The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
On 22 May, the President of the Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons announced that consensus was not possible on a final outcome document covering implementation of the treaty. He warned that it would be "disastrous for the regime" for there to be no agreed substantive outcome given that this was the third time in a row that NPT states could not resolve their disagreements on whether and to what extent the Treaty's obligations are being fulfilled and on how to take the treaty forward. The Review Conferences in 2015 and 2022 also failed - the last agreed outcome was over 15 years ago, at the 2010 Review Conference. Many delegations at the 2026 Review Conference expressed concerns with the final draft text during their closing remarks and reportedly during the conference some of the nuclear-armed states and their allies applied pressure to other states to change their positions and retract statements. This presentation will offer a report and reflections on the divisions and areas of disagreement at the 2026 Review Conference concerning the drafts of the final outcome document.
About the speaker: Ray Acheson is a visiting researcher at SGS and since 2007 has led the disarmament program Reaching Critical Will, a project founded in 1999 to monitor and analyse international disarmament processes, including providing primary resources, reporting, and civil society engagement and coordination at the United Nations. Ray has been covering nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conferences since 2005. Ray served from 2008-2024 on the steering group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to ban nuclear weapons, and has been involved in many other global coalitions and campaigns. Ray is the author of two books: The Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy (2021) and Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages (2022), as well as the SGS working paper Notes on Nuclear Weapon and Intersectionality in Theory and Practice (2022). Ray previously worked for Randall Forsberg at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies.