{"id":10368,"date":"2026-09-17T10:21:49","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/?p=10368"},"modified":"2026-09-17T10:21:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:21:49","slug":"latin-americas-long-game-nuclear-disarmament-in-the-age-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/?p=10368","title":{"rendered":"Latin America\u2019s Long Game: Nuclear Disarmament in the Age of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

The answer to one of the world\u2019s most dangerous security problems was drafted in Mexico City nearly sixty years ago.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

National Museum of the United States Air Force Nuclear Missiles. (https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/rocbolt\/8183674398; CC BY-NC 2.0, https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/2.0\/deed.en)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Latin America built the world\u2019s first nuclear-free zone in 1967, and ever since, it has been at the forefront of innovation in nuclear diplomacy, responsible international behavior, and nonproliferation norm-setting.  Over 20 countries in the region initially signed the Treaty of Tlatelolco<\/a>\u2014formally, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean. Eventually, all Latin American and Caribbean nations signed and ratified the treaty. Tlatelolco remains a viable alternative to today\u2019s faltering nuclear architecture.<\/p>\n

Latin America is now pushing to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) from being integrated into nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) systems. The region\u2019s long game, total nuclear disarmament in the age of AI, might be the answer to one of the most intractable problems in grand strategy today. Yet Latin America is still perceived as \u201cthe land that geopolitics forgot,<\/a>\u201d<\/a> where geopolitical strategy is notorious only for its absence, as hard security questions dissolve into the more conventional issues of corruption, illicit economies, drug trafficking, and criminal violence. This perception of Latin America\u2019s irrelevance in geopolitics and U.S. grand strategy could not be more misguided. It is a region where peaceful grand strategy works and the paradigm of nuclear disarmament has been successfully put into practice.<\/p>\n

The Treaty of Tlatelolco was an act of collective geopolitical imagination that the current nuclear order has never adequately honored or learned from. One of the main architects, the Mexican diplomat Alfonso Garc\u00eda Robles, eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize for it in 1982.<\/a> Hard-nosed Mexican and Brazilian diplomats\u2014the only Latin American representatives in the initial global nonproliferation treaty<\/a> (NPT) negotiations, which ran concurrently with the Tlatelolco talks\u2014actively pressed for the regional treaty to serve as a model for the global one.<\/p>\n

The Latin American representatives were rebuffed by nuclear-armed states<\/a> unwilling to apply the same disarmament logic globally that they had just accepted regionally. Yet the NPT that emerged froze nuclear weapons distribution rather than dismantling it, offering only a distant pledge to pursue total disarmament while locking in the hierarchy of nuclear haves and have-nots<\/a>. That compromise is now under severe strain in the age of AI.<\/p>\n

Since the Treaty of Tlatelolco, the region\u2019s communal approach to nuclear governance has been built on the principle that weapon prohibitions rather than managed deterrence should be the end goal. Yet this process was as difficult as it was innovative. A few countries\u2014Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico\u2014had already developed enriched uranium stockpiles, and some had the political will and the capacity to develop nuclear arsenals.<\/p>\n

Getting all Latin American countries to sign, ratify, and bring the treaty into full force required negotiations that spanned decades. But what made the outcome successful was that the prohibition came first, before the political will to disarm, not the other way round. This in itself was one of the greatest feats of geopolitical imagination and peaceful nuclear diplomacy in the 20th century. It has maintained a zone of nuclear peace through decades of superpower rivalry and geopolitical turbulence in other regions and continents.<\/p>\n

\u201cArms control is dying,\u201d warned UN Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres<\/a> as delegates from across the world wrestled with a nuclear landscape that grows more volatile by the year. He called for \u201cbreathing new life\u201d into the N<\/a>P<\/a>T<\/a>. One possible source of inspiration is to look beyond the nuclear powers and the usual places where negotiations stall. Instead, look to history and middle powers in the Global South for guidance, particularly Latin America\u2019s tradition and current innovation in nuclear diplomacy. The region\u2019s innovations in the field suggest peaceful and responsible alternatives exist to the current state of nuclear policy.<\/p>\n

