Steelman · slot A
The bargain has been broken
A non-proliferation scholar from the Global South would argue —The NPT was never just a technical instrument; it was a grand bargain. Non-nuclear states accepted intrusive inspections and renounced weapons in exchange for security assurances and access to peaceful nuclear technology. Iran signed that bargain, accepted IAEA safeguards, and was attacked anyway — its Natanz facility struck by states that themselves sit outside or above the regime's discipline. What signal does that send to every other signatory in the room in New York? That compliance buys you nothing, and that the treaty's protection ends where a nuclear-armed state's preferences begin. The crisis facing the Review Conference is not Iranian centrifuges. It is the collapse of the political trust that made restraint rational in the first place.