NATO allies used the opening stages of the United Nations’ 2026 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review process to sharpen their criticism of Russia and China, calling out what they describe as destabilizing nuclear buildups and pressing for renewed arms control talks involving the United States. The diplomatic push, which intensified during preparatory sessions in April 2026, comes at a precarious moment: the New START treaty between Washington and Moscow expired in February 2026 with no successor agreement, leaving the world without a single binding limit on the two largest nuclear arsenals for the first time since 1972.
The stakes at the NPT review
The NPT’s Eleventh Review Conference, now in its preparatory phase, is the treaty’s main accountability mechanism. Every five years, the 191 state parties gather to assess whether the treaty’s three pillars, disarmament, non-proliferation, and peaceful nuclear energy, are holding up. The United Nations has published procedural documents under the NPT/CONF.2026 designation and opened its formal accreditation process for delegations and media.
The last review conference, held in 2022, collapsed without a consensus final document after Russia blocked agreement over language related to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and the broader fallout from Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. That failure left deep scars. “A second consecutive breakdown would be devastating for the treaty’s credibility,” one senior European diplomat involved in the preparatory sessions told reporters on the sidelines of the April 2026 meetings in Geneva. That warning now hangs over every session of the 2026 cycle.
NATO’s two-front argument
Alliance members have zeroed in on two developments they say threaten the arms control order the NPT was built to protect.
The first is Russia’s posture. Moscow suspended its participation in New START in February 2023, and the treaty lapsed entirely in February 2026 without renewal or replacement. Russian officials have framed the suspension, and the subsequent expiration, as responses to what the Kremlin calls Western hostility and alleged U.S. violations of the treaty’s inspection provisions. NATO governments reject that reasoning and argue that Moscow’s decision removed the only verified ceiling on deployed strategic warheads, creating a dangerous vacuum.
The second target is China’s nuclear expansion. The Pentagon’s most recent China Military Power Report estimated that Beijing’s operational nuclear warhead stockpile could reach roughly 1,000 by 2030, up from an estimated 500 in 2023. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has tracked a similar trajectory. NATO allies have argued that an arsenal of that scale can no longer be dismissed as a minimal deterrent and that Beijing should be drawn into binding arms control commitments, a position China has consistently rejected on the grounds that its stockpile remains a fraction of those held by Washington and Moscow.
The push for U.S. engagement
Alongside the criticism of Moscow and Beijing, several NATO governments have urged Washington to pursue fresh negotiations. The precise format remains contested. Some European allies favor bilateral U.S.-Russia talks to restore limits lost with New START’s expiration. Others argue that any new framework must be trilateral, incorporating China from the outset, to reflect the shifting balance of nuclear power.
No U.S. State Department document from the current preparatory sessions has spelled out a formal response to those calls. Washington has signaled general willingness to discuss strategic stability but has not committed to a specific negotiating track. The absence of a clear American position is itself a source of anxiety among allies, who worry that domestic political divisions and the broader deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations could stall diplomacy indefinitely.
What Russia and China are saying
Both countries are NPT state parties and have historically defended their records at review conferences. Russia’s delegation has pointed to what it describes as NATO’s own nuclear sharing arrangements and U.S. missile defense deployments as destabilizing factors that preceded Moscow’s decisions. China has maintained that its no-first-use policy and comparatively smaller arsenal demonstrate restraint, and that pressure to join arms control talks designed for much larger stockpiles is premature and inequitable.
Whether either country has adjusted its stance during the 2026 preparatory sessions is not yet clear from publicly available conference records. Detailed transcripts and national position papers from closed-door meetings have not been released, leaving analysts to read signals from broader diplomatic behavior rather than from the formal NPT record.
Emerging complications
Beyond warhead numbers, diplomats face a thicket of newer challenges that the original NPT text, drafted in 1968, was never designed to address. Hypersonic delivery systems, dual-capable missiles that can carry either conventional or nuclear payloads, and the growing entanglement of nuclear command structures with artificial intelligence all complicate verification and trust. Arms control specialists at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the International Institute for Strategic Studies have warned that any future agreement will need to account for these technologies or risk being obsolete before the ink dries.
The preparatory documents circulated so far, including information papers NPT/CONF.2026/INF/1 and INF/2 and the main working document NPT/CONF.2026/1, lay out procedural groundwork but do not yet map how these issues will be handled in formal negotiations. That ambiguity gives delegations room to maneuver but also room to delay.
Whether the NPT can survive a second consecutive failure
For ordinary citizens, the NPT remains the single most important legal barrier to the spread of nuclear weapons. Its review conferences are among the few moments when all treaty members must publicly account for how well that barrier is holding. A consensus final document in 2026 would signal that the world’s major powers can still cooperate on nuclear risk reduction even amid fierce geopolitical rivalry. A second consecutive collapse would send the opposite message: that the framework built to prevent nuclear catastrophe is losing its grip.
The preparatory process suggests the procedural foundation is more advanced than it was ahead of the failed 2022 review, with multiple working documents already in circulation and a structured agenda in place. That is a cautiously positive sign. But procedural progress has never guaranteed political agreement, and the unresolved questions, over arsenal limits, new technologies, and whether Washington, Moscow, and Beijing can find any common ground, are as difficult as any the treaty has faced in its nearly six decades of existence.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
