This commentary is part of a series exploring P5 perspectives on the forthcoming 2026 NPT Review Conference (RevCon). It will continue over the coming weeks and months, ahead of the RevCon, which takes place from 27 April – 22 May at the United Nations HQ in New York. These publications are part of the ELN’s project on Protecting the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The United Kingdom has the responsibility of chairing the P5 Process in the final stretch before and during the 2026 Review Conference (RevCon) of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). What London does with that role matters, not because one chair can transform the process, but because the manner in which the UK stewards the dialogue will signal whether the P5 remain capable of purposeful collective engagement.

The UK has a narrow but real window to help move the P5 from a holding pattern toward a more constructive trajectory. Ultimately, however, the P5 operates by consensus, and no amount of creative chairing can substitute for political will. The greatest risk is not disagreement, which is to be expected, but the erosion of belief that engagement amongst the P5 and across the NPT community still serves a purpose.

When States Parties convene later this month in New York, the true measure of success will be whether the conference can demonstrate that the NPT remains a viable framework for restraint and accountability, even under present conditions of severe geopolitical strain. A credible outcome will require restoring confidence in the Treaty’s continued relevance; demonstrating genuine balance across all three pillars – disarmament, non-proliferation, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy – as a functional requirement rather than a rhetorical aspiration; and identifying opportunities for convergence where progress is politically credible.

Regrettably, multiple nuclear-weapons states are modernising or expanding their arsenals while the constraints and confidence-building mechanisms that once governed competition among them have largely fallen away. The normative and legal consensus on not conducting nuclear tests – long considered settled – is newly contested. And nuclear-armed states, including one not bound by the NPT, are engaged in military attacks against non-nuclear-weapons states who are parties to the Treaty.

Taken together, these developments place sustained pressure on the credibility of the non-proliferation regime and raise fundamental questions about the durability of the NPT’s central bargain. Non-nuclear-weapons states whose compliance sustains the Treaty’s non-proliferation pillar are watching, and their patience is not inexhaustible.

The P5 Process: Diminished but not defunct

It is no secret that there was a major rupture in P5 relations due to the war in Ukraine, which has only deepened further in recent years. Western P5 members have broadly maintained a ‘no business as usual’ approach with Russia, though with varying degrees of rigidity. As a result, the UK, for its part, has been cautious about expanding the P5 agenda or elevating participation to more senior levels.

A change of administration in Washington, and resulting transatlantic turbulence, has also complicated the picture for London and other allied European capitals. Most recently, the US has called for multilateral, P5-wide strategic stability talks in the pursuit of a new era of arms control that draws in China, effectively deferring formalised bilateral limits with Russia indefinitely.

In the absence of a clear pathway for how such an approach would be realised, there is a risk of ambition outpacing feasibility. The P5 Process, however, is not designed to fill that gap. It is a consultative forum, not a negotiating body. It was never designed to serve as the venue for negotiations, and treating it as one risks overloading it with expectations it cannot meet while undermining the practical work it is suited to deliver.

The P5 agreed at the end of the last Review Cycle to continue their discussions on strategic risk reduction and doctrinal transparency. It is positive that both workstreams have stayed alive. However, on risk reduction, dialogue has remained largely at the level of identifying drivers and perceptions of risk. This is terrain on which the P5 are unlikely to converge, considering their fundamentally divergent threat assessments and the absence of political mandates to move beyond description. Russia, and to a lesser extent China, have resisted agreeing to additive risk reduction measures but have been willing to talk through more specific types of tools in recent months. The doctrinal exchanges, while useful for building baseline familiarity, have remained largely static, limited to formal presentations that do not sufficiently test how postures are interpreted or misinterpreted.

What the P5 Process can do – and what the UK should use its position as chair to advance – is deepen engagement on these two key areas, seek common ground on other major RevCon issues, such as calls from non-nuclear-weapon states for enhanced P5 national reporting and more interactive dialogue on the implementation of Article VI commitments, and set the ground for what should follow in the next Review Cycle.

What the UK should push the P5 to deliver

The P5 traditionally issue a joint statement ahead of the NPT Review Conference and are expected to pursue one again. Yet statements alone are not a credible contribution. Principles such as “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” must be operationalised through functioning systems of restraint as well as routines and habits of communication and cooperation.

As chair, the UK should pitch a short, outcomes-focused workplan for the next Review Cycle – not a sprawling programme that greatly expands their current work, but rather four or five deliverables related to their current discussions.

First, the P5 should deepen its work on risk reduction by moving beyond abstract discussions of risk drivers toward a systematic mapping of gaps and vulnerabilities in the current architecture to identify where future work should be focused. The goal should be to advance mutual understanding through descriptive, not prescriptive, engagement, building the shared knowledge base essential for any future measures.

The risk reduction toolbox built during the Cold War – from incidents-at-sea agreements and pre-launch notification regimes to crisis communications links – demonstrably reduced dangers when grounded in concrete operational practice. But that toolbox does not provide sufficient coverage for the broader variety of escalation scenarios now in play. Adapting that legacy is an urgent matter.

