The answer is obvious: President Trump. I’m not talking about what he has done with the government (which is bad enough), but what he has done with the holiday. He has made it tawdry. There is much to celebrate in America’s past, but its present is less inspiring.

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President Trump talks a lot about how he is cleaning up the capital, making it safer and more beautiful. In fact, the opposite is true. First, he tore down the East Wing of the White House without any notice or debate. He seems to think the people’s house is his personal property rather than something lent to him by the American people. He hired a contractor on a no-bid contract, first claiming it was paid for with private contributions and then trying to stick taxpayers with a $1 billion to build a ballroom no one wants. The result is a gaping hole on the White House grounds, an eyesore that seems likely to stay for a while.

The construction site that was the East Wing is not the only injury to the White House compound. The Rose Garden was paved over. A professional wrestling match on Trump’s birthday turned the White House lawn into a gladiatorial arena. A mocking cartoon replaced President Biden’s portrait. Fencing around the White House now encompasses Lafayette Park, keeping protesters out of view from the White House.

The damage has not been limited to the White House. Trump defaced the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by illegally adding his name to the center and its façade. He announced plans to shut it down for years for supposed renovation. When a judge ordered him to take down his name and keep the center open, he petulantly left a tarp covering the center’s correct name – The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In the meantime, Trump’s takeover drove away performers and audiences and forced some of the Capital’s leading performing arts groups – the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Opera, and the Washington Ballet – scrambling for alternative venues, audiences, and funding, and leaving the Kennedy Center without its anchoring attractions.

President Trump’s next debacle was to wreck the Reflecting Pool that stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Claiming he was cleaning it up after years of neglect, and at no cost to the public, he has so far spent nearly $16 million, including public funds, with no end in sight. He hired a contractor (aptly named Greenwater Services), on a no-bid contract, to fix the filtration system line the bottom of the pool in “American flag blue.” The predictable result of this dark color was to heat the water and turn it green with algae. The hydrogen peroxide National Park Service workers used in a futile attempt to kill the algae ended up peeling off large swaths of the new lining, which may also have been damaged by a motorcade that drove along the bottom of the emptied pool. Refusing to recognize his serial blunders, Trump blamed imaginary vandals for the damage he had caused. For show, he had police arrest a few unlucky members of the public who happened to dip their hands in the water out of curiosity. Most of the western half of Mall has been fenced off, supposedly to prevent further vandalism but more likely to keep people from seeing up close the putrid mess Trump created.

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President Trump also hijacked the long-planned America 250 celebration – a traditional patriotic affair – with his own MAGA-themed Freedom 250 boondoggle, turning a non-partisan unifying moment into political theater. Virtually all the musical performers backed out when they learned of the switcheroo, leaving the Mall to be entertained only by Trump’s campaign-style talk-a-thon and by Christian nationalists seeking to expunge the country’s Enlightenment origins. The main attractions appear to be a broken Ferris wheel and shoddy mockup of the massive arch he wants to erect between Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, which would obstruct the view between those two landmarks. And most of the eastern half of the Mall has also been fenced in, with excessive security measures that overshadow the celebratory intent. The National Guard presence continues to grow with no evident need or purpose, except perhaps as a show of force to create a sense of military occupation. The National Mall is usually a tourist magnet but attendance so far has been sparse.

The President’s repeated assaults on the national capital are more personal than political. They reflect his need for attention, control, and admiration. They also reflect his gaudy and grandiose aesthetics, his inattention to detail, his corrupt inside dealing, and his habit of blaming others for his own failures. Because these failures are not political, they are easier for Americans to recognize.

And so what should be, for Washington, a celebration of 250 years of striving to build a more perfect union, has become instead an occasion most residents would rather ignore. The country has seen awful times – civil war, depression, slavery, and genocide, but it has also done great things and embodied the highest ideals of human rights, political and economic freedom. If we are not in the mood to celebrate our present, at least we can celebrate the best of our past as a guide for building a better future.

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

The third week of the NPT RevCon ended last Friday, and all three Main Committees held their last meetings. This week the work has returned to the plenary, where the President is slogging through a paragraph-by-paragraph review of his latest draft. I’m going to focus here on Main Committee 2, which deals with nonproliferation and safeguards. The three main issues in this committee were Iran, safeguards, and export controls. I’m saving Iran for after the conference ends, as it seems like the issue will remain pivotal to the outcome. I have written elsewhere about export control and will not repeat that here. So this piece will focus on safeguards. For the uninitiated, “safeguards” is the name for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verification and inspection system. I will focus on the relationship between safeguards and the NPT.

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Comprehensive safeguards agreements

In one sense that relationship is simple. Article III of the NPT requires non-nuclear-weapon states that join the treaty to conclude safeguards agreements with the IAEA covering all nuclear material in the country. They are designed to enable the IAEA to verify that there is no diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons. After the NPT entered into force in 1970, the IAEA Board of Governors negotiated a model for the structure and content of safeguards agreements. With some minor modifications, this model has been the basis for all safeguards agreements concluded under the NPT, known as comprehensive safeguards agreements (CSAs).

Safeguards lessons from the 1990s

The IAEA learned in the early 1990s that CSAs were not effective at detecting clandestine nuclear programs. The IAEA had implemented CSAs to verify that states’ declarations were correct, i.e. that nuclear material was declared accurately and remained accounted for and that facilities operated as declared. But for the most part the IAEA was not trying to verify that those declarations were complete, i.e. that the state had declared all its nuclear material and activities. The NPT and CSAs require states to accept safeguards on all their nuclear material, but the IAEA was not verifying that they had done so.

The IAEA learned from inspections after the first Gulf War that Iraq had pursued clandestine nuclear fuel cycle activities that were designed to produce fissile material, the essential fuel for nuclear weapons. It had to reckon with the fact that safeguards had fallen short of providing the assurance that NPT Parties should expect, namely that a state was not secretly developing nuclear weapons.

The IAEA faced a challenge: Its mission was to safeguards to all nuclear material in the state, but it needed to do better job with its existing tools or it needed to develop better tools. I fact, it did both. It launched a two-pronged effort to strengthen its safeguards system.

The first part focused on finding ways to use its existing legal authorities to try to detect undeclared activities and thereby verify completeness. This part concluded that the IAEA should do its best to use the tools of a CSA to verify completeness and to provide credible assurances that a state was not pursuing undeclared nuclear activities.

The second part focused on defining new legal authorities, including expanded declarations by states and expanded access rights for inspectors, to better verify completeness. This led to the negotiation of the model additional protocol (AP) to augment the IAEA’s legal authorities and expand its verification toolkit. It was up to each state whether to stick with a CSA alone or to accept the combination of a CSA and an AP based on this model, but the expectation was that the AP would become the accepted standard.

Experience has shown that CSAs are effective in verifying that declared nuclear material is not diverted and declared nuclear facilities are not misused. But a CSA alone does not give the IAEA enough information or inspection authority to draw conclusions about whether a state’s declarations are complete, and in turn whether its nuclear program is entirely peaceful. To draw that broader conclusion, the IAEA needs the added tools provided by an AP. The revised draft final document circulated by the President of the Review Conference last Wednesday, and a second revision on Sunday, accurately reflects this history and experience.

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What is the safeguards standard?

This history has created a murky situation. A CSA is sufficient to meet the legal requirements in the NPT, but not to fully meet its verification objectives. To meet those objectives requires an AP in addition to a CSA, but this is not a legal requirement. This leads to constant arguments in both NPT and IAEA meetings. Some states — usually those that have only a CSA — give precedence to the legal requirement and call on states to meet that requirement. Other states — including most of the states that have both a CSA and an AP — give precedence to the verification objective and call on states to conclude both agreements.

