The NPT Is Not Dying. It Is Being Buried — By the Same Powers That Wrote It

Mohammad Javad Larijani called the Non-Proliferation Treaty a dead document. He is not wrong — but the obituary the Iranian state media prefers to read misses who wrote the death certificate.

By Monexus Staff Writermena5-minute read26 Apr 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

Mohammad Javad Larijani, described by Tasnim as a senior international expert, called the Non-Proliferation Treaty a dead document on 26 April 2026. The same framing holds that the probability of a renewed regional war remains below sixty percent. The Iranian state media outlet carried both claims without challenge. Neither deserves the silence it typically receives in Western coverage.

The observation is not without merit. The NPT has been selectively honoured, selectively enforced, and selectively violated by the very states that negotiated it in 1968. India, Pakistan, and Israel never signed. North Korea withdrew. The United States and United Kingdom moved nuclear submarines and strategic bombers into NATO postures that the treaty was designed to prevent. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty remains unratified by several NPT custodians. This is not a secret. Arms-control professionals have said it aloud for decades. What is different now is who is saying it, and why the international system has stopped pretending the framework functions as designed.

A Convenient Diagnosis

Larijani's framing — carried verbatim by Tasnim, an Iranian state-affiliated news service — presents Tehran's nuclear posture as rational response rather than strategic choice. The sixty-percent figure for renewed conflict does similar work: it positions Iran as a cautious actor managing probability, not as one driving escalation. The language of expertise, of probability curves and institutional analysis, lends the argument a credibility that a direct political statement from the foreign ministry would not carry.

This is not unusual. Every major power wraps its strategic interests in the language of system critique when the system no longer serves it. The Soviet Union spoke of "peaceful coexistence" while building arsenal after arsenal. American think tanks spent the 1990s arguing that missile defence was a stabilising rather than destabilising force. China's posture on the South China Sea invokes historical rights that conveniently align with present economic zones. The form is universal. Tasnim's framing of Larijani is not uniquely instrumental — but it is instrumental, and it deserves to be named.

The substantive claim, however, survives the sourceless framing. The NPT is in structural crisis. The crisis predates Iran's current enrichment programme, which itself predates the Trump administration's maximum-pressure withdrawal from the JCPOA. Understanding the order of operations matters: the framework frayed before Tehran accelerated centrifuge counts, before North Korea tested thermonuclear devices, before AUKUS carved a nuclear-powered submarine pathway outside the treaty's normal channels.

What Sixty Percent Actually Tells Us

The war probability figure — less than sixty percent — is not sourced to any disclosed methodology. Tasnim carries it as declaration, not analysis. No polling instrument is named. No modelling framework is cited. The number functions as a rhetorical ceiling: a signal that catastrophe is not imminent, that the situation is containable, that the Islamic Republic is not the driver of regional instability its Western critics allege.

This kind of probabilistic framing has become a staple of diplomatic signalling from Tehran. It manages audience expectations domestically and signals calibrated restraint internationally. Whether the underlying assessment is accurate is unknowable from the source material. What is knowable is that Tasnim published it on a Saturday evening, Eastern Hemisphere, as part of a wider week in which Israeli officials had publicly articulated red lines on enrichment levels, and in which the Trump administration had signalled it was reconsidering its secondary sanctions architecture.

The sixty-percent figure, in that context, reads less like analysis and more like positioning. It says: we are not the ones on the edge of this decision. Whether that claim holds depends entirely on what happens to the enrichment programme in the coming months — a variable the sources do not specify.

The Structural Frame the Wire Misses

Coverage of Iranian nuclear policy in Western outlets routinely anchors to the question of compliance — Is Tehran violating the NPT? Is the deal dead? — rather than asking why the NPT itself became a vessel that different parties could fill with contradictory expectations. The treaty was designed to freeze the nuclear order: five declared states would retain weapons, everyone else would foreswear them, and the international system would benefit from predictable restraint. It embedded a hierarchy, not a principle. The hierarchy proved unstable.

When George H.W. Bush's administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, it did so citing the changing strategic environment. When the United States entered into the AUKUS partnership with Australia and Britain — enabling the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion technology to a non-weapons state — it did so on the argument that the arrangement fell outside NPT restrictions because the material was not "weapons-grade." When India received a civilian nuclear cooperation exemption in 2008 despite being outside the NPT entirely, the framework bent. Each bend was justified on its own terms. The cumulative effect was the erosion Larijani identifies — but the erosion was produced by actors far larger than Tehran.

None of this absolves the Iranian programme. Enrichment to weapons-adjacent levels outside verified inspections is a fact that carries its own weight regardless of what the Bush administration did in 2002 or what AUKUS did in 2021. But structural critique of the NPT must be applied symmetrically or it is not analysis — it is advocacy dressed in institutional language. Larijani's diagnosis, made through Tasnim on a Saturday, names a real disease. The patient he identifies is not the only one in the room.

Stakes and the Road Not Taken

If the NPT continues on its current trajectory — treated as a compliance checklist by some signatories, an obstacle by others, and a rhetorical weapon by a third tier — the most likely outcome is a regional cascade. Saudi Arabia has signalled it will pursue independent enrichment if Iran reaches weapons-adjacent capacity. Turkey has expressed similar concerns. Egypt and Brazil have historical enrichment programmes that remain intermittent. The framework was designed to prevent exactly this dynamic. Its selective enforcement has made it not just unlikely but counterproductive: a tool that accelerates the proliferation it was built to stop.

The counter-narrative that Western outlets tend to centre — Iran as the singular threat to non-proliferation — is incomplete. It lets the major powers off the hook for decades of institutional erosion and positions Tehran as the problem rather than a symptom. Larijani's sixty-percent figure and his description of the NPT as dead deserve scrutiny precisely because they are partially right. The treaty is failing. But the failure is collective, and the price of its collapse will be paid by everyone in the region — Iranian civilians included.

Monexus covered Larijani's comments against the grain of the wire framing, which typically processes Iranian nuclear commentary as threat assessment only. The structural dimension — who built this framework, who has violated it, and who benefits from its collapse — is the frame the story requires.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/tasnimnews_en/51784
https://t.me/tasnimplus/51782
https://t.me/tasnimnews_en/51783