No New Commitments to Actions to Address Growing Nuclear Dangers

For Immediate Release: May 22, 2026

Media Contacts: Daryl Kimball, Executive Director (202-463-8270 x107)

After weeks of tough negotiations and debate, representatives of some 190 governments to the pivotal 11th nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference failed to reach consensus on a modest outcome document that reaffirms consensus-based commitments made at the 1995, 2000, and 2010 Review Conferences apparently due to references to Iran's nuclear program that the United States insisted on including in the document.

Due to intransigence from the five nuclear-armed states, representatives also failed to adopt meaningful new steps in the draft document to advance the treaty's core goals, particularly on nuclear disarmament, according to experts with the Arms Control Association who attended the month-long conference at UN headquarters in New York.

The NPT Review Conference is held every five years. The last two NPT Review Conferences (2015 and 2022) also failed to produce a consensus outcome document.

The 2026 NPT Review Conference was led by Vietnam’s Ambassador to the UN, Do Hung Viet. Before the 2026 Conference opened, President Du Hong Viet told Arms Control Today that another failure would further weaken the NPT. “We may lose the credibility of the NPT itself,” Viet warned.

“Tragically,  NPT states missed an important opportunity to formally reaffirm their support for the treaty and its core principles, goals, and objectives at a time of increasing nuclear dangers,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, who has attended and participated as a nongovernmental expert in seven NPT Review Conferences going back to 1995.

"In reality, the ongoing dispute over Iran’s sensitive nuclear activities, which has been complicated by President Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018, cannot be resolved at the NPT Review Conference and must be addressed through serious and more sustained diplomacy outside the halls of the UN,” he continued.

“The draft outcome document, which addresses the status of implementation and compliance with the treaty and next steps relating to each of the NPT’s three main components — nuclear disarmament, nonproliferation, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy under effective safeguards against military diversion — would have formally succeeded in reaffirming states parties core commitments and obligations,” Kimball noted.

“Even if the consensus could have been achieved,” Kimball added, “states-parties missed a chance to use the conference to address the dizzying array of nuclear dangers, including the deficit in nuclear disarmament diplomacy.”

For the first time since 1972, there are no agreed limits on the size of the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals, the world’s largest. The U.S. government has called for multilateral “strategic stability” talks, but there are no negotiations between Washington and Moscow or with other nuclear armed states to limit or reduce their arsenals. Without new bilateral or multilateral constraints, there is a serious risk of a dangerous, global nuclear buildup in the years ahead.

“Due to the combined efforts of the NPT’s nuclear five who used aggressive diplomatic intimidation tactics against nonnuclear weapon states, the document failed to call for concrete action steps that are urgently needed to avert a new nuclear arms race and reassure nonnuclear weapon states they will not be attacked by nuclear-armed states,” Kimball charged.

For example, paragraph four of the outcome document fails to call upon the five nuclear-armed states to “negotiate” on “disarmament” with “urgency.” Article VI of the NPT already states they must “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

Instead, the draft outcome document pursues “constructive dialogue on the basis of mutual respect and acknowledgement of each other’s security interests and concerns, to ease international tension, promote international peace and stability, enhance confidence and reduce strategic risks, and note that such engagement could facilitate future arms control discussions, and help progress towards nuclear disarmament ….”

“The failure of nuclear weapon states-parties to agree on language that already exists within the Treaty, and the failure to commit to new steps with any urgency, reveals just how wide the disarmament deficit has grown,” emphasized Libby Flatoff, Program and Policy Associate of the Arms Control Association, who also attended the Review Conference.

"One bright spot,” Kimball said, “is that states parties insisted, despite opposition from the U.S. delegation, on including meaningful language in paragraph eight of the draft outcome document in support of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), against the resumption of nuclear testing by any state and the international monitoring and verification system of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization.”

“The draft final outcome document that was worked out over nearly a month of debate and negotiation tells us as much about what some states, particularly the nuclear weapon states, cannot agree upon as much as it tells us what they still do agree upon,” said Kimball.

When reflecting on how the conference was run, Kimball said: “Amb. Viet smartly pursued agreement on a draft outcome document that was relatively short. It focused on principles rather than invoking the names of countries, and it also side-stepped a number of key issues, including the North Korean nuclear challenge, attacks on Ukrainian and Iranian nuclear facilities, and the growing discomfort with the extended nuclear deterrence practices of U.S. allies, in order to try to achieve consensus on core issues. Nevertheless, that was still not enough to achieve agreement among the treaty's many states and their divergent views.”

“U.S. leadership, always critical to a successful and meaningful NPT process, was sorely lacking,” he said.

“The foundations of the NPT, the cornerstone of global efforts to reduce and eliminate the world’s greatest danger, are cracking due to inattention, intransigence, and ineptitude. Much more enlightened, engaged, and pragmatic leadership from Washington and the capitals of the other nuclear-armed states will be needed to strengthen the system to guard against the growing risks of nuclear arms racing, nuclear testing, and nuclear proliferation,” Kimball said.