In fact, all but one of NPT parties that are required to conclude CSAs — the non-nuclear-weapon states — have concluded safeguards agreements as required by Article III. There was some hope that this the last remaining states would meet this requirement ahead, enabling the conference to mark a significant NPT milestone, but one country — Equatorial Guinea — has yet to act.

The vast majority of NPT parties have both a CSA and an AP. Three quarters of the countries implementing CSAs also have an AP in force (138 out of 184). If you limit the count to states with nuclear facilities, roughly seven out of eight have an AP in force. While the AP is not yet a near universal standard like a CSA, it is a standard embraced by the vast majority of NPT Parties.

Many delegations at the Review Conference have labeled the AP the NPT safeguards standard, using a variety of formulations. My preferred formulation is to recognize that the CSA remains the de jure (Latin for “by the law”) NPT safeguards standard, but the combination of a CSA and an AP — by virtue of its broad acceptance and its importance in achieving NPT safeguards objectives — has become the de facto (Latin for “by the facts”) NPT safeguards standard.

Unfortunately, the only way of expressing this concept that has gained consensus is to say that, for a state with a CSA and an AP, “the combination of the measures in those two instruments represents the enhanced verification standard for that state,” a formulation that is virtually meaningless.

Asking states to adopt the additional protocol

The other issue in dispute is how strongly to ask states to adopt the AP. Diplomats use verbs that range in strength from “encourage” to “demand,” with “call upon” and “urge” somewhere in between. For years, the standard formulation has been to “urge” states to meet the NPT’s legal requirement by concluding a CSA and to “encourage” them to adopt the stronger measures of the AP, but some states want to drop any encouragement to adopt the AP, claiming that it is not relevant because it is not required by the NPT. If an NPT final document were limited to things required by the NPT, there would be no reason to do anything but reprint the text of the treaty. The vast majority of actions discussed at the review conference go beyond what is strictly required by the NPT.

Balance and zero sum thinking

One reason advanced for resisting the AP is the need to maintain balance among the NPT pillars of nonproliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. According to this argument, as long there is no progress on nuclear disarmament, there should be no progress on nonproliferation. This sort of zero-sum thinking has often plagued the NPT review process and resulted in an under-investment in the nuclear nonproliferation regime. It is also a fruitless effort by some non-nuclear-weapon states to apply pressure the nuclear-weapon states on disarmament, but in fact such action provides virtually no real leverage.

I prefer a concept of balance that says that NPT parties should do what they can to reinforce all three pillars of the treaty: nonproliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. In today’s security environment, this might mean pushing to strengthen safeguards by promoting the AP, calling for concrete steps to limit the risk of nuclear conflict or a resumed nuclear arms race, and investing in nuclear technology for sustainable development at the same time. There is no conflict between pursuing all three.

With the genuinely difficult issues that are in play, safeguards should be relatively easy. There is no point in continuing to rehash debates and talking points that have changed little for decades.

I suspect that, in the end, this year’s review conference will not stray significantly from standard formulations on safeguards, as reflected in the President’s draft texts, perhaps with a few additions of factual updates.

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Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

One new element in the “zero draft” final document for this year’s NPT Review Conference is a paragraph on nuclear sharing and extended nuclear deterrence, colloquially known as the nuclear umbrella. This is a feature of nuclear alliances in which a nuclear-weapon state pledges that it will act to protect the security of a non-nuclear-weapon state even to the point of using its own nuclear forces to deter and respond to strategic threats or attacks against an ally. NATO is such an alliance, as are the alliances the United States has with Australia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea and Russia’s alliance with Belarus.

The paragraph in the draft reads as follows:

2. The Conference notes ongoing discussion regarding nuclear weapons sharing and extended deterrence arrangements, including in relation to the Treaty’s long-term effectiveness and credibility. The Conference expresses concerns about the potential establishment of any new nuclear sharing arrangement. The Conference emphasizes that sustained dialogue on issues relevant to the implementation of Articles I and II can contribute to strengthening the Treaty, enhancing confidence, and advancing its objectives.

Some delegations have complained that this paragraph does not go far enough in reflecting widespread criticism of nuclear sharing, including claims that it violates the NPT. Others have complained that it endorses unfounded criticism and fails to recognize that nuclear alliances strengthen nonproliferation by reduce incentives to acquire nuclear weapons. Both sides have suggested additions and deletions, including deletion of the entire paragraph. I come down on the side of deletion for two reasons. First, as a practical matter, the views of the two sides are essentially irreconcilable; there is no chance that they can find common language to reflect their divergent views. The standard mantra of multilateral diplomacy is to focus on areas of common ground and set aside areas of irreconcilable disagreement. As a practical matter, there can be no consensus outcome document that includes this paragraph.

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The history

More fundamentally, the concerns expressed in this paragraph reflect a novel and ahistorical criticism of nuclear sharing that is essentially at odds with the original design of the NPT. That is not to deny the real concern from some delegations that continued reliance on nuclear deterrence is incompatible – or at least in tension – with NPT’s disarmament goals. But this paragraph treats a longstanding and stable feature of the security environment as if it were a newly emerging security threat. It is a distraction, or a deliberate deflection, from truly new dangers posed by ongoing wars, cavalier nuclear saber-rattling, expanding and diversifying nuclear arsenals, and threats to resume nuclear testing.

Nuclear sharing was never really an issue in NPT meetings until 2015. The Soviet Union – and later Russia – tacitly accepted NATO nuclear arrangements for nearly five decades. They knew that the NPT did not prohibit those arrangements. In fact, the first phase in the negotiation of the NPT was a largely bilateral U.S.-Soviet negotiation that codified an understanding between the two Cold War nuclear superpowers that they would not arm their allies with nuclear weapons (see Mohamed Shaker’s NPT negotiating history). The wording of Articles I and II was designed to permit NATO’s nuclear basing and related planning and training, with the shared understanding that U.S. nuclear weapons would remain exclusively under U.S. control. They would not be transferred to any non-nuclear ally or “to any recipient whatsoever.” The latter was a coded way of prohibiting the transfer of nuclear weapons from U.S. control to collective control by the alliance as a whole. The declassified historical record is clear that the Soviet Union understood that Articles I and II did not prohibit NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements as they existed at the time. Those articles also permitted the Soviet Union to deploy nuclear weapons in Warsaw Pact states, as long as they remained under Soviet control.

But this understanding was by no means limited to the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies. In parallel with the NPT, there are five treaties that establish nuclear-weapon-free zones (NWFZs) in various regions of the world. Today, over 100 countries belong to NWFZs. There are many differences among the NWFZ treaties, but they all have one feature in common that distinguishes them from the NPT: NWFZ treaties prohibit the stationing of nuclear weapons on the territory of states within the zone. This makes states in the zone more security by eliminating nuclear threats both from within the region and, through protocols those treaties, from outside nuclear powers. This distinction between the NPT and to NWFZ treaties was understood from the beginning. The Treaty of Tlatelolco – which opened for signature in 1967 and established a NWFZ in Latin America and the Caribbean – predates the NPT and explicitly prohibits stationing of nuclear weapons within the zone. The NPT, negotiated soon after the Treaty of Tlatelolco, contains no such prohibition.

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The revisionism begins

What happened in 2015 to change the tacit acceptance of extended nuclear deterrence? The year before, Russia seized of Crimea from Ukraine and supported separatist proxies in Ukraine’s Donbass region. Russia was harshly criticized for violating its 1994 commitment to respect Ukraine’s political independence and territorial integrity, a commitment Russia made in exchange for Ukraine’s commitment to give up its Soviet legacy nuclear weapons, return them to Russia for dismantlement, and join the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state.