The Treaty of Tlatelolco and the region\u2019s diplomatic tradition in nuclear disarmament have become even more important as nuclear-armed countries like India and Pakistan have become more belligerent and \u201ccavalier about nuclear use,\u201d and less \u201cconstrained by the \u2018nuclear taboo<\/a>,<\/a>\u2019\u201d<\/a> a reflection of a global trend. For the first time since the Cold War<\/a>, the number of nuclear warheads has increased<\/a>, reaching an estimated 12,187 warheads in January 2026 (though still low compared to the Cold War\u2019s extremely high numbers). China\u2019s growing nuclear stockpile and the expiry this year of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty<\/a> (New START) between the U.S. and Russia have accelerated arsenal buildups among the three major nuclear powers. Additionally, North Korea\u2019s relentless missile advances, Russia\u2019s nuclear brandishing over Ukraine, the fallout from the Iran war, the dithering new treaties with Saudi Arabia<\/a>, and shifting deterrence doctrines in South Asia<\/a> have all strained long-held assumptions about strategic stability in today\u2019s nuclear architecture.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, another race is picking up steam with implications for the nuclear arms race. The great powers\u2014the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and India\u2014are rushing to integrate AI into modern conventional warfare, operational planning, and new, sophisticated autonomous systems. But AI technology has proliferated faster than any military\u2019s ability to adopt it. Today, the decisive question<\/a> in the AI race is not who develops a capability first, but who integrates it first. As Paul Scharre argues, in this race to win \u201cthe war of the future,\u201d losing human control over conventional warfare becomes a real scenario, especially if this becomes a race to the bottom. This has also affected nuclear weapons systems.<\/p>\n

As Joshua Keating note<\/a>s<\/a>, there is an \u201cincreasing encroachment of AI systems into the larger nuclear architecture,\u201d a trend sparking global alarms. Guterres warns that \u201cthe nuclear threat is compounded by new dangers from rapidly evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.\u201d Pope Leo XIV\u2019s encyclical on AI warns about autonomous weapons. And in July 2026, a Rome Declaration of the Global Nobel Laureates Assembly<\/a> sounded the alarm over the risks of automation and rearmament. \u201cIn the midst of a worsening nuclear arms race, we are embarking on an equally dangerous AI race,\u201d all based on the assumption that lasting security should be built on fear, domination, and the permanent threat of assured mutual destruction.<\/p>\n

Latin America\u2019s regional powers never abandoned their tradition in nuclear diplomacy and continue to innovate in the field, behaving as responsible actors in the international community. The 1991 Guadalajara Agreement<\/a> created the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials, a reciprocal safeguards system under which each country\u2019s inspectors verify the other\u2019s facilities, turning two former and potential nuclear rivals into mutual guarantors of restraint. Furthermore, Mexico, working with the United States, Canada, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), completed the removal of its highly enriched uranium at the Nuclear Security Summit<\/a> held in 2012. Brazil is pursuing a largely domestic program in naval nuclear propulsion technology to <\/a>develop<\/a> nuclear-powered submarines<\/a> using low-enriched uranium with French non-nuclear design help.<\/a><\/p>\n

In response to the United States and China accelerating into an AI-driven arms competition, Mexico has returned to the forefront of nuclear diplomacy, building on previous initiatives and a 2023-2024 Xi-Biden agreement<\/a> that led to constructive dialogue between China and the U.S.<\/a> on NC3 systems<\/a> and AI-related risks. Mexico introduced new UN resolutions designed<\/a> to address this new threat, which did not exist when the original Treaty of Tlatelolco was written in the 1960s. In December 2025, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution A\/RES\/80\/23<\/a> to prohibit nuclear weapons from being placed under the control of AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cReaffirming that nuclear disarmament and the total elimination of nuclear weapons are the only absolute guarantee against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons,\u201d Mexico and other nations introduced the resolution, which targeted primarily NC3 systems. Point 1 of Resolution 80\/23 \u201c[d]emands that, pending the total elimination of nuclear weapons, human control and oversight is maintained over command, control and communications systems of nuclear weapons, including those that integrate artificial intelligence technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

