The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the cornerstone of global efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, has opened its five-year review conference in New York under the shadow of a fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran.At the centre of the discussions will be Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile: how much remains, where it is located and what will ultimately happen to it.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listOn February 27, Omani Foreign Minister, Badr Albusaidi, who was mediating talks between Washington and Tehran, said Iran had agreed to “zero accumulation”, “zero stockpiling” and full verification of its existing stockpile by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).Iran’s existing stockpile, the Omani minister said, would be downblended to natural uranium levels and converted into fuel.However, hours later, the US and Israeli strikes began.The NPT, alongside the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Washington abandoned in 2018, was designed precisely to prevent such a scenario. One of the justifications that the US and Israel have used to wage war on Iran – that Tehran must not be allowed to continue with a nuclear programme – has drawn accusations of hypocrisy, given Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. Israel has never officially acknowledged it has nuclear weapons and is not a signatory to the NPT.To many experts, the NPT’s very survival as a credible mechanism to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is now at stake.The grand bargain is ‘fundamentally broken’T …