Russia struck back at its Western critics by launching a novel attack on NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements. At the 2022 NPT Review Conference, China decided to piggyback on Russia’s criticism and use it to malign U.S. alliances in the Asia-Pacific region. This criticism was a convenient deflection for both countries. Russia was waging a full-scale war against Ukraine, diversifying its nuclear forces, and making ominous references to its nuclear capabilities, while China was building up its nuclear forces without explaining its aims or even acknowledging the buildup.

The contagion spreads

Also in 2022, the Non-Aligned Movement embraced this dubious critique of extended nuclear deterrence. Perhaps Russia and/or China persuaded one of the leaders of the Movement to adopt his position, and no one objected. It is disconcerting to see so many states seem to embrace this critique. I compare it to a virus because it infects the debate even though its legal and historical claims are demonstrably false.

The worst example is a Working Paper submitted last week by Iran. This paper repeatedly asserts that basing of nuclear weapons on the territory of nuclear weapons violates the NPT, even though the NPT contains no such prohibition. The paper asserts that NATO’s extended nuclear deterrence arrangements involve the transfer of control and custody of nuclear weapons even though NATO has made clear that this does not happen. It claims that the NPT Parties that are members of the Non-Aligned Movement never accepted NATO’s nuclear arrangements when in fact they never objected until more than fifty years after the treaty entered into force.

In short, the legal claim that nuclear sharing violates Articles I and II of the NPT is simply wrong. It is inconsistent with a plain reading of the text and with the negotiating history behind that text. And yet somehow the contagion continues to spread.

The trouble with deterrence

There is a discussion worth having on the role of extended nuclear deterrence in the nonproliferation regime and whether it helps or hinders progress on disarmament. How important are alliances in reducing incentives for states to acquire nuclear weapons, and how important is the nuclear element of those alliances? Does the reliance on the nuclear umbrella limit prospects for arms reductions or does it provide stability that makes those reductions more likely? And do the arguments states in nuclear alliances use to explain why they still must rely on nuclear deterrence increase the allure of acquiring nuclear weapons for other states?

These are interesting questions where NPT Parties genuinely disagree. They take opposing positions, but as far as I can tell they hold those positions in good faith. In my view, the answers to those questions are not as obvious as those on either side seem to think. I would encourage delegations on both sides to listen and consider what their counterparts are saying. Unfortunately, the recitation of positions in an NPT review conference is not conducive to an in-depth exchange of views. It is possible that further dialogue, well-structured and informed by academic inquiry, could help bridge those differences and lead to better mutual understanding. But at present differences are too wide. Attempts to impose one view or another will only divide the conference and undermine prospects for consensus. The issue simply is not ripe for this Review Conference.

The conference President is set to release a new draft this afternoon. We’ll see if he has reached the same conclusion.

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

The Conference President, Ambassador Do Hung Viet of Vietnam, called it a “zero draft,” not even a first draft, to indicate that it is a preliminary text that is open for revision. The draft is also notably short. It follows the same structure as the final documents from past conferences and draws heavily on those previous texts, but it has been pared down to a mere 13 pages and 107 paragraphs, about a third of the usual length. The text itself is often bland and opaque, and hard for outsiders to decipher. The nuances are not always obvious even to longtime insiders like me.

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What Comes Next

These documents tend to function like Christmas trees. Various national delegations will propose to add ornaments – words, phrases, sentences, or entire paragraphs – reflecting their views and priorities. They will all say the draft is a good start, and they will often propose to insert elements of previously agreed text. They will argue that the document needs to be more specific and more balanced, but different delegations have different ideas of what details are needed and what constitutes balance. I have heard that the President intends to resist the pressure to add text by treating the draft as a reverse Christmas tree. He is more inclined to remove ornaments than to add them. Evidently, he has concluded that reaching consensus on the standard long-form document will be impossible.

Caption: The Festivus Pole, an unadorned alternative to the Christmas Tree

The President has asked the three Main Committees have now been asked to discuss the text, and delegations have been invited to provide comments in writing. I have been watching some of the negotiations taking place in Main Committees 1 (disarmament) and 2 (nonproliferation). Most of their meetings are open to accredited participants from NGOs and are livestreamed on the UN Web TV, though some take place in closed meetings of “subsidiary bodies.”

But the real action takes place behind the scenes. In public, delegations tend to put on performances and take more ideological positions, but in private, out of the spotlight, they can be more pragmatic. The President and the Chairs of the Main Committees will meet in private with key delegations. When issues seem stuck, they may ask small groups of delegates to work out their differences side-meetings. Some criticize these backroom deals for not being inclusive. As an NGO participant now watching from the outside, I now share some of that frustration. But I also recognize that open, inclusive processes rarely produce results and that small groups are better able to produce compromise.

Plan B?

Adam Scheinman and I observed at the beginning of the Conference that it will be hard to find consensus on anything other than a short statement of high-level principles and objectives. It is not clear whether the reverse Christmas tree approach will lead to consensus or whether the President will need to shift gears and produce a concise, thematic document. Rather than extracting elements from past, long-form drafts, he would assemble a concise set of principles and objectives, similar to one of the documents adopted at the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference. Perhaps he already begun to do so.

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The Main Issues

Watching the public elements of the process, it is not hard to identify the main issues and the key countries whose disagreements need to be resolved if there is to be an agreed, consensus outcome. In many cases, this year’s debates are a rehash of past ones and the zone of compromise seems fairly clear. But many of this year’s disputes involve current events and novel positions taken in response to those events. Those are the main potential stumbling blocks the President and delegations will need to overcome if they are to salvage a positive outcome.

In future posts, I plan to explore some of those issues and suggest ways to handle some of them. The list is long, so I probably won’t get to all of them:

• The need for strategic dialogue among the nuclear-weapon states to reduce risks of conflict, escalation, and a renewed arms race.

• The importance of stopping the production of fissile material in constraining a potential arms race.

• How to avoid a resumption of nuclear testing.

• Newfound objections to extended nuclear deterrence and nuclear alliances.

• Recognizing the devastating effects of nuclear war.

• Managing differences of opinion over measures to strengthen international safeguards on peaceful nuclear programs.

• The complex issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and attacks on nuclear facilities.

• Defusing disagreements over the right to peaceful use of nuclear energy by focusing in practical achievements (as I wrote in Arms Control Today).

• How to deal with the conclusions of past review conferences, particularly on disarmament and the Middle East.

• And how to make a dysfunctional review process work better next time.

This is the fifth in a series of posts on the NPT Review Conference. Here are the prior posts:

1. The Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference: Reminiscences and reflections of a practitioner.

2. How to Salvage the NPT Review Conference: It’s not too soon to start. I hope it’s not too late.

3. Multilateral Diplomacy as Festivus: The airing of grievances is underway. Will there be feats of strength?

4. The NPT Review Process is Broken: It’s past time to start fixing it.

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

Beating swords into plowshares, a gift to the UN by the Soviet Union.

All NPT meetings set aside a session for representatives of non-governmental organizations to make statements. At this year’s review conference, that session took place Friday morning, May 1. A friend asked if I was going to make a statement. I said I wasn’t, but this set me to thinking what I might have said. So I started writing a statement the statement I might have delivered.

DRAFT STATEMENT, NOT DELIVERED

May 1, 2026

Chair, delegates, colleagues,

My name is Mark Goodman. I am a non-resident fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and I speak in that capacity.

This is my first time participating in an NPT Review Conference in a non-governmental role. For many years, I took part as an official representing the government of the United States.

I would like to comment not on the substantive aims of this conference but on the process.

It’s time to face the facts. The NPT review process is broken. It was never purposefully designed. It was improvised. It seemed to work well enough at first, producing useful consensus several times. But past efforts to improve it have failed or even backfired. The accumulation of practices and precedents has left the process brittle and inflexible. It is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was.

