re covering RevCon, a lot of Japanese journalists, but just two of us Americans, as far as I can tell.

Alex Bell: The bulletin was there, too. But it is something that people have assumed is working. So, they don’t have to pay attention to it. And unfortunately, now we’re kind of seeing in real time what happens when these institutions, when these agreements that we’ve created together start to crumble and maybe are more ephemeral than we thought there were. But I actually truly believe that the overwhelming number of states parties to the NPT believe it is worth having and it’s worth preserving. What we can’t figure out right now is the best way to do it. So that means, you know, I don’t know how to be flip about it. It’s just like we’ve got to try harder.

The number of states that actually sent a senior-level official to that conference in the opening days is pretty low. And that concludes the United States. Having a lower-level delegation sort of indicates to the world where this lies in terms of importance to your country. But it’s also, again, legislatures asking administrations questions, administrations being held to account by the media, which is, as you said, an increasingly limited number of organizations that actually ask these questions. But overall, I think, not accepting that getting, you know, failing to get 191 countries to agree to the exact same amount of language at the exact same time is some indication that, oh, I guess that whole trying to keep proliferation from happening is over.

And that whole attempt to try to bring down numbers, like we’ve been through rough patches before. We can weather this. We just need to be committed to weathering it. And I do think that TPNW supporters can play a huge role there of simply keeping this issue active in the public debate, in the international debate, to say clearly and definitively, as TPNW countries do, that they expect more progress, and really put their, you know, sort of diplomatic shoulder into it. I think that would be extremely helpful in supporting the larger structures that we need in place to actually achieve that goal of a world without nuclear weapons.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Alex, thank you so much for your time. This is really helpful.

Alex Bell: Yeah.

There are certain events or scenarios that, should they unfold, would threaten large swaths of humanity across multiple continents. These are often referred to as Global Catastrophic Risks for their potential to disrupt lives and livelihoods on a massive — even planetary — scale.

The consequences of these risks are terrible, involving unimaginable levels of death and destruction. But while these dangers are very real, they are not inevitable. They can be prevented.

Global Dispatches is partnering with the Global Challenges Foundation for a series of episodes examining how to guard against these catastrophic risks. The Foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of global catastrophic risks and strengthening global governance to address them. Global Challenges Foundation’s 2026 Global Catastrophic Risks report outlines five of the biggest risks facing humanity today. You can find this report here.

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This is the fifth episode of this series, which has included episodes on specific risks like nuclear weapons, ecological collapse, catastrophic climate change — and even near-Earth asteroids.

In today’s episode, w are joined by the former prime minister of Sweden, Stefan Löfven, and Jens Orback, a strategic advisor to the Global Challenges Foundation, for a wide-ranging conversation about how we can better reform our politics and diplomacy to confront global catastrophic risks.

Managing global catastrophic risks requires systems of global governance, and in this episode we discuss how we can build our common defense against these challenges.

This episode is freely available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg: The Global Challenges Foundation released this report earlier in the year on global catastrophic risks, identifying five specific risks that have the potential to profoundly disrupt humanity. Could you just briefly discuss and describe what those risks were and why they were included in this report?

Jens Orback: Yes, we have concentrated on global catastrophic risks, and I guess later on we will talk about the gaps when it comes to handling them. But we have identified them, first of all, the man-made risks, the risk that we have developed since the Second World War, I would say — it’s the climate change, it’s biodiversity loss, it’s weapons of mass destruction, and it’s also AI coming up, not the least AI in military use. Then we also sometimes mention these more natural disasters, like super volcanoes or asteroids.

But these four that I mentioned are the one that we think are most urgent to handle. You can also divide them in ongoing risks or risks that could suddenly come, like weapons of mass destruction or pandemics. Some of the risks are more threshold characters like climate change and biodiversity, and maybe you need different tools to also handle these risks.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Stefan, I wanted to ask you, aside from their potential catastrophic impact to life on Earth, what to you binds these distinct risks together?

Stefan Löfven: Well, except for the fifth, the asteroids are all man-made, but they all demand a global cooperation to deal with. And today we have too much of nationalism, too much short-sighted decisions. So, we need to be much more aware. So, this report is a very important task in bringing up these risks because we need to be more aware. Leaders need to be more aware, take more long-term decisions than today. So, man-made and it demands global cooperation.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Stefan, I wanted to stick with you. You just identified one of the challenges in getting effective multilateral cooperation around these distinct risks, being that they require long-term thinking. As a former politician, a longtime prime minister of Sweden, presumably you were often having to balance short-term decision-making for immediate political impact versus long-term planning for some eventuality that might occur, but if it occurs, would be devastating. How would you balance those two?

Stefan Löfven: Well, one way is to prepare for catastrophes. We have to prepare the government and the authorities and everybody, we have to exercise in handling catastrophes. That is one thing. But in terms of, let’s say, for example, climate and environment, what needs to be done is to see the long-term effects if we do too little too slow and make sure that the population is aware of that, and that we can deal with it if we cooperate. And that we must make the transformation that is needed on, let’s say, climate must be made visible to people that this is something good. We’re bringing down pollution.

We’re stopping the warming of the planet. And we’re building a new, better society. So, giving people more or feel more comfortable, it’s now being described almost always as something negative, dangerous, costly, difficult. And I think it’s important as leaders to turn that into more of a win-win. Yes, we have to do that. Otherwise, the cost will be much, much, much higher. But as we go along in doing and dealing with these risks, we’re also building a better societies, new technology, new jobs, future welfare. I think that combination is very important.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Jens, you mentioned earlier you’re a former professional communicator. To what extent do you believe that communicating this to the global public has been challenging thus far, the idea of sort of preparing them for long-term risks and encouraging publics to support decision-making and tough decisions in the here and now to guard against these future risks?

Jens Orback: Well, I think that is a very tough challenge, actually. If you look, for instance, in the period when Stefan was prime minister, and we had this COVID-19, then you could see and you can sense the fear. And they took actions that were so strong, actually saying you cannot meet more than six people, you cannot go in restaurants, you cannot go in collective traffic. But with these long-range risks, the climate change is taking a step at a time, and you cannot really see it, and we have a cold day here in Stockholm for the diversity loss, it’s very tricky to communicate.

We had the same, I think, challenge with smoking. You didn’t see the harm when you were 15 or 20 smoking. And I discussed that with my four kids. So we have to be scorned to see how what we do today will affect us tomorrow. And I think that is a very, very, very big challenge. And going back to your thoughts about how the nation state should act, I think the nation state, except for when Stefan was prime minister, of course, it’s a rather selfish unity. When negotiating with other states, it concerns mostly about its own interests.

I’m looking over the Baltic Sea here, and we have many countries around, but we have a sea in the middle that is actually dying because we cannot agree on how to do it, and that all, maybe, has to offer a little bit. So, I think this selfishness and this short range is a very tough challenge that we have to deal with.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And on that point of balancing kind of national interests with the kind of global good and collective good, Stefan, as you sort of survey the international system, what both strengths and deficiencies do you see that would enable the creation of effective systems of global governance to confront these global catastrophic threats that we’re discussing?

