North Korea’s developing nuclear arsenal could be a deal breaker – Copyright KCNA VIA KNS/AFP/File STR
Amélie BOTTOLLIER-PAS
Signatories to the landmark nuclear non-proliferation treaty will meet at the UN from Monday as hopes fade that they can reach a deal and tensions rise between the nuclear powers.
In 2022, during the last review of the treaty considered the cornerstone of non-proliferation, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned humanity “one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation”.
The situation has only gotten worse since then.
“I think there is a shared sense, if you will, of crisis by all states parties,” said Izumi Nakamitsu, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.
“We don’t have any bilateral arms control agreement between the two largest nuclear weapons states,” she said, referring to the February expiration of the New Start treaty between Moscow and Washington.
“We are also beginning to see quantitative increases in nuclear capabilities in all nuclear-weapon states.”
Nakamitsu said rising geopolitical tensions had halted the post-Cold War disarmament trend.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed by almost every country on the planet – with notable exceptions such as Israel, India and Pakistan – aims to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, promote complete disarmament and encourage cooperation in civilian nuclear projects.
The nine nuclear-armed states – Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – possessed 12,241 nuclear warheads in January 2025, according to the latest report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The United States and Russia hold nearly 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and have carried out major programs to modernize them in recent years, according to SIPRI.
China has also rapidly increased its nuclear stockpiles, SIPRI said, with the G7 raising the alarm on Friday over Moscow and Beijing increasing their nuclear capabilities.
US President Donald Trump has indicated his intention to conduct new nuclear tests because “other countries are doing it too”.
In March, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a dramatic shift in nuclear deterrence, notably an increase in the nuclear arsenal, which currently numbers 290 warheads.
– NPT can be ‘dismantled’ –
“It is clear that trust is eroding, both inside and outside the NPT,” Seth Sheldon of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, told AFP.
He questioned the likely outcome of the four-week summit.
Decisions on the NPT must be agreed by consensus, with the previous two conferences failing to adopt final political statements.
In 2015, the impasse was largely due to the opposition of Israel’s permanent ally Washington to the creation of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.
In 2022, the impasse was largely due to Russian opposition to references to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant occupied by Moscow.
This year’s summit could fall on any number of obstacles.
The ongoing war in Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear program and the war there, non-nuclear states’ fears over proliferation and North Korea’s developing arsenal could all be deal breakers.
If there is a third failure in a row, the treaty “may not implode overnight,” said Christopher King, the conference’s secretary-general.
But there is a risk “over time it will be resolved”.
Artificial intelligence could be an important issue as some countries call on all parties to maintain human control over nuclear weapons.
