This speech was delivered to the 11th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons on May 1, 2026.

Honorable President, Distinguished Delegates, Colleagues, and Friends,

We are living in a decisive moment. Humanity faces a choice, whether consciously or not, to continue down a path of conflict that leads toward ultimate destruction or to renounce its old ways and center peace at the heart of all its efforts.

International law, built painstakingly over decades and even centuries to prevent such an unfathomable catastrophe, is under brazen and relentless attack today. At the heart of this divergence lies a fundamental question: whether states may claim a right to wage war without restraint, and whether use and even possession of weapons with potential to end human civilization can ever be justified. These are precisely the issues at the core of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)—whose future we have gathered to discuss at this Review Conference.

Nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation are not separate tracks toward a safer world—they are intertwined and inseparable paths.

Our world is a time-ticking bomb. There are more than 12,000 nuclear warheads in existence—each capable of killing hundreds of thousands, some even millions of people, and any one of which could trigger a chain reaction leading to full-scale nuclear war in less time than this session will last.

More than 40 years ago, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev reminded us that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” And yet today, we hear renewed calls to use nuclear weapons in the name of “saving lives,” alongside threats that contemplate the destruction of entire societies.

The five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the NPT, the United States, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, France, and China, possess over 95% of the world’s nuclear arsenal. With that power comes not only a moral responsibility, but a clear legal obligation under Article VI of this Treaty: to pursue negotiations in good faith to achieve not only nuclear disarmament, but also total and complete general disarmament.

Nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation are not separate tracks toward a safer world—they are intertwined and inseparable paths. As Joseph Rotblat warned in his 1995 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their........

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