Stefan Löfven: We have to get over this purely nationalistic thinking. And we’re in a time when we need global cooperation more than ever, I would say, not least because of these very serious risks that are presented in this report. But at the same time, it seems as if leaders think that the best message they can bring to the population is that I’m thinking only about this country, and we are the center of the world. We just have to be very selfish. That’s how we get along. And that has been successful in winning elections.

But what we need to do, what we must do, is to present both the real risks. That’s bad enough. But not only pollution and loss of biodiversity, but also the economic losses that we will suffer because we need to tell people, if we reach a warming about, say, three, four degrees, well, that will be the real cost. Today in Sweden, we talk mostly about the price on gasoline and diesel. And I do understand people’s worry, but that can be dealt with supporting people financially. But we have to say, well, if we do nothing now, reducing pollution, the real cost will come in 10, 15, 20 years.

That’s the cost we need to be worried about. So, we can do this, if we do it together within a country, if we do it together, cooperate globally, we can deal with this. And as I said, again, it’s a win-win. We bring down pollution, we save biodiversity, and we’re building a better society with a new job. So, that combination, I think, is crucial for people to see an alternative path.

Mark Leon Goldberg: I suppose a question to you is whether or not that optimism is warranted based in part on your experience as co-chair of the high-level advisory board on effective multilateralism. You and the former president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, co-chaired this advisory board, which is one of the many elements that sort of fed into the UN’s effort to revitalize itself in the context of its 80th anniversary.

What did you learn about our systems of global governance to confront some of these global catastrophic threats and how they might be themselves revised and strengthened?

Stefan Löfven: Well, it was obvious, and it was also called for, not least by the Secretary General, that UN to be reformed. There are too many obstacles within the system. It’s not efficient enough. So that is ongoing. And I was very glad when the General Assembly adopted the Pact for the Future because what it showed was that nations are aware of a serious situation and that we need to reform the United Nations. I hope that really continues. But one of the subjects that we dealt a lot with was the global financial architecture, because it is crucial that we can allocate enough financial resources to do what we need to do to invest in bringing down pollution, for example.

So that awareness, I think, is there. I hope it is ongoing that we need to bring more financial resources into the global financial architecture, meaning, among other things, bringing more of private capital. Some say we don’t have enough financial resources to deal with what we want to do, which that is wrong. The world’s problem is not financial resources. It is the distribution. And we can invest a lot more resources to handle acute crisis, environmental crisis or other crisis, not least to help the developing part of the world to not choose the path that we have taken, the richer part have taken using oil and gas and fossil fuels in general to enrich ourselves. But they need the support to avoid that trap.

We can’t just say, don’t do what we did. That’s not good enough. We need to invest a lot more. So more money, but also more democratic decision-making in the global financial architecture. I think that is a crucial part of the solution.

Mark Leon Goldberg: More money and more investments are often, as you said, a crucial part of the solution. They’re not sufficient, though, in my view, and having covered the UN for many years, you also need that political will as well. And the two tend to work hand in hand, more money and more political will to advance effective multilateral solutions. So, Jens, what sort of opportunities do you see in the coming months or years in which that kind of political will might be catalyzed in ways to help build structures or systems to prevent against things like nuclear risk, like out-of-control AI, like ecological collapse or catastrophic climate change?

Jens Orback: Well, I think often when sometimes it’s successful, it’s not because they are forced, but if there is an interest, and especially if there is a win-win. So I think I think meeting a lot of investors, I think they have an interest of investing. Their capital is restless. So I think investing in what we call the South Fair is actually of a great interest for investors.So, what we can do from a political angle is to maybe have some assurance and try to develop the capital market for these kinds of investments. I think if we can scale that up, there will be self-ridden interest in these kinds of investments.

And I think the return will be very good, actually. And I can also see that the IMF and the World Bank are working with this voluntarily investment instead of trying to take it from the development budget.

Mark Leon Goldberg: It’s interesting that both of you now have identified the global South as the potential place where these kinds of solutions that are guarding against threats that are global in nature may emerge and be catalyzed. Stefan, why do you believe that is?

Stefan Löfven: I mean, it’s quite simple to see that if we can build a world where everybody is well off, let’s say we have, is it some 700, 800 million people living in really extreme poverty, and some are living in not extreme poverty, but still in poverty, and if we can invest, bringing these people also into decent level of living, that would mean a good thing for them, but also for the world economy. Because they would also be able to contribute in the economy, not only the local and the national, but because we’re so integrated around the world between countries and regions, that would mean that the world economy would grow. So, this is a clear win-win situation.

And I think we should be able to visualize it more in numbers so that people see also in the richer countries that, “Hey, this is a good thing. This is really a win-win. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s a win-win game.” And that is something we need to underline much, much more.

Jens Orback: I think it is also a development on the knowledge we have and about the systems that we are part of. I didn’t know that I was connected to the ice sheet of Greenland, ice or fresh water, or deep sea or forest, and all these kind of parts in our Earth system, our planetary commons that decide how we can live our life here on Earth. But the more I know about it, the more responsibility I think I’m feeling. So, we as humans, we also have to take this science seriously. And sometimes we have a hard time to take it in and to adjust to it because it’s such a big system that we have to learn about.

But it’s very much connected to our daily life, our production, our consumption. And I think the big challenge is, can we adjust again? And humanity seem to be very good at adjusting, but here we have a very big challenge to adjust to. And we have to listen to science. and we are working a lot at the GCF with this science policy interface. So, that is something that I would like to bring to the table here.

Stefan Löfven: I think it’s important to make it visible and comprehensible for people. So, in terms of… now I’m talking climate and biodiversity, and environment. What we did as government and what leaders need to do is to decide on a long-term goal. And then your short term goals, you break it up. So, you see what needs to be done in the transportation sector, in the construction sector, in the industry sector. And then you make it more and more clear, more and more concrete. And then, of course, you have to add a political decision to support all this, be it supporting individuals for a limited time because otherwise the cost would be too high, the cost of living.

So one, you have to have a very clear long-term goal, but then break that up to make it visible. This is what we’re going to do the next five years. But we’re also pointing the whole time at 2040, 2045 or 2050, whatever countries choose. This is the main goal. This is where we’re going. And we’re going there together and we’re helping one another.

Mark Leon Goldberg: I suppose my key question then is how does one reform the multilateral system to be better at using those kind of near-term or medium-term inflection points towards advancing to a long-term goal. For example, I’m talking to you a few blocks from the United Nations right now where they are discussing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. One of the key issues in the report, one of the key risks was nuclear risk. But it appears that delegates to this conference at the UN are too focused in the very short-term crises of the here and now, getting bogged down on the situation in Iran, for example, than kind of having that mindset of adjusting their thinking towards long-term solutions.

Jens Orback: I have a colleague who is the president there at the NPT conference, and it’s not so positive. I still think it’s very important that they meet. But maybe the outcome of some of these ongoing conferences, and then I talk about the COP, the Convention on Climate, we could see then that many, many countries were a little bit fed up that they couldn’t discuss the phase out of fossil fuel, for instance. And so, they decided to meet here in April in Santa Marta in Colombia and came up with different ideas on how to encourage investment in renewables and other things, just to start to talk to them.

