On May 27, the shadow of Hiroshima spread ominously from the United Nations headquarters over the entire world as the seventh review conference of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty ended in failure.

The member states to the treaty were under a mandate -- defined by the NPT itself and by the outcomes of the two previous reviews -- to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons around the world and to hold the nuclear weapon states accountable to their disarmament obligations. Instead, they found themselves caught in a tangle of procedural challenges from which they were unable to extricate themselves over an entire month. 

Nearly the first two weeks of the four-week conference were wasted in attempts to approve the agenda. The third week evaporated in disagreements over the tasks of the three working committees. The final week was dominated by the anxiety of watching the clock run out.

When it did, the fact that there was no consensus on how to strengthen the treaty was overshadowed by the realization that our nuclear peril -- already growing more urgent by the day -- had been virtually ignored while the diplomats argued over punctuation and footnotes.

The failure to achieve consensus, however, should not be seen as a lack of agreement on what needs to be done. The vast majority of NPT member states support the practical steps toward nuclear disarmament to which they all agreed in 2000: entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, negotiation of a fissile materials ban,  increased investment in verification technologies, international controls over the nuclear fuel cycle, and fulfillment of the "unequivocal undertaking" by the nuclear weapon states to eliminate their arsenals, among others. They also recognize that the non-proliferation goals of the treaty are inseparable from the disarmament goals.  They said so in speech after frustrated speech during a month of general debate, and they offered dozens of substantive proposals that were never given a formal hearing.

Moreover, a kind of shadow conference, comprising non-governmental organizations, municipal officials, and experts in international law and disarmament ranging from Daniel Ellsberg to Robert McNamara, ran parallel to the "official" review, adding the voices of civil society to the demands for full compliance with the NPT. Mayor Akiba of Hiroshima presented an emergency appeal to ban nuclear weapons by 2020 that has been endorsed by hundreds of other mayors around the world. Yoko Ono spoke emotionally of the need for nuclear disarmament to the delegates gathered in the General Assembly, who had just been given petitions with millions of signatures calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Hundreds of hibakusha -- the survivors of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- came to the review as witnesses to the horror of nuclear war.  Indigenous peoples who have been the principal victims of nuclear weapons testing and production demanded disarmament as a form of social justice. Medical students descended upon Times Square to educate pedestrians about the consequences of nuclear war, while youth from many countries showed more leadership qualities than the diplomats and politicians who were sequestered in the dank and smoky basement of the UN.

With so much desire by so many people to do the right thing, what went wrong? At the end of the day, the review collapsed over one issue: the refusal of the United States to build on the foundations for disarmament that were laid in 1995 and 2000, or even to acknowledge that those foundations exist.  The Bush administration boasted of progress in reducing the numbers of nuclear weapons in slick publications that failed to mention the CTBT or the other practical steps to which the US had made firm commitments. Such claims rang hollow given the permanent role for nuclear weapons described in US security policy, the administration's push for nuclear-armed bunker busters and missile defenses, and the indefensible argument that nuclear weapons in "good" hands are acceptable and even necessary, while they must be kept out of "evil" hands at all costs. The other member states may have been willing to compromise on details of implementation; they refused to endorse a cynical revision of history and a self-serving double standard.

The Bush administration may attempt to spin the meaning of the failed NPT review to suit its distaste for multilateral negotiations and for the UN as an institution. This would be akin to a teenager breaking the lawnmower and then telling his parents that he can't cut the lawn because the lawnmower doesn't work. One cannot deliberately "break" a consensus-based decision making process and then claim that multilateralism does not work. The fact that a few other countries exploited the vulnerabilities of consensus decision making to advance narrow, but comparatively minor, agendas does not exonerate the world's largest nuclear superpower. The US exploited the process for the clear purpose of retaining and modernizing its nuclear arsenal, while trying to deny that option to others.

A medical analogy is hard to avoid: had the US delegation been a physician and the Earth its patient, we would have just witnessed a case of global medical malpractice with a potentially fatal outcome.

The failure of the NPT review is a tragedy. That it happened in the 60th anniversary year of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an outrage. The challenge for civil society and for the overwhelming majority of countries that left New York frustrated and angry is to find new and more effective ways to ensure full compliance with the NPT and to rid the world of nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.