This conference offers a modest opportunity to make it work better. The working group on further strengthening the review process, which met in 2023 produced several useful proposals that promise to make the process work a little better, at the margins. It came tantalizingly close to consensus on a modest list of common-sense reforms, only to be blocked by one of the nuclear-weapon states. A similar effort last year was blocked by another nuclear-weapon state.

The NPT demonstrably serves the interests of all its parties. But its review process does not. Making the process work better is something everyone in this room should be able to support.

The most important proposed innovation is to make better use of the national reports that many states have submitted to this and previous conferences. At present, despite the call in the 2010 Action Plan for all NPT Parties to submit national reports, these reports have no formal place on the conference agenda or program of work. Instead, they are relegated to side-events. Three of the nuclear-weapon states held side-events this week to engage in interactive discussion with other delegations and with civil society on the content of their reports.

Those side-events demonstrated a commitment to transparency and to a respectful exchange of information and views, not just by the governments that held them but by all the participants. The side-events also demonstrated the readiness of those nuclear-weapon states to be held accountable for their obligations under the NPT and their commitments to advance goals of the NPT. I hope the other nuclear-weapon states will recognize that they have nothing to fear from such an exchange; I hope they will support the overwhelming desire of other NPT Parties.

Delegates,

Interactive discussion of national reports in the formal sessions of this conference would be a better use of everyone’s time. The “general debate” over the last four days should give everyone pause. How much time is needed for the repetition and elaboration of well-known positions? Does the exchange of accusations and rebuttals bring us closer to common ground? Bringing the discussions from this week’s side-events into the formal deliberations would be a distinct improvement; it would contribute to the transparency and accountability that participants say they crave. Consensus should be achievable.

This is a shared interest that cuts across the ideological lines that usually divide NPT Parties. Indeed, when I sat in the U.S. chair during the 2023 Working Group, the key compromise proposal in was inspired by Mexico and put forward by Brazil, Canada, Ireland, and the Philippines.

Delegates, I urge you to work toward consensus to adopt this practice in the coming review cycle, and I stand ready to assist in your deliberations.

Incorporating interactive discussion of national reports into the review process would be a useful first step. It could also provide an opening for a more systematic assessment of ways to improve the review process. Do we really need consensus on a joint set of commitments and hold every state accountable to an identical set of measures? Or should we ask each state put forward its own commitments and be held accountable for meeting them? Other international instruments have processes that may provide useful examples.

Some might object that this does not enable NPT Parties to make comparisons among states and over time. I why such comparisons appeal to NPT Parties and civil society participants, but it is worth thinking through whether it is the best way to reinforce the NPT regime. Establishing uniform benchmarks does not raise the bar on expectations. It creates a least common denominator that enables a few states to drag their feet and frustrate the ambitions of others. Allowing each state to present its own commitments would let them be more ambitious.

I offer this suggestion not as a proposal for this conference, but as food for thought on how to reform the NPT review process to better serve the interests of NPT Parties and the public.

Chair, Delegates, Colleagues, thank you for the opportunity to share these comments. I wish you luck in finding common ground and stand ready to help in whatever way I can be useful.

END OF DRAFT STATEMENT, NOT DELIVERED

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

The early days of the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference are a good time to think about the structure and rhythm of the conference and how things are going so far. I like to compare these conferences with Festivus, a made-up holiday popularized by the Seinfeld show. Review conferences begin with an airing of grievances (statements) and aim to end with feats of strength (compromise and consensus).

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The review conference will last four weeks, from April 27 to May 22 at UN headquarters in New York City. The conference is supposed to review events relevant to the NPT and make recommendations for ways to reinforce the NPT and its objectives. The first two weeks of the conference are usually taken up with debate and the last two weeks with negotiation.

“Debate” consists mostly of the delivery of prepared statements. Halfway through the day, the conference just finished up its “general debate.” That’s when the head of each delegation gives a prepared statement laying out the country’s priorities. It has also become, over the last decade, the venue for the airing of grievances. This is when countries explain why others are to blame for making things worse, what they need to do or stop doing. They explain why their own actions are innocent and justified.

For many years the unwritten rule in NPT meetings was for countries to refrain from criticizing each other by name. Instead, they would express their complaints in more general terms. Rather than naming Iran for violating the NPT, for example, they might say that all states must comply with their nonproliferation obligations and that international bodies should respond to cases of noncompliance. Everyone knew what that meant. Review Conferences can’t ignore the problems of the day, particularly those that involve a particular country or region. They operate by consensus, so they can’t force a country to accept criticism or demands for action.

This practice of restraint – not criticizing one another by name – helps set a constructive tone. It indicates countries are willing to set aside their differences and find common ground, and to make the compromises necessary to reach consensus on an agreed outcome document.

I don’t know how this unwritten rule came about, but I heard a story that illustrates how it works. In the 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union were still locked in the Cold War and its nuclear arms competition, but there were signs of an emerging thaw. Rather than air their differences at the 1985 the NPT Review Conference, they decided set those differences aside and work together to promote their common interests and build consensus. The Soviets weren’t sure the deal would stick and came prepared with two versions of their opening statement. After hearing the U.S. statement that refrained from criticizing Soviet actions, they read the version that responded in kind.

This unwritten rule held more or less until 2015. The year before, Russia had seized Crimea from Crimea and Russian proxies seized control in parts of Ukraine’s Donbass region. This was a direct violation of the commitments Russia made at the end of the Cold War, when Ukraine gave up any claim to the nuclear weapons on its territory and joined the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state. Russia promised that it would respect Ukraine’s political independence and territorial integrity. The U.S. statement to the 2015 Review Conference, delivered by Secretary of State John Kerry, said Russia’s actions “disregarding” its security assurances to Ukraine were “extraordinary.” This was hardly a harsh criticism, but it named Russia and Russia acted as if this was a betrayal of a longstanding deal. By the end of the conference, Russia had maneuvered behind the scenes to put the United States in the position of having to block the final document.

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There is a ritual in multilateral diplomacy called the “right of reply.” When a country is criticized by name, it has a right to respond. The first time I heard about this was in 2018, during an NPT preparatory committee meeting in Geneva. The exchange of recriminations between the United States and Russia gave the meeting a sour tone. Since then, the exchange of rights of reply has grown to the point that there were rights of reply on each of the first four days of this conference. Here are the highlights:

• Iran rejected Western claims that it had violated its nonproliferation obligations and condemned U.S. and Israeli attacks on its nuclear facilities and civilian infrastructure. The United States justified its bombing of Iran as a response to the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.

• China responded concerns about its growing nuclear arsenal and its lack of transparency by rejecting references to the “China nuclear threat” and dismissing the U.S. request for dialogue as somehow “unfair.”

• Iran and its Arab neighbors traded accusations. Iran said the Gulf states had let the United States to use Gulf states’ territory to attack Iran and the Gulf states condemned Iran’s drone and missile attacks against their civilian infrastructure.

• Russia sought to deflect criticism of its invasion of Ukraine and its threatening nuclear posture by shift blame to Ukraine, the United States, and NATO for threatening Russia, assertions that were roundly rejected.

• France and the UK rejected Russia’s fabricated accusation that they were helping Ukraine acquire nuclear weapons.

• China responded to Japan’s concern about China’s nuclear buildup by accusing Japan of seeking nuclear weapons, a claim Japan rejected.

• A handful of non-nuclear NATO states rejected claims by Russia and others that NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements violate the NPT and argued that the U.S. nuclear umbrella reinforces the NPT by removing incentives for European states to acquire nuclear weapons of their own.

Many speakers began on a gloomy note, citing increasing nuclear threats. The world is more dangerous, which makes the NPT more important than ever. The problem with airing grievances at the start of the conference is that it makes it harder to achieve feats of strength at the end. It reinforces the gloom.

