Some Very British Food for Thought on Nuclear Weapons
by Sean Howard | May 5, 2026
As the eleventh quintennial Review Conference of the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) opens at UNHQ in New York, the UK is presenting itself as an open-minded leader of efforts to revive the fortunes of the treaty’s ‘grand bargain’: non-proliferation in return for disarmament and access to non-military nuclear power. Given the UK’s volte face on key NPT commitments with regard to its own (US-enabled) arsenal, making this case will prove a heavy lift. It is, though, an effort worth registering, and one that deserves to be constructively, rather than dismissively, criticized.
From April 27-May 22, delegates from the treaty’s 191 states parties – including the five nuclear-armed permanent members of the UN Security Council, and excluding only nuclear-armed India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea – will aim, amid low expectations, to agree the first consensus outcome document since the 2010 Review Conference, a time of great expectations fuelled by President Barack Obama’s commitment, made in Prague the year before, “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”.
In 2010, unanimity was achieved on a 64-point action plan – twenty two of which identified measures to accelerate progress towards Global Zero – and a Final Declaration historic for its acknowledgement of the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from the use of nuclear weapons.” Although the NPT acknowledges “the devastation that would be visited upon all mankind by a nuclear war,” this first mention of humanitarian consequences in a Review Conference document reflected a broad, seemingly unstoppable post-Cold War shift towards humanitarian disarmament producing the Mine Ban Treaty (1997) and the Cluster Munitions Convention (2008).
Such diplomatic heights now seem dizzy. They also flattered to deceive, with the disarmament portion of the action plan quickly fizzling (to date, only five steps have been taken), frustrated not least by the Obama Administration’s hollowing of its own Prague promise with a through-going ‘modernization’ of its nuclear systems and infrastructure. All the other nuclear-armed states were or now are also ‘upgrading’ their weapons and delivery systems, a dynamic of ‘vertical proliferation’ partly responsible – along with NATO expansion and Russia’s illegal, nuclear-emboldened war in Ukraine – for crashing the US-Russian nuclear arms control relationship.
The failure of the NPT, yet again, to deliver disarmament converted the ‘Humanitarian Initiative’ begun after the 2010 Review Conference into a political uprising delivering, in a diplomatic blink-of-an-eye, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted by 122 states in July 2017. For the nuclear states and their allies, the TPNW is a ‘nothing burger,’ a divorcing of diplomacy from the realities of national security in a dangerous world in which rearmament ‘inevitably’ trumps disarmament. Yet though the current divide in NPT ranks could scarcely be deeper, the UK claims to have spied a way to close it.
Relative Responsibilities: The Costs and Consequences of Nuclear Possession
Prior to the Review Conference, the UK, France and US submitted a working paper complaining how much the meeting was costing the treaty’s nuclear-armed members, namely 55% of an estimated total of just under $9 million. Britain’s assessed share is 6%, $546 million, a sum sure to be contrasted with the $10.4 billion spent on the British ‘nuclear enterprise’ in 2024: a burn rate of $19,800 a minute, consuming that 6% contribution every half hour. (For its part, the US ‘Department of War’ currently spends $101 million per hour, enough to fund ten Review Conferences.)
The fact that such a complaint is even being made perhaps suggests that the sums involved, miniscule in the context of exploding military budgets, actually seem burdensome in the context of imploding foreign ministry budgets, in Britain’s case a fall from £12.1 billion in 2023-2024 to £8.7 billion in 2025-2026, as defence spending soared from £49 billion to £61.7 billion.
The UK also contributed a working paper with the mouth-watering title ‘Imagining a world without nuclear weapons: a food for thought paper’, urging the NPT community “to imagine all of the legal, political, technical, and normative arrangements” necessary to make what it repeatedly calls a “disarmed world” as “successful as possible” – with, it cautions, success only possible if all states can have “confidence that such a world is in their interests”.
It is not clear whether a ‘disarmed world’ refers solely to a denuclearized international security system, potentially still prone to conventional conflict, or the kind of post-war world envisioned in the UN Charter, the culmination of the ‘General and Complete Disarmament’ of national militaries. Both the NPT and the TPNW envisage such a generally and completely ‘disarmed world,’ though neither treats radical demilitarization as a precondition of, or prerequisite for, radical denuclearization.
