Some consider that fresh disarmament efforts are needed to advance in terms of non-proliferation. This approach is debatable. We may wonder if it’s really by eliminating more nuclear weapons that we’ll succeed in convincing countries violating their international obligations to comply with them. Let’s take a look at the facts. It was in the mid-1990s that some countries developed or accelerated clandestine nuclear programmes. Yet, at that same time, nuclear-weapon States were strongly engaged in the nuclear disarmament process and arms control, whether unilaterally (like France and the United Kingdom), bilaterally (like the United States and Russia) or multilaterally (with the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995 and the signing of the CTBT in 1996).