OPINION | VIENNA, 25 May 2026

A special report by Tariq Rauf on the collapse of the Eleventh NPT Review Conference, New York, 27 April– 22 May 2026

After four weeks of discussion, the five-yearly Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), ended without agreement. Its failure raises the question whether the NPT survives “as a meaningful instrument of disarmament, or merely as a framework for managing the permanence of nuclear weapons,” asks Tariq Rauf, an Atomic Reporters Board member, in this in-depth analysis.

On the evening of Friday, 22 May 2026, Ambassador Do Hung Viet, the President of the Eleventh Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) solemnly took his seat on the elevated podium in the cavernous UN General Assembly hall in New York and announced what many had feared for weeks: consensus could not be reached. For the third consecutive Review Conference — following the failures of 2015 and 2022 — the States parties to the most important nuclear arms control treaty in history had failed to agree on a single substantive sentence about nuclear disarmament. The NPT is entering its third consecutive decade without an agreed outcome document. The bomb, once again, had won.

That this outcome was not a surprise does not make it any less alarming. The divergences between nuclear-armed and non-nuclear-armed States were plainly visible from the Conference’s opening day on 27 April. What unfolded over four weeks — and what the documents produced during those weeks reveal with cold precision — is a story of a treaty under siege from both within and outside, hollowed out by the very States whose compliance is most essential to its survival. Responsibility for that hollowing-out is widely distributed: it belongs to Moscow and Washington in equal measure, to NATO allies which shelter behind extended deterrence while preaching disarmament, impunity of certain States’ violations of the UN Charter and international humanitarian law, and to a multilateral system that has so far been unable to hold any of them to account.

A DRAFT DESIGNED TO DISAPPOINT

Even before the final collapse, the trajectory of the draft outcome documents told a damning story. The Conference President’s penultimate draft, circulated in the small hours of Thursday 21 May, had already stripped the text of virtually every meaningful disarmament commitment. A paragraph-by-paragraph comparison circulated by me to diplomats in Vienna of the two final versions of the draft — designated CRP.2/Rev.3 and CRP.4 — makes the steady erosion visible in granular, vertiginous detail.

Urgency was deleted. The affirmation that the indefinite extension of the NPT does not mean the indefinite possession of nuclear weapons was gone. Past commitments from 1995, 2000 and 2010 were no longer reaffirmed — merely “recalled,” like something vaguely remembered from a distant past. The word “urge” directed at nuclear-armed States was softened to “call on.” The requirement for “equal” transparency by nuclear-weapon States was quietly excised. The reference to the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons” was narrowed to the consequences of “nuclear war” — as if the distinction matters to those who have already experienced a detonation.

By the time the final version, CRP.4, was circulated on Friday morning, the review process language had been further degraded. Transparency discussions with nuclear-armed States — the one area where genuine progress had seemed possible — were moved from open plenary settings to private ones, gutting the transparency mechanism of actual transparency. The paragraph on nuclear sharing and extended nuclear deterrence was deleted entirely. So was every reference to North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. The IAEA Director General’s Five Concrete Principles for the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, under Russian military occupation since 2022, vanished without replacement. Language on artificial intelligence in nuclear command and control systems — which Russia alone had opposed in earlier drafts — was dropped entirely. What remained was a document that, as civil society observers from Reaching Critical Will noted with barely restrained fury, “conveys the sense that it was written by the nuclear-armed States.” They presciently were not wrong…

Download the full document to read the remainder of Tariq Rauf’s analysis:

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About the author

Tariq Rauf is former Head of Verification and Security Policy, Alternate Head of NPT Delegation, Office of the Director General, IAEA; member of Canadian NPT delegation (1987–2000), co-drafter of the strengthened review process (1995/2000); delegate with other States parties (2012–2025).

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Photo credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías