The Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons ended on August 26 without reaching agreement on what is called a Final Declaration, which was supposed to make an assessment of the implementation of the Treaty’s provisions and propose recommendations to strengthen its provisions. Held at five-year intervals (the 2020 conference was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic), this is the sixth such conference in which consensus could not be achieved.
This sixth failure is, however, particularly foreboding. This is so because many non-nuclear weapon countries now believe their security is primarily threatened not by regional non-nuclear weapon rivals but rather by nuclear weapon countries—Russia and China.
