Failure to agree a joint statement after weeks of debate at UN marks latest blow to hopes of maintaining an arms control regime
A paragraph in the final draft text on Friday stressed “the paramount importance of ensuring control by Ukraine’s competent authorities of nuclear facilities … such as the Zaporizhzia nuclear power plant”.
The NPT was a deal struck in 1968 in which nuclear weapons states pledged to disarm while states without nuclear weapons promised not to acquire them. At the time there were five acknowledged nuclear powers, though Israel had secretly developed a weapon of its own by then. There are now nine states which possess nuclear warheads. Before the NPT came into force, some had predicted there would be dozens countries with their own arsenals.
But Sarah Bidgood, the director of the Eurasia nonproliferation program at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, said the NPT was not irreparably broken, and that every other country would have accepted the text. Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, said the disarmament elements in the proposed text had already been diluted by all five of the official nuclear powers recognised by the treaty – Russia, the US, France, the UK and China.
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