States-Parties Prepare for NPT Review Conference

May 2025
By Shizuka Kuramitsu

Against a backdrop of rising nuclear proliferation concerns, states-parties to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) are holding their last meeting to prepare for the 2026 Review Conference, which aims to strengthen the landmark pact.

The third and final NPT preparatory committee meeting began April 28 in New York and plans to wrap up May 9.

The 191 states-parties to the cornerstone NPT, which enshrines key commitments on nonproliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy, are supposed to “make every effort to produce a consensus report containing recommendations” to the forthcoming review conference, as the 2000 Review Conference directed.

The meeting is taking place when the international political climate is posing significant challenges to the global disarmament and nonproliferation regime. In addition to long-term issues with the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, there are growing concerns about weakening U.S. commitments to allied defenses, including France, Germany, and Poland, under President Donald Trump. (See ACT, April 2025.)

The 2026 Review Conference dates are not set but the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the last remaining treaty limiting the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals, expires Feb. 5, 2026. In January, Trump signaled interest in addressing denuclearization issues with China and Russia, but no major follow-up has been reported. (See ACT, March 2025.)

“There is a need for high-level political leadership to ensure that the risk is brought down. And [Trump’s] indication of a willingness to be able to engage in that direction is one that I find encouraging,” Harold Agyeman of Ghana, chair of the 2025 preparatory committee meeting, told Arms Control Today in an interview March 19.

“I hope that we can leverage that to engage in discussions, including on the suspension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty by the Russian Federation, and look beyond 2026 in terms of what will be done by these two major nuclear-weapon states,” Agyeman said.

Participants in the NPT review process have long considered the ideal outcome of preparatory committee meetings to be a formal consensus agreement on the draft rules of procedure, a provisional agenda, a formal summary by the meeting chair, and recommendations for the review conference.

Notwithstanding, no meeting since 2002 has adopted a chair’s factual summary by consensus.

Instead, chairs typically have issued factual summaries as working papers on their own authority, to document what states discussed during the meeting and to serve as a blueprint for further discussion.

Because forming a consensus at NPT meetings has been a chronic challenge, divisions among states-parties have deepened. The past two preparatory committee meetings concluded with unprecedented endings. No official chair’s summary was recorded in 2023 due to Iran’s objection, and in 2024, a Russian proposed footnote decreed that the chair’s summary “shall not be considered as a basis for future work within the NPT review process.” (See ACT, September 2024.)

“There are a lot of pressures on the treaty, from outside the treaty’s realm, but also from the inside,” Jarmo Viinanen of Finland, who chaired the 2023 preparatory committee, noted in the Arms Control Today interview March 19.

“At the same time, when we are approaching the review conference next year, we can see that the turmoil that we are facing in today’s world actually makes all the purposes of the treaty even more urgent and important,” Viinanen said.

“It is clear that in this very difficult situation, we need more nuclear disarmament than ever before,” he added.