So maybe some of these countries are a little bit fed up with having to have anonymously decision-making, and they can be an alliance of the willing. So, I think we can see here that there are countries that would like to go a little bit faster than can be done at the conference like the NPT, for instance.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Stefan, Jens’ example kind of strikes me as a trend I’ve seen around the UN these past several years, which is the proliferation of mini-lateralism or multilateralisms as opposed to looking towards one big overarching multilateral goal or system or solution to a specific problem. Do you see kind of the proliferation of these kinds of alliances of the willing or coalitions of the willing as one way forward to creating systems to confront these global catastrophic threats?

Stefan Löfven: Yes, I do in the sense that we need both. So, we need a stable, real multilateral system that covers us all because that is needed. But I do believe that regions, be it African Union or European Union or others, can do, and should do more. I also think that we should build more of global alliances of the willing. I mean, today, we have growing mistrust towards the United Nations and the multilateral system. And to a large extent, it has been fed by those who really want to destroy it. But there are also many other countries, many other regions that do want to keep and modernize and reform the United Nations.

So, why don’t we gather all the good forces around the world? Me, as a European, I know that we have good dialogue with Canada, with Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and others. And so, stabilize as much as we can the good forces and then reform and push the organization forward. So, yes, we can do a lot with alliances, but we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. We need a United Nation, a changed reform, yes, but we do need a global organization.

Jens Orback: And adding to that, I think one of the purposes of Santa Marta is not to take all the decisions for a long time by themselves, but perhaps coming back to the COP process. Maybe also the European Union can be seen as a very good example. It’s built actually on soft power. You can be a member because you get a lot of benefits when it comes to trade and open borders, and so on. And then some countries can go a little faster. They could have a monetary system together or do something, and then the others come after. So, I don’t want to put one of the solutions against the others.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Is there any other question I didn’t ask or point you wanted to make before we wrap up?

Stefan Löfven: We need to keep on talking about the positive opportunities, not only the dangers. We need to be aware, but we also need to show the other side of it and that we can come out so much stronger. We need to avoid the risks, otherwise, the future for ourselves, but not least our grandchildren or the generations that are not even born. And we want them to say that, at last, our generation understood the risk. We understood what we needed to do and we did it. We don’t want them to say that we didn’t even understand that this was dangerous.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Stefan and Jens, thank you so much for your time. This was really interesting.

Jens Orback: Thank you.

Stefan Löfven: Thank you.

But the Trump administration’s retreat from the global health architecture built for precisely this kind of emergency has made that task harder. In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, Mark Leon Goldberg and Anjali Dayal discuss how American attacks on the WHO and other key nodes of our global defenses against disease outbreaks have made this particular Ebola outbreak more difficult to contain than it ought to be. Later in the show, they discuss the newest entrant in the race for UN Secretary-General — and whether we can expect more candidates to throw their hats in the ring.

A whole lot of multilateralism goes into stopping an Ebola outbreak. Vaccines are developed and deployed by Gavi—the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations. Disease surveillance is often conducted by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which has developed sophisticated networks for tracking diseases of all sorts. The World Health Organization coordinates it all, including between national health authorities and international experts and aid workers who are trained in taking the kind of action required to contain an outbreak before it spreads internationally.

You may have seen our recent three-part series, Before the Outbreak, which describes how disease surveillance and outbreak prevention work. The upshot is that when local and international health officials, experts, and responders work together in a coordinated way, an uncontrolled outbreak can be prevented.

And when it works, it works!

It did not get much media attention at the time, but back in December I wrote about the remarkable speed with which the previous Ebola outbreak in the DRC was brought under control. But that piece ended with a warning: unless these platforms are adequately supported, their ability to repeat this kind of success is far from assured.

We are now seeing the consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to pull away from the systems that prevent deadly outbreaks like Ebola.

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An asteroid impact is what is known as a “high-impact, low-probability event.” It probably won’t happen, but if it does, it would be really bad. How bad? If an asteroid of about 100 meters impacted Earth, it would carry energy several thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. An asteroid larger than a kilometer could wipe out civilization itself.

The chances of that happening are remote — but they are greater than zero. So, about a decade ago, two UN entities — the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, or UNOOSA — established a planetary defense system to guard against this risk. This includes a network of observatories that monitor the skies for potentially dangerous asteroids and a network of space agencies ready to respond to threats should one be detected.

This system works. We know that because it was tested.

In late 2024, an observatory in Chile identified a potentially threatening asteroid that could strike Earth in 2032. The UN-backed network was alerted, and scientists around the world quickly studied the size and trajectory of the asteroid, known as 2024 YR4. Meanwhile, a group of 20 space agencies with planetary defense programs met under UN auspices to discuss how to respond. Further calculations determined that the asteroid was smaller than initially thought, and therefore not likely to become a threat. But this experience was the first real-world test of how a system of international cooperation would respond to a potentially dangerous asteroid. It is a lesson in global governance — and how efforts to guard against global catastrophic risk can go right.

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To discuss the potential consequences of an asteroid impact, and how we have built a system of planetary defense to guard against this risk, I am joined by Romana Kofler, program management officer at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and Anja Olin-Pape, head of programs at the Global Challenges Foundation.

We kick off by discussing the ways in which an asteroid impact could disrupt life on Earth and cause mass destruction, before turning to a longer conversation about how international cooperation and global governance have given us the tools to prevent an asteroid impact — and the catastrophe that would entail.

Today’s episode is produced in partnership with the Global Challenges Foundation. The foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of global catastrophic risks and strengthening global governance to address them. The Global Challenges Foundation’s 2026 Global Catastrophic Risks report outlines five of the biggest risks facing humanity today, including an asteroid colliding with earth, the topic of this episode. You can find the report here.

Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Anja, I wanted to kick off with you. An asteroid impact is what’s known as a high-impact, low-probability event. What do we mean by that?

Anja Olin Pape: High-impact, low-probability events are a special kind of risk. We know them quite familiarly through our recent pandemic experience. It could also be certain climate disasters, tipping points, or even volcanic eruptions. So, things that have low likelihood of happening, but when or if they do, they impact our lives in a really great way.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Romana, I wanted to ask you, what would the impact of an asteroid be for people on Earth? Like, what do we know about the science behind what an impact might entail?

Romana Kofler: Well, we know a lot about the science of asteroids because we have since decades, through space agencies and the work globally, improved our capacities to observe asteroids, so to detect, track them, to find them. Every planetary defender saying is, you have to find asteroids before they find us. So, to put this into perspective in terms of what could an asteroid impact entail or what would be the consequences, objects, asteroids around 10 meter in size, for example, can cause some local damage.

A 40-meter asteroid could already cause a city-wide damage. If you recall the 2013 event over Chelyabinsk, a city in the Russian Federation, that was a 20-meter asteroid, and it resulted in a shockwave, shattering windows, damaged buildings, and several people were injured. So, the asteroids that are around 50 to 60 meters wide, and those are still the most difficult to detect, especially if they come from behind the sun, they can really cause damage that if it’s a populated area, we would aim to avoid.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, it really seemingly comes down to both the size of the asteroid and the location of where it impacts Earth?