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At the end of general debate, the conference president, Vietnam’s UN Ambassador, made a brief statement calling on states to focus on the substance of the conference and resist the temptation to criticize others. “What is needed,” he said, “is to recognize the interests of others, to recognize our shared interests, and also to recognize what is at stake in this review conference.” He invited delegations to “take the high road” and “work with restraint, mutual respect, and a willingness to compromise, a readiness to find common ground.” This may sound banal or trivial, but it’s the essential formula for success in multilateral diplomacy. It’s the key to the feats of strength that I hope to see over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

I wasn’t planning to do a new post so soon, but the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an article today by Adam Scheinman and me with our recommendations for how to salvage a modest success from the NPT Review Conference, which started today. From what I’ve seen at the Conference, it looks like such a salvage operation will be necessary.

The article is by practitioners and for practitioners, so this post is wonkier than usual. We identify the main problem areas and potential ways to finesse some of the pitfalls. The mood is generally gloomy and recriminations are already in high gear. Our core recommendation is that the conference’s president, Vietnam’s UN Ambassador Do Hung Viet, begin early on a Plan B that does not try to reproduce the level of detail of a traditional final document but instead affirms core principles.

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For those who are curious but unfamiliar with the subject, I’d invite you to read our article. For the NPT aficionados who want to cut to the chase, here are some of our key points, but I’d also encourage you to read the article for explanations.

1. Regarding the deadlock over next steps on arms control, we suggest that “the United States and Russia could issue separate, parallel national statements indicating each will hold to New START quantitative caps and resume routine transparency notifications for 12 months. China could signal openness to strategic dialogue and mutual restraint among nuclear-weapon states.”

2. Rather than falling into a spiral of renewed nuclear testing, we suggest “the United States, China, and Russia could commit to discussions on increasing the transparency of activities at their respective nuclear test sites.”

3. We suggest that a final document could include a “factual statement of the status and organizational developments for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons without attempting to resolve differences on the merits of the treaty.”

4. To address the risk of nuclear war and a resumed nuclear arms race, we suggest that the document should “revive calls on the five powers to resume dialogue with a view to adopting specific measures to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons use and to affirm support for a treaty to end production of fissile material.”

5. To address sharp divisions over the role of nuclear deterrence in alliances, “a final document could endorse the general principle that, in keeping with NPT purposes, military strategies of all parties should aim to limit the role and salience of nuclear weapons” and express “the shared understanding that the treaty precludes any loophole allowing for nuclear proliferation through military alliances.”

6. To address recriminations over military attacks on nuclear facilities in Ukraine and Iran, the conference might address the general issue of “the adequacy of legal and policy responses to attacks on civilian nuclear facilities.”

7. As a way to dissuade Iran or any other state from withdrawing from the NPT, the conference could endorse the principle that “a withdrawing state remains responsible for any prior NPT violations and for safeguards obligations that stem from its agreements for peaceful nuclear cooperation.”

8. Rather than getting bogged down in arguments over the nature of the right to peaceful use of nuclear energy, the conference could “endors[e] concrete steps to expand access to nuclear technology to meet the countries’ energy and other development needs.

9. Recognizing that many states want to reaffirm commitments from past conferences but some of those commitments are outdated, we argue that “any blanket reference to past commitments would need to be crafted to recognize that, while some remain relevant and achievable, others do not.”

10. And as a step to improve what has become an increasingly dysfunctional NPT review process, “the conference could decide to incorporate interactive discussion of national reports in the next review cycle.”

Coming soon: Multilateral diplomacy as Festivus.

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

For the uninitiated, the NPT is the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its official name is the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but I feel like we’re old friends and I can be more familiar.

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The NPT is one of the most important treaties there is, not quite as important as the Charter of the United Nations, but it’s up there. People like to describe the NPT with architectural analogies: It’s the “foundation” or the “cornerstone” of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. (For the uninitiated, the nonproliferation regime refers to the interlocking set of rules, norms, and practices designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. I will have more to say in future posts.) The NPT provides a “framework” for international cooperation on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and nuclear technology more broadly. And, depending on your point of view, it could provide a “foundation” or a “framework” for nuclear disarmament. States that join agree not to acquire nuclear weapons (if they didn’t already have them by 1967) and not to help others acquire them. They agree to cooperate on peaceful uses of nuclear technology, and to pursue progress on nuclear disarmament.

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I’ve written about the NPT before. An article that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last June discusses misconceptions about the NPT. The article grew out of my frustration with debates about the NPT that are often built on faulty assumptions and lead states to take misguided positions. These misconceptions usually have a basis in truth but are either incomplete or sometimes mistaken. In the article, I list the following misconceptions:

• The NPT is a bargain where non-nuclear-weapon states agree not to get nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapon states agree to disarm. Alternatively, the bargain is that non-nuclear-weapon states agree not to get nuclear weapons in exchange for access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. These aren’t wrong, but they are oversimplified. They miss many important elements of the bargain, including the security bargain between non-nuclear-weapon states not to acquire and threaten one another with nuclear weapons.

• The NPT is a disarmament treaty. In fact, the NPT does have an obligation “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to … nuclear disarmament.” I quote these words to show how many caveats there are compared to the obligation “not to acquire” nuclear weapons and “not in any way to assist” other states to acquire them. The disarmament obligation in the NPT sets a very low bar, particularly compared to the aspirations of NPT parties.

• The NPT is a success, because it has limited the spread of nuclear weapons, albeit incompletely. Alternatively, the NPT is a failure, because some states have acquired nuclear weapons and the nuclear-weapon states have not disarmed.

• The NPT is about collapse because recent review conferences failed to reach consensus on a final document that lays out a plan or at least a vision to reinforce the NPT. This is a category error that confuses the NPT – a well-designed and well-balanced legal instrument with its review process – a poorly-designed and dysfunctional political process. For more detail on the dysfunction see this article by my colleague and former NPT Ambassador Adam Scheinman.

• Nuclear alliances, where nuclear-weapon states provide security guarantees to non-nuclear-weapon states that include using nuclear weapons to deter attacks against allies, are either inconsistent with the NPT or, in the opposing view, they reinforce the NPT by reducing incentives for those allies to acquire nuclear weapons of their own. Both have an element of truth, but both are overstated.

• The NPT is unfair. Some states are allowed to have nuclear weapons and others aren’t. This one is actually true, but it reflects a world that is unfair and unequal in many ways. The NPT is designed to reduce the impact of that unfairness, and to make all of its parties better off than they would be without it.

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Fundamentally, the NPT is designed to limit the risk of nuclear war. That risk would surely if more countries had nuclear weapons. The goal of nuclear disarmament is to eliminate the risk that nuclear weapons will ever be used again. I recently visited Hiroshima, where nuclear weapons were first used over 80 years ago at the end of World War II. Hiroshima is home to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, the Hiroshima Peace Park, and multiple other memorials, including the iconic Atomic Bomb Dome. I was there during cherry blossom season, an odd juxtaposition of destruction and renewal, of death and rebirth, but ultimately a sign of hope.

Stay tuned. I expect to have more to say about the NPT and its review conference in coming weeks. It will be rough going and may end badly, but as one former NPT Ambassador told me, the NPT review process is the price we pay to have the NPT.

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

The Nevada Nuclear Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site)

and I were asked to contribute an article to the Foreign Service Journal (FSJ) on nuclear weapons testing. The article was written last year but came out in the March-April 2026 issue. I invite you to read that article before reading this update.

