NPT News in Review, Vol. 20, No. 6

Editorial: Sintering Solidarity for a Nuclear Free World
10 May 2025

By Ray Acheson

After two weeks of discussions and some final negotiations behind closed doors, the third Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) for the 2026 NPT Review Conference (RevCon) ended without adopting recommendations for the RevCon. Despite efforts by the Chair, the PrepCom also did not adopt the draft decision he had put forward on strengthening the NPT review process.

The meeting did agree to the dates and venue for the RevCon—27 April–22 May 2026 in New York—and it elected the president of the RevCon—Viet Nam—and adopted a procedural report. But the PrepCom’s lacklustre finish reflected the overarching problem of the NPT: the nuclear-armed states and some of their complicit allies refuse to comply with their legally binding obligation to eliminate nuclear weapons.

It’s that simple. Whatever justifications they thrown around about “complex international security environments” or “geostrategic instabilities,” the bottom line is that the five states parties to the NPT that possess nuclear weapons, and a handful of their friends, refuse to implement international law that they ratified and continue to claim to value.

Obscured perspectives

At a time when billions of dollars are being spent on nuclear arsenals, and arsenals are being expanded in size and new types of weapons and delivery systems and facilities are being built, and governments are threatening to use these bombs, or to start testing them again, or to start spreading them to additional countries, it’s profoundly difficult to understand what, exactly, these states see in the NPT.

If it is about the constraints the Treaty places on other countries, they cannot possibly expect that all other governments in the world will indefinitely accept the outrageous hypocrisy and double standards. But it seems like the nuclear-armed and nuclear-complicit states have deluded themselves into thinking that everyone else will just sit back and watch while they engage in another arms race and bring us, every day, closer to the brink of nuclear war.

Four nuclear-armed states are currently at war. Three of them are not party to the NPT and so they are barely discussed. But does it matter that five of the nuclear-armed states are party to the NPT, when they arrogantly refuse to comply with it?

Their approach seems to be: we built the “rules-based world order,” and so its rules are for others, not for us. Their understanding of how the world works, their place in it, is skewed. Like cracked sunglasses, or an obscured view of the stage at a theatre. Or, like an authoritarian leader who has surrounded himself only by those who will tell him what he wants to hear. They appear to have no conception of the lived reality of others; no care for justice, equality, or community; no concern for current or future generations. They only seek power, profit, and privilege, and if they end up destroying the world in their quest for “security,” so be it.

A strange comment from France during cluster three exemplified this distorted world view. It claimed that the NPT’s three pillars of nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, and nuclear energy “are the cornerstone of international nuclear solidarity.”

First of all, if France actually believed this, wouldn’t it uphold its commitments under the first pillar and eliminate its nuclear weapons? Second of all, what exactly does “nuclear solidarity” mean? What does “solidarity” itself mean to the French state, or to any nuclear-armed state?

As far as the last two weeks of discussion show—or the last fifteen years of discussions over the last three review cycles—solidarity as conceived by nuclear-armed and nuclear-complicit states is that they will share their bombs with each other and threaten to use them on each other’s behalf.

“Nuclear solidarity” also perhaps mean that everyone can have a nuclear reactor, for a price. The more the merrier; atoms for all. France, Canada, the United States, and others spoke gleefully this week of spreading nuclear materials, technology, equipment, and knowledge across the world. Of course, that “solidarity” falls apart when it comes to the DPRK or Iran—they can’t be trusted. And it falls apart with nuclear sharing, too—it’s fine for NATO, but not fine for Russia and Belarus.

Solidarity also doesn’t extend to supporters of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)—these states are dismissed and denounced for having the audacity to solidify their commitment to never acquire nuclear weapons or support nuclear activities, and to try to address past nuclear harms and prevent future ones.

Ironically, the TPNW is a much better model of solidarity than the NPT, and perhaps if France joined up or even observed a meeting it could learn a bit about what solidarity actually looks like. The TPNW might not be taken seriously by “serious states” (i.e. the most violent states in the world), but it’s the only place where real work is being done in the realm of multilateral nuclear disarmament efforts.

In short, “nuclear solidarity” for France and its friends seems to be about selling nuclear technology to the Global South (and in the US case, doing it in exchange for incarcerating people they have kidnapped and kicked out of the country); sharing nuclear weapons with each other and echoing the same talking points in support of this unlawful behaviour; and selling weapons to or sharing nuclear technology with non-states parties if it suits their “geostrategic” interest.

This isn’t solidarity. This is domination. This is power politics. This can only lead to catastrophe.

Sintering and solidarity

Real solidarity is pretty much the opposite of how the nuclear-armed and nuclear-complicit behave. Real solidarity is about acting collectively to care for one another. It’s about confronting harm together, providing for each other, supporting each other and figuring out to share, survive, and thrive together with all living things and the planet.

We can find a much better picture of solidarity in the snow than from nuclear-armed states.

In Theory of Water, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes about the process of “sintering,” which she suggests can ground solidarity, “strengthening and renewing connections across communities of struggle.” She writes:

When a snowflake falls from the sky and lands on the earth, it immediately begins, or perhaps continues, a transformation as it forms bonds at temperatures below zero (this is not a melting process) with its neighbouring snowflakes or crystals to create the fabric of a snowpack.

Sintering is joining. It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other. It is a process of changing from a singular, angular snowflake to a more rounded form of bonded crystal, or a snowpack—a denser, more compact, linked formation. As the snow sinters, it settles and becomes denser, stronger and soggier under the influence of gravity….

The first thing a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is to join bonds, actual physical bonds, with its neighbours. And these coalitions mean that packed sinter snow on the trail has staying power, that it remains longer after the spring has melted the snow around it.

In this way, Simpson writes, the snow tells us how to make worlds, how to “weave ourselves into the land without destroying it.” It teaches us what “radical overturning and transformations can be accomplished when sintering creates deep attachments across many, many individuals.”

What would solidarity actually look like in the NPT?

It would look like good faith dialogue. Instead of vetoes and insults, it would look like diplomats working in earnest to figure out how to meet everyone’s needs.

It would look like the nuclear-armed states renouncing nuclear weapons and working together to eliminate their nuclear weapon programmes, as they are legally obligated to do.

It would look like the nuclear-complicit states cutting nuclear weapons out of their security doctrines, removing them their territories, and no longer providing political cover for violations of international law.

Those who have conducted nuclear tests, mined uranium, stored radioactive waste, built nuclear weapons, and otherwise exposed people and the planet to radiation and other toxic harm from nuclear weapon or nuclear energy activities would provide reparations, assistance, and remediation for those impacted. And they would end all of these activities, end the nuclear age.

Participants would commit to multilateralism, to diplomacy and dialogue, to building cooperation and collective security. They would reinvest in the ideals set forth in the UN Charter—cutting military spending and the accumulation of weapons, refraining from the use of force, settling disputes peacefully.

Overall, our work would be informed and led by those harmed by nuclear violence rather than by those who profit from it. And our discussions and decisions—transparent, accountable, and inclusive—would be guided by preventing future harm and providing care and justice for all.

These are not exclusive visions of real “nuclear solidarity,” but they offer a clear alternative to that set out by nuclear-armed states.

The 2026 NPT Review Conference is another chance to enact a different vision, a different ethic of relationality, a different kind of solidarity. But we need urgent action now, not a year from now. This is our own chance to get things right, and non-nuclear-armed states and civil society alike have demonstrated again and again that we are willing to show up and do the work. So let’s do the work.

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