Challenges for the 10th NPT Review Conference
Research paper
Published 29 May 2020
Updated 11 December 2020
ISBN: 978 1 78413 398 6
Although the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) has not yet entered into force, it will nonetheless loom large over the next Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) Review Conference. Perspectives of NPT alliances on the one hand, and proponents of the TPNW on the other, are contrasted in this paper.
We strive for a world free of nuclear weapons because we know these weapons pose a unique and potentially existential threat to our planet. We know any use of nuclear weapons would be a humanitarian catastrophe.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, 20191
The next five-yearly review of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (the Non-Proliferation Treaty – NPT), originally scheduled for April–May 2020, has been postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.2 The Review Conference, when circumstances allow it to take place, will be the first since the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in July 2017. A number of NPT states parties, among them the nuclear weapon states and most members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with the exception of the Netherlands,3 chose not to participate in the UN conference that adopted the TPNW, rejecting or casting doubt on its likely efficacy as an ‘effective measure’ for nuclear disarmament in terms of the NPT.4
Although the TPNW has not yet entered into force,5 it will nonetheless loom large over the next NPT Review Conference. This is because the TPNW has served to underline various pressure points in the NPT that, although not new, have not previously been quite so clear cut. While NPT parties are sometimes described as the nuclear ‘haves’6 and ‘have nots’,7 a sizeable number of the latter are militarily aligned to and are protected by the nuclear weapons of the former under a so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’.8
Perspectives of members of such alliances on the one hand, and proponents of the TPNW on the other, are contrasted in this paper. Perceptions of what underpins strategic stability are, in effect, competing with what some see as the humanitarian imperative for the elimination of nuclear arms.9 In any event, strong tribalism10 associated with these viewpoints has wreaked mistrust and misunderstanding in nuclear disarmament forums. The upcoming NPT Review Conference needs to lay the basic groundwork for identifying and recognizing the sources of this situation, and chart a course for addressing them in the next review cycle.