Romana Kofler: Exactly. For example, over 100 years ago, the Tunguska event, which occurred on 30th June, 1908, over Siberia near Tunguska River, there was an asteroid estimated to be around 60 meters wide, and it exploded in the air, flattening around about 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian Forest. This was the largest known asteroid ever in recorded history. And if it happens over remote wilderness, like it did in 1908, with millions of trees flattened, humanity sort of survives. But if it happens over a city, that’s a different question.

And that’s why within the United Nations, member states already in the late 1990s, mandated the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to strengthen preparedness and international collaboration in case of an asteroid impact. Because only through global coordinated efforts can we do something about it. It is not complex global shock that only pertains to one country or one region. It really requires international collaboration.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Anja, this episode is part of a series on global catastrophic risks that include risks like nuclear weapons or ecological collapse. And what to me, I suppose, makes this particular interesting, other than the way in which it captures the imagination in certain ways, is how there’s no villains you could point to that might cause this. This is truly an exogenous threat to humanity.

Anja Olin Pape: It is really also a unifying risk in that sense that there is global cooperation that really is unparalleled in other fields. And I think that is largely due to that this is actually a unifying threat towards humanity as a whole, rather than a threat with vested interests or, as you say, villains on the other side of the table. It’s a truly global catastrophic risk.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Now, Romana, I think you hinted this before, and Anja just hinted this as well, but I think because there’s something apolitical about an asteroid strike, there has been, over the years, the creation of a system of international cooperation and global governance to guard against this catastrophe. Can you walk listeners through what that system entails?

Romana Kofler: Yes, we’re talking about planetary defense, right? So, how the international community monitors asteroid threats, how warnings are issued, and what would actually happen if a dangerous objects were found on a collision course with Earth. And as I mentioned earlier, the third United Nations Conference on Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space here in Vienna, that resulted in the end declaration, one of the recommendations was strengthen preparedness in case of an asteroid impact.

This led to the committee establishing an action team and working on recommendations. What would this governance or preparedness regime against a potential asteroid impact entail? And through negotiations and through experts discussing what is actually needed to put operational mechanisms in place, in 2013, the Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Space established two mechanisms. One is the International Asteroid Warning Network, which comprises observatories all around the world. And the second one is Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, or SMPAG in short.

So, the IAWN is sort of the eyes and ears of planetary defense. It tracks nearest objects, it calculates orbits, impact probabilities, it estimates potential impact effects, but it also issues warnings. While on the other hand, SMPAG is comprised of space agencies and focuses on response options. So it would prepare international mitigation strategies to reflect a potential asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So essentially, you have this group of networked observatories that communicate with each other and are dedicated to monitoring space for asteroids that might potentially hit Earth, on the one hand, that monitoring system. And then you have a group of space agencies that have a platform for coordinating how they might respond if one of those networks in the observatory identify as a potential threat.

Romana Kofler: Yes. And the Office for Outer Space Affairs works with both. So, we act as a secretary to Space Mission Plan Advisory Group. And in case there’s an object discovered, which would have a 1% chance of collision course with Earth within the next 20 years, the International Asteroid Warning Network would issue a notification to the Office for Outer Space Affairs. And we have a unique mandate to disseminate this information to the United Nations member states. So, all of them.

The mandate comes from General Assembly. And the rationale is information sharing to ensure that all countries, particularly those that do not have capacity in this area, are informed and are prepared. And we have another program of our office called UN SPIDER for Disaster Management and Emergency Response. And this program bridges the space and civil protection societies, and works a lot with countries that would need to boost preparedness in this area in terms of capacity building.

So, in short, it’s about mapping asteroids as a natural disaster to ensure that countries who do not have capacities or certain understanding yet in this area treat asteroids under the protocols that would pertain to natural disasters.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, you had this system that had been built up over the years to both monitor space and prepare a response. Should those monitors indicate some potential impact of an asteroid at a predetermined size, it had to be like over a 1% chance of actually striking Earth, that’s when this system would trigger into action. And then, Anja, in 2024 and 2025, that system was triggered. Can you explain what’s known as the 2024 YRW incident?

Anja Olin Pape: Basically, one of these above 1% risks were identified, and a whole series of actions were taken to really determine the actual risk of this potential asteroid hitting Earth, IR₄. And what is so incredibly fascinating to me is that we have managed to build this kind of system that’s in place once the risk is identified, where we have this anticipatory approach with a really joint and global monitoring system and early warning action, where countries come together and work across borders to anticipate responses to these risks, which is really unparalleled in any other domain and has a fascinating threshold as well.

This 1% risk, the above 1% risk is really quite impressive if we compare it to other domains where we see, for example, now in climate and tipping points that these really critical current systems in the Atlantic have an above 50% risk of collapsing, where we don’t have any similar action and response mechanisms, even though the impacts would be devastating across the globe with very cold weather in the entire northern hemisphere and disruption to the tropical brain system. So, I think it’s really worth noting this system that we have built up and which was exemplified by last year’s events.

Mark Leon Goldberg: I think that point is worth emphasizing, though, that whereas this system of planetary defense is intended to guard against a 1% risk of total catastrophe, it works and it’s in place at that very low threshold, whereas other risks that have higher potential, the defenses against them, the methods of international cooperation are not quite as robust, which again, I think speaks to the unique, almost apolitical nature of planetary defense.

Anja Olin Pape: It is worth highlighting. And I think what we from the Global Challenges Foundation see is that many times the biggest threat is not the risk or the hazard itself, but our failure to govern and act on it. I mean, an asteroid is only a catastrophe if we fail to act. And László Szombatfalvy, who was the founder of the Global Challenges Foundation, really founded the foundation with a simple idea that the biggest threats to humanity come from our inability to deal with the global catastrophic risks effectively.

And I think the asteroid story is really a rare case where that sentence sort of becomes a story of hope rather than a warning.

Romana Kofler: With the 2024 YR₄, it was a real-world stress test of the whole information sharing system. And what UNOOSA Director Aarti Holla-Maini often says, “Okay, we practiced this, but this was the real thing.” And she serves as the principal advisor on space matters, the United Nations Secretary General, and was drafted in a memo while I was working with the International Asteroid Warning Network on notification to member states. So, it did work.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Yeah, walk us through play by play. Where was the and how was the 2024 YR₄ asteroid first identified, and what happened?

Romana Kofler: It was first identified during the routine near-Earth object screening of the universe. So, on 27th December 2024, it was discovered by the Atlas Observatory in Chile. And it was performing a routine survey of the night sky. And by January 2025, calculations showed that this asteroid had a 1.3% chance impacting the Earth in December of 2032.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So slightly above that threshold.

Romana Kofler: Exactly. And this was for the first time ever since the existence of IAWN and SMPAG, these two global mechanisms that work in the area of near-subject and planetary defense, in the area of information sharing, that this notification was actually shared and distributed to the United Nations member states. So, immediately when this object was discovered and classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid, the International Asteroid Warning Network called its observatories to perform further observations.

And that is how the 1.3% chance of impact was calculated and also verified by three independent calculation platforms.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And after the impact probability was verified, what happened next?

Romana Kofler: Well, after this was verified, obviously, we had to first, through our direct channels to the United Nations Secretary General, our director informed the executive office, the Secretary General. We obviously were aware that this could be big in the media. The International Asteroid Warning Network issued the notifications we disseminated to member states, but also the International Asteroid Warning Network made this public. I mean, especially nowadays in the era of social media, it’s really important that we provide this information as soon as possible, also publicly available as a verified source of information and to avoid any misinterpretations or misunderstanding or panic.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And at some point in this process, and please tell me when, that SMPAG, that organization or collective, I should say, that group of space agencies that coordinate how to respond to potential near-Earth asteroid impacts snapped into action. What did that process look like? And how did they plan for potentially preventing a direct impact to Earth?

Romana Kofler: So, Space Mission Plan Advisory Group, or SMPAG, actually carries out hypothetical exercises to test its capabilities to understand what each space agency and our currently 20 space agencies that are members of SMPAG bring to the table. What are their capacities and how this can be merged into them providing great advice for a potential mitigation mission.

So SMPAG also, in parallel with the Office for Outer Space Affairs, receives the notification by IAWN. SMPAG convened, looked at the size of an asteroid. At the time, there were still estimates between 40 and 90 meters in size. Same page only starts developing mitigation option advice when an object is 50 meters or above. And a few weeks later, the James Webb Telescope, which is a space-based telescope, With the help of its observations, it was determined that the 2024 YR₄ is actually 60 meters in size. So, similar to Tunguska, for example.

So, the SMPAG convened and negotiated or discussed potential mitigation options. However, it was not yet the case to really take any official action in terms of providing advice to member states. SMPAG and IAWN both regularly inform the scientific and technical subcommittee of the main committee on their actions. And SMPAG decided to wait so that the observations are further refined in order to take any action. But as you know, this then did not happen since the asteroid fell off the risk course.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, at some point, there was this asteroid that was determined to be 60 meters and that was also determined to have a greater than 1% chance of impacting Earth. But there were further calculations that reduced the probability below 1%. Is that right?

Romana Kofler: Exactly.

Mark Leon Goldberg: In theory, what would be some of the options available to space agencies working in coordination through that SMPAG platform to prevent an asteroid that it is determined will or might impact Earth at higher probabilities? What can space agencies actually do to protect the planet at that point?

Romana Kofler: Well, there are several possibilities and several technologies available, but only one has actually been tested. And you have probably heard of the DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission in 2022, that successfully altered an asteroid’s orbit. So, that means it was the first time that humankind managed to change an orbit of a celestial body. And follow-up ground-based observations and space-based showed that the orbit has changed for about 30 minutes. So that was a test of a kinetic impactor.

So, they crashed a spacecraft into a moonlight of an asteroid and changing its orbit. There are other technologies that have not been tested, such as, for example, Ion Beam, or as a last resort, there are models for nuclear explosive device. But obviously, this option would entail a lot of political and legal considerations given the Outer Space Treaty and the international space law that prohibits placement of nuclear devices in space.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Anja, taking a step back now, a couple of years removed from the 2024 YR₄ incident, what does it suggest to you about our mechanisms for global cooperation and global governance on planetary defense against near-Earth asteroid impacts?

Anja Olin Pape: I think it really showcases also this special place that space has within our minds, body and culture. I mean, it’s almost like a physical reaction to imagine these kinds of asteroids hitting Earth and our ability to now also derail them from their trajectories or orbits. I mean, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I think this podcast is probably the closest that I’ll ever get. But I think it really showcased something about our ability to come together as a species and a global community to deal with threats that are external. And for me, I would really like to see that we could take those learnings and bring them into other domains of risk. And I think one of the most fascinating things about YR4 is that we stress tested this system and that it actually worked.

And that there were a few things that were really sort of crucial in those mechanisms to guide the responses. There were sort of pre-agreed thresholds. You didn’t have to sit down and start negotiating what kind of impact, what kind of size, what kind of probability are we determining as a risk at this point. That there were these independent verification mechanisms where multiple actors were checking each other’s numbers, which creates also trust in a system that’s quite disaggregated in the information sharing above not only targeting the superpowers, but really sort of engaging all member states in the UN.

So that we have learned that the system of governance around asteroid actually works and that we have managed as a global collective to develop a system that is anticipatory, not reactive, that exists even before the threat really materializes. But also that prevention really needs lead time, that it is important for these mechanisms to be able to have the time to figure out the responses and build the capacity to prevent the catastrophes from happening. And these are, of course, all learnings that we would very much like to take into other domains, both nuclear, but also, of course, climate and environmental degradation, where preventative work is maybe not visible and maybe not the sexy response to these kinds of catastrophes. But really, really important in order to deal with other risks that have much higher probability and impact on humankind.

Romana Kofler: I would say, you know, deflection missions, this takes years or decades of preparation, right? So, early detection, international coordination and agreed protocols in this respect are essential. But also, what you mentioned, Anja, this inspirational side to the universe or to outer space. I’m very pleased that in 2029, we will mark the International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defense on the occasion of the close approach of asteroid Apophis, which will pass very close to Earth.

I mean, so close within the geostationary orbit or at around 33,000 kilometers from Earth that it will be visible with a naked eye under the dark and quiet skies in many parts across the world. And this will really be an opportunity also for the citizens of our planet to engage more with the science of asteroids, how unique they tell a story about the origins of our universe, and also an opportunity to inform more about what is actually being done to prevent a potential impact. So, through international collaboration, through the existing mechanisms that were put in place through the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. And we’ll have a chance to explore and more also in the 2029 international year.

Anja Olin Pape: I think just for the context of governance around asteroids, I think it’s important to note that it doesn’t exist in isolation, that it also depends a lot on the broader space governance environment, which is becoming more contested and more congested and unstable. We see now with AI, with nuclear developments and with satellite clusters and private actors that we have gone from what is basically a two-lane street with two types of cars to a very congested motorway with many different actors in space.

And that will also affect space governance in the future. And it’s something to keep an eye on to ensure and safeguard that these governance systems that we have managed to build are sort of resilient and can continue to thrive within that context.

Romana Kofler: I would definitely agree. And I’m humbled to work in this area, in the Office for Outer Space Affairs here at the United Nations as the custodian not only for space for [inaudible 00:28:50], but through its work in promoting the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. As you know, there are challenges in view of the growing space activities, especially in the areas of space traffic, how to manage space traffic, space resources, and space debris mitigation. So, there are challenges, but there are also opportunities.

And from what we see here in the diplomatic discourse within the committee on the peaceful use of outer space, the trend is to go into really operational and practical solutions. Recently, the importance of space governance, the committee established very practical mechanism, for example, Action Team on Lunar Activities Coordination or Expert Group on Space Situational Awareness, that really brings together those actors that use space data or operate satellites on a daily basis that talk to each other.

And through these kind of mechanisms, through anticipatory diplomacy, and through really building trust among member states and among particular actors that are involved in the space activities, we can make progress and we can ensure that space remains for our future generations.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Romana and Anja, thank you so much for your time. This was fascinating.

