Last week, diplomats from 191 countries sat in a conference room in New York reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The host country was the United States, the country currently bombing an NPT member state. Nobody in that room will say it plainly, but everyone knew what they were sitting inside—not a review conference but a funeral.
Let me explain why.
The Deal
The NPT is fifty-six years old. Its logic was always simple, almost embarrassingly so. You give up nuclear weapons, and you get two things back: access to peaceful nuclear technology under international supervision and a place inside the rules-based order—the implicit understanding that compliance buys you some degree of protection.
It was never a clean deal. The five nuclear powers promised eventual disarmament under Article VI. That was 1970. They are still waiting, but the bargain held well enough to matter. It stopped the twenty-country proliferation cascade Kennedy once feared. It brought near-universal membership. It built the IAEA safeguards system—inspectors, monitoring equipment, declared facilities, and the whole architecture. Iran was inside that architecture. Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were declared, monitored, and safeguarded. The inspectors were there when the bombs fell.
What the Evidence Actually Said
This is the part that deserves more attention than it gets.
When the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, 2025, neither Washington nor Tel Aviv had presented intelligence showing Iran had decided to build a nuclear weapon. The IAEA—the body specifically designed to detect exactly that—had not found evidence of a structured weapons program. Iran was enriching beyond normal civilian levels. That was a real concern. It was also the subject of active negotiations, the sixth round of which was scheduled for the Sunday after the strikes.
The strikes came on the Saturday. For the first time ever, the US deployed the Massive Ordnance Penetrator—a 30,000-pound bunker buster—against Fordow. Tomahawk missiles hit Natanz. Isfahan was struck separately. Three declared sites, all under safeguards, were hit before the diplomats had even packed their bags for Oman.
Trump declared spectacular success. His intelligence community, within 72 hours, called the damage assessment inconclusive. Interpret that as you wish.
The Pattern Governments Are Looking At
I want to be careful here, because the proliferation argument gets oversimplified fast. The standard version goes: Iran complied and got bombed; North Korea refused and didn’t. Therefore, everyone should go nuclear. That’s too neat. North Korea is a specific case. Seoul is close enough that any military strike on Pyongyang risked devastating a US ally with conventional weapons alone. That geography matters. Libya had no real weapons capability to speak of when Gaddafi gave his up. These cases are not identical.
But strip away the nuance, and the residue is still damning. Iraq was dismantled under pressure and invaded anyway. Libya surrendered its program entirely and was bombed eight years later. Iran submitted to the most intrusive inspection regime ever placed on a non-nuclear state, cut its enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent, and accepted IAEA cameras in its facilities—and was struck while sitting at the negotiating table. North Korea told everyone to get lost, built the bombs, put them on missiles, and has not been touched.
Governments are not academics. They do not read the footnotes. They see the column of outcomes, and they draw the obvious conclusion. The more troubling point—and I think this gets underreported—is what the IAEA’s presence in Iran actually meant in retrospect. The inspectors knew exactly where everything was. The continued presence of IAEA inspectors did not protect Iran from the strikes. The declared facilities were the ones that got hit first. Transparency did not protect Iran. It may have made Iran easier to destroy.
If you are a government somewhere watching this and considering your options, what does that tell you about the value of declaring your facilities?
A Conference in the Ruins
There is something almost surreal about the 2026 Review Conference. The delegations discussed whether the NPT’s grand bargain is being honored—in a building in a city in a country that is actively dishonoring it, in real time, with bombs.
Article IV of the treaty guarantees all signatories the right to peaceful nuclear technology under safeguards. Iran’s legal position throughout the entire failed negotiation was grounded in that article. Its enrichment activities were the exercise of a right that the treaty explicitly granted. Washington’s counterposition—that Iran could not enrich at all—was a demand that Tehran surrender something the NPT guaranteed it. When Tehran refused, the talks collapsed. When the talks collapsed, the strikes began.
The review conference cannot fix that. No communiqué will fix that. What you would need to fix it is for the United States to stand up in that room and explain why it bombed a treaty member exercising its treaty rights without evidence of a weapons decision. That explanation is not coming.
What Comes After
Iran’s parliament began drafting legislation to withdraw from the NPT within days of the first strikes. One lawmaker said continued membership was pointless—it had “no benefit” for the country. A law passed in June stopped short of formal withdrawal but banned IAEA cooperation, which amounts to the same thing functionally. Iranian officials have gone further, accusing the IAEA itself of providing the technical knowledge that guided strikes on safeguarded sites.
That last accusation is the one that should keep arms control analysts up at night. Not because it is necessarily true, but because other governments will believe it is plausible. And once that idea takes hold—that your inspectors are your vulnerabilities, not your protection—the entire verification architecture starts to collapse. Why declare? Why allow access? Why stay inside a system that mapped the targets?
Meanwhile, in South Korea, public support for a domestic nuclear program has been building for years and is not going away. Turkey has raised the question publicly. Poland has had the conversation in the context of Russian aggression. These are not rogue states hedging at the margins. These are American allies, inside Western alliances, looking at what happened to Iran and quietly running the numbers.
The Begin Doctrine—Israel’s standing policy of preventive strikes on regional nuclear infrastructure regardless of NPT status or IAEA safeguards—has now been co-signed by Washington. Begin said in the 1980s that this was a precedent, not an exception, binding on every future Israeli government. Forty years later, the Americans joined the sortie. That doctrine is now US policy too, whether or not anyone says so officially.
The Question Nobody Will Answer
Treaties do not die in a single moment. They hollow out. States stay as formal members while the substance drains away. Review conferences produce documents. The machinery keeps running, but underneath it all, there is a question the diplomats in New York cannot answer because the answer is too uncomfortable.
If you join the NPT, declare your facilities, accept the inspectors, negotiate in good faith, and stay below the weapons threshold, and you get bombed anyway, without evidence of a weapons decision while talks are still scheduled, what is the treaty actually asking you to do?
It is asking you to trust a system that the most powerful state in that system just publicly broke. It is asking you to remain transparent inside an inspection regime that couldn’t protect the last country that used it properly. It is asking the weak to honor commitments the strong have decided don’t apply to them.
Some governments will keep honoring those commitments. Probably most will, for now, out of inertia or genuine conviction or lack of alternatives. But the ones sitting on the fence—the ones with the technical capacity and the political grievance and the security anxiety—just watched the strongest possible argument for leaving land in real time.
The conference will end. A document will be issued. And somewhere, in a government that has not yet made its decision, an official will read about what happened to Iran’s declared, safeguarded, inspected nuclear facilities. And they will start doing the math.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift
Hassan Elbiali is a political analyst and commentator specializing in international relations, geopolitical affairs, and the intersection of law and power. His writing focuses on current affairs with particular attention to how global power dynamics shape international institutions and legal frameworks. He is a regular contributor on Middle Eastern politics, Western foreign policy, and the evolving international order.
