Tasks: Negotiation on global nuclear agreement is moved to 2021

Originally, the Review Conference was to be held at the UN headquarters in New York from April 27 to May 22, 2020.

Most of the 191 states that joined the agreement had planned to participate, including Sweden.

Now the proposal is that the Review Conference be held between January 4 and January 29, 2021 because of the corona crisis. The US State Department states that it supports the proposal.

The conference will be held every five years to review the implementation and compliance of the NPT, which is the multilateral disarmament agreement that has received the largest accession of all disarmament agreements.

The agreement prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons from nuclear states to non-nuclear states. The latter commit to opening their civilian nuclear power plants for inspection by the International Nuclear Energy Agency, the IAEA.

- While the NPT is being postponed, nuclear weapons states continue to invest and modernize their weapons of mass destruction. As the risk of nuclear use has increased in recent years, it is risky to just keep waiting and hope that nothing goes wrong, says Beatrice Fihn, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and is the head of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

"It is time for all countries without nuclear weapons to sign the ban on nuclear weapons," she says.

Sweden decided in the summer of 2019 not to accede to the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The NPT agreement was concluded after negotiations between the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom to halt a development that would undermine their ability to maintain their balance of power.

In the 1960s, it was an important issue in the European countries that had the technical capacity to develop their own nuclear weapons, including Sweden.