Anja Olin Pape: Thank you, Mark.

Romana Kofler: A pleasure.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me, Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive.

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Four years on, I wanted to learn more about the state of the civil war today, including how the Iran conflict is impacting Sudan. Many of the same outside forces in the Gulf that have backed various sides in Sudan’s civil war are now themselves under attack. Further, as we explored in a previous episode, rising fertilizer prices are hitting crisis-prone places like Sudan particularly hard.

My guest today is Sudan analyst Dallia Mohamed. We kick off our conversation by discussing the current trends in this war. She then explains how the Iran war is impacting Sudan’s own conflict before we have a longer discussion about what can break this cycle of violence.

The episode is freely available across all podcast listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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There is a small number of people to whom I owe my career, and one of them is Ted Turner. In 1997, he famously pledged a billion dollars to support UN causes, leading to the creation of the United Nations Foundation. The UN Foundation, in turn, was one of my key backers early in my career when I launched the first blog about the UN, UN Dispatch. I would not be doing what I do today if not for his original act of philanthropy.

I had the chance to meet him a few times over the years, including for an on-stage interview on the sidelines of a UN climate conference in Rio in 2012— still one of the highlights of my career. I don’t usually get nervous doing those sorts of things, but I think he could tell I was a little on edge, so he cracked a joke right off the bat to put me at ease. (The interview was about the pioneering children’s television series Captain Planet, which coincided with my own childhood. I made the point that I, born in 1981, was “the Captain Planet Generation.” He retorted: “Well, I was born in 1938 and I created it, so that makes me the Captain Planet Generation.”)

Ted Turner died today at the age of 87.

There are many great obituaries. But if you want the richest biography of the man, I cannot recommend more highly the six-part documentary on MAX about Ted Turner. Call Me Ted delves deeply into both his personal history and business ventures, including the founding of CNN. But for me, the most intriguing part of the documentary is its exploration of Ted Turner's deep commitment to philanthropy.

Ted Turner’s $1 billion pledge in 1997 was the single largest act of philanthropy at the time and inspired many of the other mega-donors in philanthropy today. What makes his commitment even more remarkable was that not long after his pledge, he lost a huge fortune in the AOL-Time Warner merger but still followed through on his pledge.

He was fond of saying “You can’t take it with you,” when discussing why he’d given away so much of his wealth to causes that benefit humanity. Now that he’s gone, it’s worth taking a moment to remember what a difference he made—from the founding of the UN Foundation, The Goodwill Games, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and so many other causes to benefit the global good.

Rest in Power, Ted. And thank you.

My podcast conversation with “Call Me Ted” filmmaker Keith Clarke is freely available across all podcast listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. However, if you are inspired by Ted’s story and want to support humanitarian journalism and my reporting on the UN, please back Global Dispatches with your paid subscription.

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The United States is making another push for a UN Security Council resolution to compel Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. An early draft of the resolution calls on Iran to stop imposing transit tolls, declare where it has laid mines, cease attacking ships, and more generally return the status of the strait to what it was before the war.

This all may seem reasonable. The problem, however, is twofold. First, the last time a similar resolution came to a vote, it faced a double veto by Russia and China. Both countries insisted on language condemning the U.S. and Israeli attacks and did not want to pass a resolution that might in some way justify further attacks on Iran. It’s hard to imagine this new resolution will allay those concerns.

But perhaps more importantly, even if this resolution does somehow get past those vetoes, the fact remains that Iran is insisting on keeping Hormuz closed. The resolution itself can’t open the Strait. Only Iran can. And that can only happen through direct diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran. If and when the U.S. and Iran come to an agreement, then the Security Council can step in to enforce it. This resolution will fail in its intended effect even if it passes, precisely because it represents an inversion of the proper diplomatic order of operations.

In this clip from today’s episode of To Save Us From Hell Anjali and I discuss what this draft resolution circulated by the US entails — and why it is probably doomed from the start.

Our full conversation is below the fold for our paying subscribers — we also discuss a new American effort to squeeze the UN budget even tighter and the latest from a major nuclear security meeting underway at the United Nations.

You can also access the full episode here on Substack or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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Every five years, the parties to the NPT come together for what is known as a Review Conference, in which they assess progress toward these three pillars and discuss ways to strengthen the treaty. The NPT RevCon, as it is known, is one of the major multilateral conferences on nuclear security, and it is taking place at the UN from April 27 to May 22.

Joining me to discuss the significance of this NPT Review Conference is Kelsey Davenport, Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association. We kick off with a discussion of the NPT itself and its impact over the decades, and then have a long conversation about the key storylines, diplomatic intrigues, and policy debates that will unfold over the next three weeks at the UN. Consider this episode your curtain-raiser for the most important global gathering on nuclear security of the past five years.

This episode is freely available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get podcasts.

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A few notes: This episode is produced in partnership with Ploughshares, a foundation committed to reducing and ultimately eliminating nuclear threats. I’ll have a follow-up episode at the end of the conference discussing what exactly happened during the NPT RevCon.

Also, I’ll be attending much of the RevCon in person. I’ll be serving as something of a “pool reporter,” covering this conference in support of dozens of international journalists who report on nuclear security issues and feeding them news and insights from the confab.This project is backed by the Stanley Center for Peace and Security Developing Story Project, an initiative to support, strengthen, and sustain reporting on nuclear weapons and related issues. I’m looking forward to this.

If you are around the UN, say hi. And be sure to follow our new Global Dispatches WhatsApp Channel for updates from the RevCon and other happenings around the world of the UN.

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Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Kelsey, we are speaking just at the start of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, and we’ll unpack what that means. But to kick off, can I have you explain to the audience what is the NPT, and how does it work?

Kelsey Davenport: The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty really is designed to do three things that form the bedrock of the broader non-proliferation and arms control regime.

First, it commits the states that had tested nuclear weapons prior to the negotiation of the treaty — So, the United States, the Soviet Union, now Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France, to halt the arms race and engage in negotiations on the elimination of nuclear weapons. So, essentially, it commits them to nuclear disarmament. The second aspect of the treaty is that it commits all countries that joined the treaty that did not possess nuclear weapons to refrain from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons.

So, that’s really the nonproliferation component. And it was the primary driver of the negotiations on the NPT. The United States and the Soviet Union were both concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons. And then the third aspect is that the treaty guarantees that states that join can still access nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, provided they put those programs under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. So, those are really what are referred to as the three pillars of the NPT — nuclear arms control and disarmament, nuclear nonproliferation, and access to nuclear technology for peaceful uses.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And big picture, since 1970, how has the NPT fared?

Kelsey Davenport: The NPT has been remarkably successful, particularly in preventing the spread of new nuclear-armed states. As a result of the negotiation of the NPT, a number of countries that were interested in developing nuclear weapons, that had pursued nuclear weapons-relevant research, renounced those programs and joined the treaty. The treaty has proved successful in terms of giving the IAEA access to countries, which has been detected when there has been illicit nuclear activities ongoing.