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The FSJ had planned a special focus section on nuclear security. Our article was a last-minute addition stimulated by President Trump’s Truth Social post last October, in which he directed the Department of War [sic] to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with other nuclear-armed states. The subject proved to be a moving target, with several developments since we wrote the article. I want to comment on some of those developments, though none of them affect our basic conclusion: “The United States has little, if anything, to gain from resuming nuclear testing and much to lose if it does so.”

Under Secretary of State Tom DiNanno told the Conference on Disarmament on February 6 that “China has conducted nuclear explosive tests, including preparing for tests with designated yields in the hundreds of tons.” The statement further claimed that China had used “decoupling” – conducting the test inside a cavity to muffle its seismic signal. It gave a specific date for the test: June 22, 2020. This was a more definitive claim that the previous statement that raised concerns whether China was adhering to a “zero-yield” moratorium.

Separately, Assistant Secretary of State Chris Yeaw provided more details in a February 5 presentation to the Hudson Institute and in a February 23 statement to the Conference on Disarmament. To explain why the June 2020 event was an explosion and not an earthquake, he presented a comparison seismographic signals of earthquakes in the region of China’s Lop Nur test site, which he claimed was consistent with a single point explosion, not the ripple explosions typical in mining operations, and had a nuclear yield of 10 tons, though the yield might have been higher – perhaps several hundred tons – if it was a shielded nuclear test. Yeaw said he believed more information would be coming to support this assessment.

Diagram from statement by Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Yeaw to the Conference on Disarmament, Geneva, February 23, 2026.

Outside experts remain unconvinced. Rob Floyd, Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), issued a statement that the treaty’s International Monitoring System was capable of reliably detecting nuclear tests with yields above about 500 tons and had not seen such a test on the date in question. Following Yeaw’s statement, Floyd clarified that the IMS had detected two very small seismic events in the vicinity of Lop Nor but could not assess their cause with confidence. NPR reported that China denied the accusation and quoted seismic expert Ben Dando saying the evidence was not conclusive. Some pointed out that the magnitude of the June 2020 event was much lower and the signal-to-noise ratio much higher. As I understand it, the seismic signals from nuclear tests are dominated by pressure waves rather than shear waves, but small earthquakes also produce relatively weak shear wave signals.

In addition to the question of whether China has tested conducted low-yield tests, there’s the question of how much it matters. Any cheating on an international commitment deserves attention, but would tests in the range suggested give China any advantage? Would the United States benefit from testing “on an equal basis?” The National Academy of Sciences examined the question in a 2012 report “The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty: Technical Issues for the United States.” This report include a table indicating what a country with limited testing experience might learn and what a more experienced country might learn. The possibilities include better understanding of physical processes, safety testing, and validation of low-yield weapon designs. It is widely believed that China has more to gain because it has conducted fewer tests (fewer than fifty compared to over a thousand), and that low-yield testing would help it design more compact nuclear warheads. But a book by Hui Zhang, the leading technical expert on China’s nuclear program, concludes that China’s nuclear tests likely gave the country a far greater ability to develop smaller, lighter warheads designs than had been recognized.

At the core of the policy debate is whether the United States should go from its current practice of conducting only subcritical tests – tests that do not produce a self-sustaining fission chain reaction – to supercritical tests, which produce a brief chain reaction. The former are called hydrodynamic, since they study the properties of flow of nuclear material under extreme pressure. The latter are called hydronuclear, because they study the onset of nuclear reactions in those conditions. There are differing views. Former Los Alamos Lab director Sig Hecker, in arguing that the United States should not resume nuclear explosive tests, is equivocal about hydronuclear tests, suggesting that Russia and China do not share the U.S. view that such tests are or should be prohibited. In an article suggesting ways to resolve questions over China’s and Russia’s testing practices, Frank von Hippel wrote that “the same information is obtained from subcritical and supercritical tests, but supercritical tests are much less costly to analyze because millions of times more neutrons and gamma rays are released, making the diagnostics much easier and cheaper.” I suspect this is connected with the statement by Jill Hruby, former head of the National Nuclear Security Administration and former Sandia Lab Director, that there are “other tools” to get the information that’s “hard to learn” without hydronuclear tests.

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Where does this leave us? There are unresolved questions about what tests Russia and China have done, how much it matters, and what the United States can and should do in response. The U.S. government may produce more persuasive evidence about Chinese testing practices. Evidently, the United States is not planning full-scale nuclear tests and has not yet decided whether to breach its zero-yield test moratorium and undertake low-yield supercritical nuclear tests. Even subcritical tests usually take several years’ preparation. Congress has authorized the Department of Energy to be ready to conduct a nuclear explosive test within 2-3 years but has not funded such tests and should have a say in whether even low-yield tests are authorized. My own view is that the United States should stick to its zero-yield moratorium and press Russia and China to adopt the same position, and that the risks that Russia and China might gain some advantage are modest.

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

One advantage of retirement is having more time to read books. I recently had the pleasure to read Alex Wellerstein’s new book The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age. I highly recommend it, but this is not a book review so much as a reflection on how the history at the beginning of the nuclear era resonates with what some are calling a third nuclear age of eroding constraints and renewed competition.

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Wellerstein began his research trying to understand President Truman’s decision to use atomic bombs on two Japanese cities at the end of World War II. He came to a startling conclusion that gives a new perspective on the origins of the Cold War nuclear arms race. It’s a compelling read and an important addition to the genre of nuclear history. And the story he uncovered intersected my own story in a several ways, both personal and professional.

Truman’s Decision

Wellerstein’s startling conclusion is that Truman didn’t really decide to drop two atom bombs on two Japanese cities. This conclusion stands in stark contrast with stories constructed after the fact about how the bombings were intended to shorten the war and save lives or to signal the Soviet Union. We learn that Roosevelt’s sudden death thrust Truman into a role for which he had no preparation: a war that was winding down in Europe but still raging in the Pacific. Truman first learned of war plans Roosevelt had set in motion long before.

Within weeks, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and General Leslie Groves briefed Truman on the Manhattan Project. They told him the bomb would be ready to use against Japan within months, and Truman chose “not to upset the existing plans.” Months later, Secretary Stimson asked Truman to support his decision, against the wishes of military commanders, not to use the bomb against Japan’s ancient capital, Kyoto. Truman agreed with Stimson that Kyoto should not be a target. He was repulsed by the idea of deliberately attacking civilian populations, repeatedly objecting to the killing of women and children, and thought such an attack would sully the U.S. reputation after the war. Truman thought the bomb should be used on “a purely military target,” and evidently believed Hiroshima was such a target. The list of potential targets identified Hiroshima as an army depot and Nagasaki as a naval base. Although the targets were cities, planners described them in terms of their contributions to Japan’s war effort.

After the August 6 bombing of Hiroshima, Truman delivered a statement for newsreel reporters describing the target as “an important Japanese Army base.” He did not seem to know yet that Hiroshima was a city of several hundred thousand or that tens of thousands of civilians had been killed, a fact he learned two days later.

Even more surprising in retrospect, Truman seemed to be caught off guard by the bombing of Nagasaki, three days after Hiroshima. The status reports he received referred in confusing ways to two types of bomb, the untested uranium bomb used on Hiroshima (known as Little Boy) and the tested plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki (known as Fat Man), and this may have contributed to his surprise. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8, and Truman hoped that would trigger Japan’s surrender.

After Nagasaki was bombed on August 9, Truman ordered that no further atomic bombings could take place without his approval. The current U.S. policy that the President has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons has its roots in that decision.

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After the War

The second half of the book describes how Truman managed the nuclear program after the war. The scale of the destruction and the human toll led him to put the atom bomb in a unique category, too indiscriminate in its killing of innocent civilians to be considered an ordinary weapon or war. And his surprise at the second bombing probably underscored the importance of maintaining civilian control. He supported the establishment of a civilian organization for that purpose, the Atomic Energy Commission, which not only produced nuclear weapons but also, for a time, maintained custody and control over them.