“Using our imaginations” effectively will require, the paper stresses, a “true dialogue” based on “listening and empathy”. Logically, this agenda should extend to establishing friendlier relations between the pro- and anti-TPNW wings of the NPT, though it should be stressed that the TPNW is already committed, in the words of its Vienna Action Plan (2022), to highlighting and underscoring the treaty’s “complementarities with specific disarmament instruments, particularly the Non-Proliferation Treaty.” In addition, from its inception the TPNW has prioritized engagement on the crucial topic of security concerns, releasing a report in March 2025 aimed precisely at building confidence that a nuclear-weapon-free-world is in the interest of all states (and that non-state-party, the planet).
It is possible the UK’s ‘food for thought’ was cooked up in part in response to the TPNW’s outreach; but for the UK effort to prove “as successful as possible,” it will require a similarly expansive menu of topics, as opposed to the four – Irreversibility, Verification, Transparency, and Risk Reduction – it claims as sufficient to establish a “responsibilities approach”.
Superficially, this seems logical, as the 2010 NPT Action Plan obligates all states to “ to apply the principles of irreversibility, verifiability and transparency in relation to the implementation of their treaty obligations,” noting the nuclear-armed states’ “unequivocal undertaking to accomplish, in accordance with the principle of irreversibility, the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals”. That year, the UK’s Security Defence and Security Review (SDSR) announced a reduction in strategic warheads from 225 to 180 (with a deployed maximum of 120) by the mid-2020s. This commitment was reaffirmed in the 2015 SDSR – and reversed in the 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defense, Development and Foreign Policy, which raised the warhead ceiling to 260 while adopting a policy of deliberate obscurity with regard to the operational stockpile and deployment ceiling.
Though this diplomatically awkward posture was roundly denounced at the 2022 NPT Review Conference, it was retained by the new Labour Government, whose 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) added fresh ‘untransparency’ over the reintroduction of US tactical nuclear weapons to the UK.
Backsliding on transparency and irreversibility also compounds challenges of verification and risk reduction, thus tarnishing the UK’s record with regard to all its ‘Fab Four’ themes. Much of the UK’s ‘food for thought’ will thus be hard for many NPT states to stomach.
Moving Beyond the Hypocritical: Taking the Junk Out of the Food?
Despite its hutzpah hypocrisy, though, there is also some genuinely nutritional content – and political potential – in the British initiative. First, it acknowledges its debt to (and funding for) the University of Birmingham and the NGO BASIC in their development since 2020 of a ‘nuclear responsibilities approach’. As a November 2025 study by BASIC (in collaboration with the Centre for Policy, Conflict and Cooperation Research (CPCCR) at the University of Stirling) noted, such an approach, if authentically “grounded in introspection, empathy, and dialogue,” can offer “a practical method to depolarize debates, build trust and reinvigorate multilateralism.” An independent, civil society dimension to the project can help foster, if not guarantee, such authenticity.
Second, the working paper opens the door not just to deepening but democratizing debate and dialogue on nuclear weapons, arguing that “prior to any dialogue,” states should take “an introspective view of the issues” in order “to be able to fully articulate why it takes the actions it does” and “what responsibilities they see themselves having,” including with regard to “moral or ethical stances.” While the paper suggests no such thing, one form such introspection could take – in Britain or elsewhere – is a Citizens’ Assembly, a review by a representative cross-section of 100 citizens on strategies to achieve nuclear disarmament (or a more thoroughly ‘disarmed world’).
This would be a very different kind of exercise than that proposed by Lord Robertson, former NATO Secretary-General and lead author of the 2025 SDR, who warned on April 14 that “there is a corrosive complacency today in Britain’s political leadership,” meaning that “even a promised national conversation about defence can’t be started.” A Citizens’ Assembly would get it started, without loading the dice in favour of guns and Bombs. ‘Food for thought’ – setting the table for a ‘national conversation’ – sounds appetizing. But how deep will the thinking go? Who decides what’s on the menu? And who gets a seat at the table?
Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University, and a member of the Canadian Pugwash Group.