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.

Some background. In the early 1960s the United States and the then Soviet Union, Cold War adversaries, realized that international security, including of course their own, would be greatly threatened if additional countries acquired nuclear weapons. The working hypothesis of Washington and Moscow was obvious: A world in which more countries acquire nuclear weapons would be a much more dangerous one. Wars that until then killed thousands might instead kill millions. Wars that were until then averted might instead be launched simply because one or both sides believed it had such powerful weapons it dared not hesitate to use them. There was also legitimate concern that new nuclear weapon countries would not possess adequate managerial capabilities and technological safeguards to prevent an accidental or unauthorized use. And policy planners in Washington and Moscow could not discount the thought that a "local" nuclear conflict might inadvertently drag them into the cauldron.