For Immediate Release: May 18, 2026

Media Contacts: Daryl G. Kimball, executive director (202-463-8270 x107), Xiaodon Liang, Senior Policy Analyst (x113)

(Washington, D.C.) — The Arms Control Association (ACA) calls on Congress to reject and cut down the president’s request for a defense budget of $1.5 trillion dollars. Coming after several years of large increases to defense spending and in the absence of demonstrable progress in diplomatic steps to avoid arms racing and unnecessary military expenditure, the request is an unjustified and indefensible imposition on the American people.

“Both this administration and its predecessor have failed to convincingly justify several years of explosive growth in spending on nuclear weapons modernization and upgrades, an ambitious and destabilizing scheme for strategic missile interceptors, and other major weapons systems. The new budget request far exceeds any justifiable requirements, will line the pockets of military contractors, and steal taxpayer funds away from programs that address the real needs of Americans,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director.

“As the Trump administration seeks the largest military spending increase in U.S. history and massive increases in Defense and Energy Department spending on nuclear weapons, it has failed to seriously pursue lower-cost strategies to mitigate national security dangers, including effective nonproliferation diplomacy with Iran and bilateral nuclear arms reduction negotiations with Russia,” Kimball noted.

The budget calls for massive increases in military spending, including $71.4 billion for Pentagon nuclear weapons programs, $85.8 billion for missile defense and the president’s Golden Dome project, and $27.4 billion for nuclear weapons activities at the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“The United States is already set to spend more than $946 billion on its nuclear weapons systems in the decade between 2025 and 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That estimate does not include recent hikes in cost estimates for several major nuclear modernization programs,” noted ACA senior analyst Xiaodon Liang.

One example of an unjustified nuclear program is the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that is on track to cost upward of $200 billion and breached Pentagon cost-control measures.

“Because these ground-based missiles are vulnerable to attack by nuclear-armed adversaries, they pose a use-it-or-lose it dilemma for the president, creating an unnecessary escalation risk in the U.S. nuclear posture. ICBMs are an extravagance in an era when an enemy surprise attack is a lesser risk than escalation—particularly accidental escalation—in a crisis. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has ignored calls to forego Sentinel and instead life-extend the existing Minuteman III missile until all land-based ICBMs can be phased out through mutual, verifiable arms reduction agreements,” Liang added.

Despite Trump’s expressions of interest in “denuclearization talks” with Russia and China, the administration failed to pursue a new nuclear arms control framework with Russia to succeed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in the year before the agreement’s expiration on Feb. 5, 2026, while also failing to engage China on a bilateral basis.

“While it is tragic that U.S. and Russian leaders failed to engage in meaningful negotiations on a successor agreement to New START, it is also notable that following the expiration of New START, the United States proposed multilateral strategic stability talks as a means to achieving a 'new era' of nuclear arms control,” Kimball noted.

“A ‘multilateral’ approach to nuclear arms control may sound appealing. Indeed, all five nuclear-armed states have treaty obligations to engage in good faith negotiations to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race. But without a serious strategy for success, Trump’s approach could be a formula for further inaction, especially given the complexities of a five-sided negotiation involving states with different force sizes, force structures, nuclear postures, and strategic cultures,” Kimball warned.

“Such an initiative should not be allowed to substitute for the immediate commencement of serious bilateral talks between the United States and Russia and the United States and China on nuclear risk reduction, strategic stability, and nuclear arms reductions that could also yield concrete arms control and risk reduction outcomes, and perhaps more quickly,” he suggested.

“The Trump administration has also advocated for an expansion of the U.S. strategic missile defense system that could cost $185 billion by the end of this presidency according to the Pentagon’s own admission, would not establish an effective workable defense for the U.S. homeland, and would likely encourage Russia and China to improve their offensive capabilities so as to be able to overwhelm any new U.S. missile defense architecture,” Liang said.

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that a missile defense shield that satisfies the president’s stated goals would cost $1.2 trillion – far more than the $185 billion the Pentagon plans to request.

Other excessive nuclear programs include third and fourth warheads for the sea-based leg of the strategic triad (the W93 and the future sea-based warhead), a nuclear bunker buster (the Nuclear Delivery System Air-Delivered), the sea-launched cruise missile, and large-scale plutonium pit production in two states.

“We also oppose the president’s proposed budget hikes because it is designed, in part, to pay for his costly, reckless, and illegal war of choice against Iran. American consumers are already paying for the president’s mistake at the gas pump and their tax dollars should not be used to support an expansion of a war that should never have been launched,” Kimball said.

For these reasons, ACA joined other organizations to encourage Congress to reject the president’s budget request. ACA is one of a diverse array of organizations, led by the Coalition on Human Needs and Public Citizen, which jointly issued an open letter on April 3 to Congress calling on members to oppose the $1.5 trillion budget request.

Instead of further wasteful and excessive spending on the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise, ACA calls on Congress to question the military effectiveness and strategic wisdom of the expensive nuclear build-up underway. Legislators should press the administration for evidence of tangible progress toward reducing military and nuclear competition with Russia and China through hard-headed and sensible risk reduction and arms control diplomacy.