When the war ended many scientists hoped the bomb would make war unthinkable and that international cooperation would forestall an arms race. Oppenheimer was on the front lines, drafting the proposal for international control of atomic energy contained in the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. But that hope was quickly dashed when the task of negotiating such controls was handed over to Bernard Baruch, who modified the proposal in ways that made it anathema to the Soviets. Whatever opportunity there might have been to avoid an arms race withered on the vine.

A few years later the Soviet Union tested a nuclear weapon, a copy of the Nagasaki weapon, and set off a chain reaction that led to the development of thermonuclear weapons and the expansion of nuclear arsenals from dozens to tens of thousands over the next three decades. North Korea’s surprise attack and revelations of atomic spies created a climate of fear and political repression that made these impulses irresistible. The military began developing war plans that relied on nuclear weapons and was anxious to gain physical control over them. Civilian control over weapons began to ease during the Korean War and was abandoned once Eisenhower came into office.

Personal Connections

The story Wellerstein tells intersects my own in a couple of places. My father was a bit player in the postwar effort by atomic scientists to limit the dangers of nuclear war. A physics graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania during the war, he was exempted from the draft as an essential war worker and contributed to the development of sonar and radar. After the war, he was the youngest in a group of physicists at Penn who wanted to understand more about how the bomb was made and how it worked. The government’s official report on the Manhattan Project left out the technical details, so they held a series of seminars and eventually wrote a book (Nuclear Fission and Atomic Energy) that filled in the gaps. They hoped to persuade the public that secrecy was futile and that the only way to control the dangers of nuclear weapons was through international cooperation. Wellerstein wrote about “The Philadelphia Story” fifteen years ago in Physics Today.

The second personal connection came with the detection of the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949. Atmospheric nuclear explosions send traces of radioactive debris into the atmosphere where winds can carry them long distances. U.S. aircraft flying over the Western Pacific collected some of that radioactive debris, and scientists concluded that it came from a nuclear test. But the radioactive plume continued to spread across the globe and was detected a second time, inadvertently, by health physicists monitoring radioactive contamination around the plutonium production plant in Hanford, Washington. I learned about this second detection while looking into a deliberate release of radioactivity from Hanford that took place later that year, but that’s a story for another day.

Personal Reflections

After World War II, immediate hopes for international cooperation to limit nuclear risks dissipated within a few years. The Cold War spawned a massive nuclear arms race and growing fears of nuclear war. My career began at the end of the Cold War, when hopes were high that cooperation among former nuclear could reverse the Cold War arms race and end the danger of nuclear war. There was remarkable progress on many fronts, eliminating thousands of weapons and hundreds of tons of fissile material. But as hope faded and distrust began to return, that progress stalled. The Cold War drumbeat that casts gloom in Wellerstein’s final chapters has an eerie resonance today in calls to deploy more nuclear weapons amid growing anxiety over the international nuclear order.

And as military planners are debating how many nuclear weapons are enough to simultaneously deter two Russia and China, it’s worth recalling why Truman wanted to maintain civilian control of nuclear weapons. He had an instinctual sense that nuclear weapons are too destructive and too indiscriminate to be treated like weapons of war. And now they cannot be used without risking massive devastation. This makes nuclear deterrence an inescapable reality. Maybe it’s time to rethink the integration of nuclear weapons into military strategy, to give up on the idea that nuclear deterrence is something we can fine-tune and that we can control the consequences of their use. I’d like to think Truman would agree that nuclear deterrence is a necessary evil rather than something to be desired.

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Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

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Today is my birthday, but that’s not why I’m writing. For the last five years, it has also been a day that symbolizes the dangers to society posed by a flood of lies that spurred an angry mob to try to overturn an election. I call this information pollution. It poses as great a danger to our social environment, our political environment, and our psychological environment as climate change poses to our physical and biological environment.

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Five years ago, a mob attacked Capitol Building, assaulted hundreds of police officers, threatened the lives of members of Congress and the Vice President, all because they had been taught to believe the big lie about a rigged election. Their aim was to overturn the results of that election.

The machinery that generated and promoted this big lie had been building for decades. Fox News was an early purveyor of political propaganda in the guise of news. Those who watched Fox News were much more likely to believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, even after this was proven false.

There have always been con artists, ready to exploit our psychological weaknesses to manipulate us into believing lies and acting on those false beliefs. But rarely have they taken hold as readily as today. Rapid advances of information technology have made us increasingly vulnerable to information pollution.

It may seem strange to think that technology designed to make information readily available and easy to share and digest could be responsible for such harm. Indeed, information technology has done a lot of good, making it possible to communicate almost instantaneously across the globe, to improve the efficiency of manufacturing and service industries, and making people healthier, more prosperous, and generally better off.

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One feature of information technology is that it has driven down the price of information. When information was expensive, there was a competitive advantage to ensuring that the quality of information was high. When I was growing up, there were three major television networks, and all three worked to produce news broadcasts that provided reliable, timely, and important information to the public.

But the cheapening of information has created a sort of corollary to Gresham’s Law. Gresham’s Law is an economic principle that “bad money” drives out good. When there is a good currency and a bad one, people spend the bad currency and hoard the good one. It’s a bit different with information. Bad information drives out good not because people hoard good information but because people profit by purveying bad information. Because it’s essentially free, they can flood the environment with bad information and make it hard for others to find the truth or even to tell the difference.

During the industrial revolution, new industries sprang up that transformed the economy but polluted the environment and undermined worker safety and public health. But today’s information pollution is, if anything, more insidious. It’s not just the unfortunate byproduct of the industry; it is, in many cases, the product. Big tech companies have learned that they can profit by manipulating people’s emotional responses to keep them engaged. It doesn’t matter whether the information is true as long as it grabs your attention. They pretend that they’re just responding to public demands and have no responsibility for the quality of what they disseminate. Fox News and MAGA influencers don’t mislead by accident; it’s their core business.

Artificial intelligence takes information pollution to the next level. It expands the tools to assimilate and share information and promises to simplify routine tasks, but it also makes it much easier to produce and disseminate fake information, not just words but images, audio, and video. It has already amplified the problem of information pollution, under the name of AI slop.

I would like to be able to say that we can find our way through to ameliorate the problem of information pollution, just as we did with environmental pollution and hazardous workplaces. There are people who have dedicated themselves to rooting out misinformation and providing tools to help people sift out the real from the fake. And, until this last year, there were people in the U.S. government who were, in baby steps, trying to develop policy solutions.

But it’s hard to be optimistic. The Trump administration has worked hard to cripple or destroy all those efforts to fight information pollution and instead is actively promoting information pollution in the name of free speech. And social media platforms have abandoned efforts to identify and minimize their dissemination of bad information. There’s no profit in being good citizens.

When I was growing up, civil libertarians would argue against censorship of hateful speeech by saying that the best response to bad speech is more speech, not less. The best corrective for bad information is good information. But this administration turns that on its head by claiming that fighting information pollution – researching, exposing, and correcting misinformation and disinformation, or even just fact checking, is a form of censorship.

In effect, they are elevating their right to mislead you above your right to know the truth.

And they are not just doing that here in the United States. Their National Security Strategy sides with the purveyors of disinformation in Europe and against the fact-checkers and regulators who have tried to address the problem, and they have imposed travel bans on some of those who led those efforts.

I can’t be optimistic, but I can offer one suggestion. Let’s name the problem of information pollution. Let’s explain where it comes from and the harm it does. And let’s raise the cost for the polluters.

