The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the “glue” that holds the entire global nuclear security architecture together — but is it fraying?
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.
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.
