Assessing 80 Years of Diplomatic Efforts for Nuclear Disarmament: Marking the Legacy of UN General Assembly Resolution 1, 1946

January 2026 marks the 80th anniversary of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1(1), the first resolution to be adopted, which established a UN Commission tasked to “make specific proposals for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons.” The resolution placed the newly created United Nations, international diplomacy, and international law at the heart of the debate over how to address the challenge of nuclear weapons posed to humanity. This webinar will reflect on eight decades of multilateral efforts to advance nuclear disarmament. These include the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which entered into force in 1970 and contains unmet obligations to end the arms race at an early date and achieve nuclear disarmament, and which 191 states have joined. There is also the much newer Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which entered into force five years ago, in January 2021, and has already been accepted by 99 states. The discussion will cover current and imminent challenges for multilateral nuclear diplomacy, the crisis of nuclear arms control, and prospects for the upcoming spring 2026 NPT Review Conference, which follows back-to-back Review Conferences in 2012 and 2015 that failed to reach agreement, as well as expectations for the first TPNW Review Conference, to be held in late 2026.

Speakers:
– Izumi Nakamitsu is United Nations Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.
– Patricia Lewis, a physicist, is past director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and co-chair of the TPNW Scientific Advisory Group (TBC).
– Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova is Director of the Nonproliferation Program at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation and Japan Chair for a World without Nuclear Weapons.
– Zia Mian (moderator) is Co-Director of the Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security and a co-founder of the Physicists Coalition.