You know, the Iraq WMD program, for instance, demonstrated the importance of these types of safeguards. And the treaty has facilitated access to critical nuclear technologies that countries are using for a range of civil purposes — everything from power to the development of medical isotopes. But it’s also not without controversy. Particularly in the last decade or so, a lot of the non-nuclear weapon states have been critical of the nuclear weapon states for failing to meet their disarmament commitments, when we saw throughout the Cold War and after the Cold War, the United States and Russia in particular take significant steps to cut the size of their nuclear arsenals.

All of which was consistent with the goals of the NPT. But that progress has reversed. And now we are seeing all of the nuclear-armed states investing in new nuclear delivery systems, and some countries even expanding their nuclear arsenals. So, that period of success is now being questioned as states really are examining whether the NPT provides security benefits and whether it can actually facilitate nuclear disarmament.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And I think possibly that brings us to the review conference that kicks off at the UN, which is the opportunity for states parties to the nonproliferation treaty to review progress against the treaty and also chart a path forward to potentially strengthen it. What are some of the big issues you see coming into this RevCon? And I suppose, again, big picture, what is the significance of this particular Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference?

Kelsey Davenport: This review conference is extremely significant because it comes at a time when nuclear norms and the broader nonproliferation and disarmament architecture is under attack on multiple fronts. And, to be honest, looking at this review conference, it’s hard to see what set of issues will not be contentious and controversial. Another thing I think that’s worth noting is that this review conference comes after the previous two review conferences failed to adopt a consensus final document. And the consensus final document generally contains actions that states commit to taking to further advance the goals and objectives of the treaty.

A final document is not the only measure of success of an NPT Review Conference, but a lot of states put premium on the adoption of this document to set a roadmap for how to ensure continued implementation of the treaty. And the president of the review conference has stated that he wants to see a final consensus document adopted. But negotiating it is going to be extremely difficult given the number of issues that are likely to be contentious. First, looking at sort of the disarmament pillar, the last remaining treaty, the New START Treaty, that governed nuclear warhead numbers for Russia and the United States has expired.

There are no constraints now on the U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons programs. China is building up its nuclear warhead stockpile. All of the nuclear-weapon states are investing in new systems. These are viewed by many countries that are party to the NPT as a violation of the Article VI disarmament commitments. So, certainly, I think we’re going to see contention between the nuclear-armed states and the non-nuclear-weapon states over how to address and advance disarmament while all of these states are investing in new systems. Another contentious issue-

Mark Leon Goldberg: Can I just drill down a little bit on this disarmament issue, because in my kind of preparation for this interview and my preparation for coverage of RevCon, it is an issue that is coming up repeatedly, particularly among most of the world that is a party to the NPT that is not a nuclear weapons state. You described the three parts of the NPT treaty, disarmament being one of the three kind of legs of the stool. And this is the leg that is withering, I would venture, you know, most quickly for the reasons you described, for the fact that there is no longer any bilateral agreements between Russia and the United States on the size of their nuclear stockpiles for the fact that China is rapidly developing its nuclear weapons program.

And this is seen, at least from the diplomatic angle that I’ve reported on, as a real affront to the NPT as a whole.

Kelsey Davenport: I think a number of non-nuclear weapons states understandably feel betrayed by the nuclear weapons states continuing to invest in new nuclear weapons systems that may make the use of nuclear weapons more likely, and the broader failure of the international system to condemn aggression by nuclear weapons states. The investment in new nuclear weapons systems, the expansion of the Chinese arsenal, for instance, none of this is happening in isolation. It’s happening against the backdrop where Russia, a nuclear weapons state, waged an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.

It’s happening against the backdrop of the United States and Israel conducting illegal strikes against Iran. All of this drives questions amongst the non-nuclear weapons states about the value of the NPT in providing for their security. And it’s pushing states that typically have been proactive members in the NPT and pushing for disarmament to reconsider their relationship with nuclear weapons. And that’s why these issues are all connected and have to be viewed within this broader security environment where additional states are beginning to ask if nuclear deterrence or if some type of nuclear extended deterrent relationship with the nuclear weapons state is more advantageous than pushing for full implementation of the NPT.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, disarmament, one key contentious issue that is sure to come up during this review conference. What else do you expect?

Kelsey Davenport: The security of safeguarded nuclear facilities is going to be another issue that could likely spur contention within the review conference. In the past several years, Russia attacked safeguarded nuclear facilities in Ukraine and is illegally occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Mark Leon Goldberg: The largest in Europe.

Kelsey Davenport: The largest in Europe, yes.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And it’s come under periodic attack, which is wildly irresponsible and scary.

Kelsey Davenport: Well, it’s not just attack of the facility itself. It’s attack of the infrastructure that’s necessary to safely run the facility. I mean, continued attacks against the power lines that connect Zaporizhzhia to the grid, concerns about cooling systems. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has repeatedly raised concerns about the safety of that facility. But it’s not just Zaporizhzhia. I mean, the United States in June conducted military strikes against safeguarded nuclear facilities in Iran, despite there being no evidence that Iran had made a decision to weaponize its nuclear program.

Similar strikes against safeguarded nuclear facilities have occurred since February 28th. So, again, there is this broader question about whether the NPT can actually provide protection for safeguarded nuclear programs in these non-nuclear-weapon states. And I think we’re likely to see Iran calling for condemnation of the U.S. strikes and Ukraine wanting to see some language regarding the security implications of Russia’s illegal occupation of Zaporizhzhia.

So, again, this could become a contentious issue, particularly if states insist on specifically naming aggressors. And if Iran tries to push for language condemning the United States, the U.S., of course, is going to object to any type of language in a consensus document that directly names it. Similar to the Russian case of Ukraine, actually was the naming of Russia’s aggression against Zaporizhzhia that prevented the adoption of a final document at the 2022 NPT Review Conference. So, this is still an issue. It’s going to be an issue in this review conference.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Any other key issues that you see being particularly contentious going into this?

Kelsey Davenport: I think the states’ parties need to be taking a better look at the relationship between advancing interest in nuclear energy programs, particularly the states that want to acquire the means of producing fissile materials, so uranium enrichment or plutonium separation, as part of those programs. And that link to proliferation concerns. If you look at South Korea, for instance, South Korea recently reached an agreement with the United States that indicates U.S. support for domestic uranium enrichment in South Korea.

There’s also a very active debate going on in South Korea right now about the value of domestic nuclear weapons to deter North Korea. Similarly, it looks like the United States is going to support Saudi Arabia having some type of domestic uranium enrichment program without more intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. All of these instances raise the concern that states are going to move closer to nuclear weapons by developing the capabilities to produce fissile material as part of nuclear energy programs.

So, I think trying to affirm the importance of IAEA safeguards, trying to push for universalization of more intrusive IAEA safeguards, a mechanism known as the Additional Protocol, that should be part of this NPT review conference to ensure that states are not trying to exploit the NPT’s provisions that guarantee the peaceful uses of nuclear programs to move closer to nuclear weapons capabilities.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, you mentioned the Iran war, specifically American and Israeli attacks on nuclear sites in Iran as being a particularly potentially contentious issue at this review conference. Are there other ways that you foresee the conflict in the Middle East as seeping into the conversations at RevCon?