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year Civil Service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

The printed version of my oath of office that I posted on my office wall

I spent most of my career at the State Department in Washington, DC. When I met people around the country and they asked what I did, I would answer “I work for you.” Then I would explain that I worked for the federal government. Of course, I reported to and took marching orders from the elected political leadership, but my highest responsibility was to the American people.

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I worked in the Civil Service for over thirty years. Each time I started a new job, I took the oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Our Constitution begins with the words “We the People,” defining the United States as a republic. As President John Adams said, our republic is “a government of laws, not men.” The oath is a reminder to public servants to obey the law.

In my career, I was privileged to work alongside many accomplished professionals who were dedicated to serving the American people. But even more than a career, public service is a culture. It relies on a body of knowledge that has been built up over generations and adapts its practices and priorities to meet the demands of the time and respond to changes in political direction. The building and transmission of expertise has been a great strength of our system of public service. I learned from my predecessors, and then learned by doing, and then helped the next generation learn to find its own way.

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The Trump Administration is working systematically to destroy the culture of public service and to transform our government into one based on loyalty rather than competence. Former career diplomat and CIA Director Bill Burns, in an open letter published in the Atlantic, described it as “a war on public service and expertise.” The government is supposed to be honest and fair, to operate “without fear or favor.” But government based on loyalty to a leader who demands praise and obedience, is neither honest nor fair. It rejects inconvenient facts, punishes dissent, and encourages people to seek advantages not through fair competition but by currying favor with the leader. Loyalty tests lead to cronyism and corruption. They make our government less efficient, less effective, less fair, and less trustworthy; they weaken our country and leave our people less secure and less prosperous.

There is no better illustration of the conflict between loyalty and the rule of law than the dispute between Acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove in February, 2025. Bove ordered Sassoon to seek dismissal of corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams, but to maintain the threat of prosecution as a way to pressure Adams to do the Administration’s bidding. Sassoon refused, citing the strong evidence valid grand jury indictment against Adams and a Supreme Court decision that the Constitution prohibits politically motivated prosecutions and, by extension, use of threatened prosecution for political coercion. Bove responded by dismissing this legal prohibition as a policy judgment, saying “Your oath to uphold the Constitution does not permit you to substitute your policy judgment for that of the President or senior leadership of the Justice Department.”

The Trump Administration has taken many actions to undermine the culture of public service. In addition to the arbitrary and illegal mass firings of federal workers, the Trump Administration has systematically worked to undermine the professional Civil Service by moving many of the most experienced officials into new job categories where they could be fired at will and by making loyalty to the President a key factor in hiring and promotions. This could lead to a return of the corrupt “spoils system” under which Presidents rewarded their political supporters with federal jobs. Putting fidelity to leadership above qualifications and fealty to the law opens the door to widespread corruption and incompetence. The Administration has run roughshod over conflict of interest rules designed to ensure that officials act to serve the public interest and not to the private interests of the President, his political appointees, and his supporters.

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Soon after President Trump took office in 2017, his actions raised questions about his commitment to uphold his oath of office to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I printed a copy of my own oath of office and posted it on my office wall as a reminder that my first loyalty was to the law. The American people deserve no less.

Unfortunately, the ongoing assault on public service continues to harm not only federal workers but the public at large. In this new year, I urge my fellow citizens to join in expressing our support for the values and culture of public service, our gratitude for those who have served and continue to serve in such difficult times, and our commitment to rebuild a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people.”

Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department in 2025 after a thirty-year civil service career. He has worked extensively on international nuclear policy, including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to eviscerate the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. It’s proposed rule would rescind the “endangerment finding” that is the basis for that regulation. The proposal is open for public comment through Monday September 22. Public comments are an important part of the process. The government has to respond to the substance of any objections and if it fails to do so is open to legal challenge.

The Clean Air Act directs the EPA to regulate atmospheric pollutants that endanger public health and welfare. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a dozen states that had sued the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on this basis, and in 2009 the EPA issued a finding that greenhouse gas emissions have potentially severe environmental and health impacts. This endangerment finding was based on a comprehensive review of scientific and economic studies of climate change and its effects.

In March 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to rescind the endangerment finding. In July and August 2025 the EPA published its proposal to do so, which is open for public comment through September 22. The EPA proposal relies heavily on a report by the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (CWG), a hand-picked group of five climate change contrarians, scientists whose views are far outside the scientific mainstream. Climate scientists criticized the report for cherry-picking data to downplay the danger from greenhouse gases and compiled a detailed critique, citing numerous factual errors, misrepresentation of scientific evidence, and a lack of peer review. The CWG has since disbanded amid questions whether it skirted federal law on outside advisory committees. The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has issued a new report reviewing and reaffirming the scientific basis for the endangerment finding. The Academies’ report concludes that the 2009 endangerment finding was accurate, has stood the test of time and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence, concluding that

the evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused [greenhouse gas emissions] is beyond scientific dispute.”

In a nutshell, climate change is real threat to health and well-being of every American and every human being. The Trump Administration’s attempt to deny this is transparently wrong not only on the facts but also on the damage it will cause by reversing policies designed to limit the damage. You can help avert this by submitting a comment by the September 22 deadline. If you are looking for a place to start, here are some resources.

The American Physical Society (a professional organization of over 50,000 physicists in the United States) submitted a public comment opposing the EPA proposal, and invited its members to endorse that comment. The comment quotes the 2021 APS Statement on Earth’s Changing Climate and makes the following key points:

• Earth’s climate is changing. This critical issue poses the risk of significant environmental, social, and economic disruptions around the globe.

• Multiple lines of evidence strongly support the finding that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have become the dominant driver of global climate warming observed since the mid-twentieth century.

• Moreover, the deduction that human-induced alterations to many principal components of the climate system are accelerating is supported by the preponderance of observational evidence.

• The potential consequences of climate change are great and the actions taken over the next decade or two will determine human influences on the climate for centuries to millennia.

Meanwhile, in May 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order on “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” The order says “Each agency head shall, to the extent practicable, incorporate the OSTP Director’s guidance on Gold Standard Science and the requirements of this order into the processes by which their agency conducts, manages, interprets, communicates, and uses scientific or technological information prior to the finalization of the updated policies under this section.”

In June, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued guidance on implementing this executive order. The guidance lists nine tenets of gold standard science, saying it should be (1) reproducible, (2) transparent, (3) communicative of error and uncertainty, (4) collaborative and interdisciplinary, (5) skeptical of its findings and assumptions, (6) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses, (7) subject to unbiased peer review, (8) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes, and (9) without conflicts of interests. The guidance says that “federally-funded and federally-performed science, and its use in Federal decision-making, must be beyond reproach.” The report of the Energy Department’s Climate Working Group fails to meet the majority of those tenets and therefore does not provide a sound basis for public policy.

I submitted a comment supporting the APS comment and drawing on Executive Order and OSTP guidance on gold standard science:

Section 3, paragraph (c) of that order states: "Each agency head shall, to the extent practicable, incorporate the OSTP Director’s guidance on Gold Standard Science and the requirements of this order into the processes by which their agency conducts, manages, interprets, communicates, and uses scientific or technological information prior to the finalization of the updated policies under this section." That guidance, set forth in a June 23, 2025 memorandum, says the use of science in federal government decision making should meet nine separate criteria. The CWG report fails to meet the standards at least five of these criteria, namely that it be "transparent, communicative of uncertainty and error, collaborative and interdisciplinary, skeptical of its findings and assumptions, and subject to unbiased peer review."

These failures to meet substantive procedural requirements make the CWG report inadmissible as the basis for a regulatory decision. Furthermore, since the proposed decision relies heavily on the CWG report, that proposal must be withdrawn in full.

I am not a climate expert myself, and you don’t need to be an expert to submit a public comment and make your voice heard. The deadline is soon.