As an example, crisis communication arrangements among the P5 remain foundational but uneven and under-utilised, increasing the risk of miscommunication and misperception during moments of crisis and conflict. The US and Russian Nuclear Risk Reduction Centres – staffed around the clock and never once out of contact since inception – remain the gold standard. Yet comparable arrangements do not exist across all P5 dyads, and there is no multilateral mechanism.

London should ideally push for a commitment that the P5 will work towards clear, secure, and unambiguous communication pathways between all National Control Authorities, as well as explore multilateral communication platforms. As initial steps, the P5 can start by mapping existing channels, informing one another of best practices related to the routine maintenance of current lines, exploring improvement and streamlining of use protocols, and developing redundant pathways and networks resilient to technological disruption.

Similar commitments can and should be made across all other types of risk reduction measures. Even though political will to agree on new tools is absent, a direction of travel can be identified and substantial work can be done to ensure that what already exists is fit for purpose in the context of today’s geopolitical and technical realities.

Second, the P5 should address how emerging and disruptive technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, are reshaping the strategic risk landscape. This is not a future concern. AI is already being integrated into decision-support systems, intelligence processing, and military operations in ways that compress the time available for crisis decision-making, degrade confidence in the authenticity of information and the communication platforms through which it is exchanged, and create pressure toward automation in high-stakes environments – precisely the conditions under which miscalculation becomes most dangerous.

Doctrine and operational practice have not kept pace with these developments, and the absence of structured P5 engagement on how AI is reshaping strategic relationships among nuclear-armed states represents a growing gap in the risk reduction architecture. Many of the technical tools needed to manage these risks already exist and can be adopted without waiting for broad political agreement.

The UK should use its chair to secure a P5 agreement to include technologists in their delegations and pursue structured engagement on this topic over the next Review Cycle, perhaps through a dedicated working group. There is a clear need for the P5 to develop shared frameworks for understanding how AI reshapes crisis and conflict dynamics and to establish common minimum standards, including for meaningful human control over relevant systems.

Third, doctrinal dialogue should become genuinely interactive and extend beyond declared policy to address the relationship between doctrine and capabilities. The P5’s doctrinal exchanges have not addressed the growing gap between declared doctrines and observable force structures, which is a primary driver of strategic uncertainty. Doctrinal transparency loses its confidence-building value when the audience does not believe the doctrine reflects actual posture.

More productive formats are available. The P5 could adopt reciprocal interpretation exercises in which each state presents its understanding of another’s doctrine and the capabilities that inform that understanding, with the state in question responding to where the interpretation is accurate and where it is not. Scenario-based walkthroughs, in which each country describes in general terms how its doctrine would apply at different stages of a stylised escalation, would test how doctrines interact in practice rather than in isolation. These could be complemented by commissioning non-governmental experts to conduct table-top exercises and report back to the P5 on where doctrinal interactions and capability developments might produce the most dangerous ambiguity.

As a foundational step, the UK should also seek commitment from the P5 to provide official translations of any updates to their key doctrinal documents into all P5 working languages – a low-cost measure that removes unnecessary interpretive risk and signals that doctrinal transparency is a substantive commitment rather than a performative one.

Fourth, the P5 should preserve and strengthen its Track 2 infrastructure. The Process has invested years in building next-generation expertise through dedicated mechanisms such as the Young Professionals Network (YPN). That investment must not lapse at the end of this Review Cycle.

Track 2 work is anything but ancillary or decorative; it is often where ideas are generated and tested, language is developed, and peer-to-peer relationships are built – all of which aids future cooperation. There is today a considerable volume of Track 2 activity across multiple bilateral and multilateral P5 configurations producing substantive work on topics of key interest to all five governments.

But the P5 should not assume that these efforts are coordinated among themselves or that their insights are reaching the officials who need them. The P5 should establish a structured mechanism, whether through periodic briefings, dedicated sessions within the P5 Process, or a consolidated reporting channel through which the conveners of major Track 2 dialogues can present key findings and recommendations directly to P5 interlocutors. This would improve the uptake of ideas that are already being generated and ensure that the considerable intellectual investment in non-governmental dialogue translates more reliably into policy-relevant input.

Fifth, the P5 should engage more constructively with non-nuclear-weapon states and systematically share insights from that engagement among themselves. Structured mechanisms, such as inviting questions for P5 consideration, convening roundtables with non-nuclear-weapon states, or co-hosting side events with them on focused topics would demonstrate that the Process is responsive to the broader NPT constituency it is meant to serve.

All five have already undertaken forms of such outreach, especially in the lead up to the RevCon. Ensuring that these efforts are shared within the P5 would help build a more coherent understanding of where different NPT constituencies stand on varying topics, and where limited but meaningful coordination may still be possible amongst the P5.

All in all, the UK’s most effective role over the next two months is not to promise what the P5 cannot deliver, but to preserve and strengthen the conditions under which progress remains possible: practical measures grounded in existing commitments, sustained dialogue even where agreement is incomplete, and continued investment in the institutions, habits, and relationships that keep restraint possible and legible in an era increasingly defined by its absence.

The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated above represent the views of the authors rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe’s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes. 

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