Kelsey Davenport: Absolutely. One critical issue that I should have mentioned before when you asked about controversy at the review conference is that there is also an active discussion in Iran right now about withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaties. And an Iranian lawmaker introduced a bill to the Iranian parliament that would necessitate withdrawal from the NPT. That measure has not been passed. It would still need to be approved by the Guardian Council.

But increasingly in Iran, the factions that are in favor of nuclear weaponization, that view the development of nuclear weapons as necessary to deter further attacks against the territory of Iran, these voices are gaining prominence. They’re gaining support. So, there is a concern that going into the NPT review conference, that during the conference itself, there’s going to be a more active debate about withdrawal from the NPT. And if Iran begins that movement, I think other states are going to be watching very closely to see what consequences Iran might face and how the international community responds to a withdrawal.

Because one important aspect, particularly related to the nonproliferation pillar of the NPT, is that a lot of the successes in the non-proliferation aspect of the broader regime have come because there was general unity in how to respond to proliferation threats. We didn’t always see the P5 states act in complete unity. But certainly, we saw a willingness to hold states accountable for violations of the NPT. We saw this in the case of North Korea. We initially saw this in the case of Iran in the lead up to the negotiations of the 2015 nuclear deal, and the Security Council passing sanctions, demonstrating that there were consequences for violations of the safeguards that are required by the NPT.

There’s no longer any guarantee that the Security Council is willing to enforce the NPT because of the divide between Europe and the United States on one side and Russia on the other. And so, there is a real risk that states may try to exploit this growing divide in order to advance nuclear programs to the cusp of weaponization while minimizing the opportunity for consequences, minimizing the costs that they might pay through sanctions and diplomatic isolation. So that’s another dynamic in the Middle East that we could see impacting the broader review conference.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Yeah, this idea that if Iran exits the NPT, it might potentially open the floodgates for others if Iran doesn’t face any meaningful consequences for exiting the NPT. What are you looking or expecting from the American delegation at the Review Conference this year?

Kelsey Davenport: It’s really hard to say how the Trump administration is going to approach the review conferences. There are indications from U.S. statements over the past six months that the United States is increasingly comfortable with the being singled out with isolation in international fora. And to me, this raises the concern that the U.S. may view the review conference as a forum for calling out activities by particular states, probably most notably China, that it views as inconsistent with the NPT. This could be about China’s buildup of its nuclear arsenal. This could be about the U.S. allegations that China has been conducting nuclear tests.

But if the U.S. decides to approach the review conference as a forum for singling out adversarial states, then it’s extremely unlikely that the review conference will be able to adopt a final document. And it’s extremely unlikely that there is going to be the productive discussion about key issues that could lead to outcomes that advance and strengthen the treaty. Another aspect I would flag is that the U.S. is now engaged in an aggressive push to expand nuclear energy, both domestically, but also how the Trump administration is seeking to sign contracts for U.S. reactor exports overseas.

But there is no indication that the Trump administration is putting a high premium on advancing safeguards and calling for more intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring verification as part of that nuclear energy push. So, there could be tension in the Review Conference between the U.S. push to expand nuclear energy while other states are also trying to push for the universalization and strengthening of safeguards.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, you mentioned a few times of the kind of challenge to getting a consensus final outcome document from this conference. And I’ve not covered an NPT RevCon in particular in the past, but I’ve covered many UN conferences that are similar process-wise. And the idea is that you have these weeks of negotiations that all lead up to this consensus document that reflects all of the things that were agreed upon at this conference and even in the weeks and months prior.

But oftentimes this outcome document, whether one exists or whether one has failed to be adopted, is like a measure of success for the conference itself. So, I suppose, Kelsey, to what extent do you see the ability of this conference to produce that consensus final outcome document, basically reflecting where countries stand on the NPT today, where they see it going in the future as being a measure of success for this conference?

Kelsey Davenport: I don’t think that the conference should solely be defined as successful or unsuccessful on the basis of a final document. Certainly, final documents are important. They can reiterate and reaffirm past commitments that states have made to strengthen the NPT and set out new actions that would advance the goals of the treaty. That blueprint for moving forward does provide a metric against which to measure states’ actions. So, certainly, there’s value to a final document.

But it’s not the only measure of success. The NPT Review Conference is an important forum for discussing and advancing mechanisms, for clarifying understandings about nuclear aspects. That still has value, even in the absence of a final document. But I do think that there’s going to be more pressure on the production of a final document at this review conference than we’ve seen in the past because it follows two review conferences where a final document has not been adopted.

A third could be perceived as diminishing support for the NPT and erosion of the NPT overall. But another challenge to getting the final document is that there appears to be some tension between states about what a final document should look like. There are states that are going to push for a robust action plan that includes more specific steps to advance all three of the pillars of the NPT. So, perhaps similar to the 2010 NPT Review Conference final document, the last time a final document was adopted, which included a set of specific actions.

I think there are other states who are going to see value in the adoption of a final document, even if it does not include a robust action plan. So, they may see value in a final document that simply reaffirms the general commitment to the NPT and puts on the back burner or waters down some of the controversies that are going to plague the conference, like whether or not to condemn attacks on nuclear facilities, whether or not to call for a halting of nuclear modernization.

So, there’s going to be some tension that the chair of the NPT Review Conference and the state parties are going to have to navigate as they consider not only the value of trying to reach that final document as a metric of success, but specifically kind of what it contains.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, can I ask you, because again, having covered so many UN conferences before, this is like an ever-present question, whether or not a watered-down agreement is better than no agreement at all, if the more ambitious agreement is not realistically adoptable — Where do you stand on that question?

Kelsey Davenport: Oh, it’s challenging. I think that there are a number of contentious issues that, if not addressed, will continue to erode the NPT regime, will continue to erode confidence in the NPT. And watering over these issues, trying to water down the controversies in favor of consensus, I think, risks contributing to that overall discontent that the NPT no longer serves security interests, that it is no longer fit for the current security environment.

So, I would be hesitant. to push for a simple final document that does not adequately attempt to address some of these broader issues. At the same time, I don’t see value in trying to single out specific states for condemnation within the NPT review conference process or final document. I don’t think that that is a worthwhile pursuit in terms of advancing the treaty. So, I would look for specific steps, perhaps even steps that states have agreed to in the past that address some of these contemporary concerns but still provide a concrete path forward as kind of the middle ground between a review conference process that tries to name and shame offenders within the regime and a final document that is kind of watered down, that contains no specific commitments or actions and simply reaffirms the treaties.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, Kelsey, thank you so much for your time. Anything else you wanted to get in before I let you go?

Kelsey Davenport: Just add that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty remains critical to preventing both the use of nuclear weapons and their proliferation. States need to approach this conference with seriousness, with a willingness to compromise, but also with innovation and flexibility. There is a pathway forward for advancing this treaty at the review conference if states are willing to negotiate and engage in good faith and look for those creative and flexible solutions.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, as always, thank you so much for your time and your expertise. This was a really helpful curtain raiser for this conference.

Kelsey Davenport: Well, thank you so much for having me.

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