By expanding the focus to the entire NC3 architecture and showing the risks of integrating AI into its systems, the resolution also identified potential nuclear conflict scenarios of computational and systemic failures occurring when machine learning algorithms interact with nuclear warning systems. It also explicitly raised concerns of algorithmic cascades and errors, cyber vulnerabilities, and unexpected autonomous behaviors triggering unintentional escalations that would not happen otherwise in a traditional escalation ladder.<\/a><\/p>\n

The resolution\u2019s vote reflected the international balance that sustains the current nuclear architecture. A total of 115 countries, including many middle and regional powers\u2014such as Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Austria, Ireland, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia\u2014voted in favor of the resolution.<\/a> Most, if not all, nuclear states opposed or abstained in their vote. Eight countries voted against the resolution: Russia, North Korea, Burundi, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Israel, and Argentina\u2014the only major Latin American country that strayed from the regional bloc. Forty-four other countries abstained, including China, India, Hungary, Japan, Canada, and several countries in the European Union.<\/p>\n

The tension between paradigms\u2014deterrence, nonproliferation, and outright prohibition\u2014has created the current nuclear architecture. The resolution\u2019s tally in favor reflects the architecture\u2019s fractures: the nonproliferation and prohibition-and-restraint bloc voting yes or abstaining, the deterrence states voting no or abstaining. But the resolution has led the UN General Assembly to establish, through the First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, a multilateral platform to have more technical discussions<\/a> on crafting a regulatory framework for AI-NC3 integration, which could maintain more meaningful human control over high-level nuclear command and control.<\/p>\n

In May 2026, diplomats gathered at the United Nations for a critical nuclear conference held at its headquarters in New York: the 11th Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty (NPT). The conference produced communiqu\u00e9s, working papers, and side events. But its outcome failed to reach consensus on many of the most pressing issues, making this the third consecutive conference to fail to achieve substantial agreement. It did not adopt most of the language specifically restricting or at least regulating AI integration into NC3 systems adopted in the UN resolution that Mexico had introduced earlier in the General Assembly.<\/p>\n

A phrase in the NPT Review Conference\u2019s initial draft\u2014\u201cthe entanglement of conventional and strategic forces, and interference in communications and command and control\u201d\u2014was removed from the final draft of the outcome document<\/a>. In the end, New York was a missed opportunity to build on this new work on AI, nonproliferation, and nuclear disarmament. The missed opportunity also raises the question of why successful and innovative middle-power nuclear diplomacy is often forgotten, overlooked, or ignored. The next review conference will not be held until 2031.<\/p>\n

The Cold War\u2019s brinkmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the <\/a>Cuban <\/a>m<\/a>issile <\/a>c<\/a>risis of 1962<\/a> offered Latin America a glimpse of what Robert Oppenheimer described as getting caught with \u201ctwo scorpions in a bottle.\u201d<\/a> The lesson regional governments drew from that near-disaster was that nuclear weapons themselves, regardless of who holds them or how responsibly they claim to wield them, are the primary source of nuclear risk. So, in response, the region\u2019s middle powers, Mexico and Brazil, did something unusual in nuclear diplomacy. Rather than scrambling for competing nuclear umbrellas or racing to develop their own deterrents by building arsenals of their own, they renounced the possibility of nuclear weapons entirely, choosing to ban them from the region altogether, and to lock in that choice through binding international law.<\/p>\n

Through Tlatelolco, Latin American states secured nuclear-armed powers\u2019 commitments to denuclearize their own territories in the region, extend negative security assurances, and constrain nuclear deployments nearby. With the treaty, Latin American states created the Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean<\/a> and partnered with the IAEA on verification and safeguards, preserving sovereign rights to peaceful nuclear technology while foreclosing the temptation to follow the nuclear weapons path.<\/p>\n

Decades later, the deterrence paradigm\u2014the bedrock of Washington\u2019s objections to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons\u2014has not delivered the stability it promised. North Korea and Ukraine are the most vivid proof: The threat of force that was supposed to halt proliferation became a powerful incentive for North Korea to successfully develop nuclear weapons, while in the case of Ukraine, peaceful nuclear disarmament became an invitation for a future Russian invasion. The question that confronted delegates in New York earlier this year was not whether the current order is sustainable, but how disorderly its unraveling will be in the age of AI, especially with the growing AI arms race, and whether any alternative regulatory and nonproliferation architecture can absorb the shock.<\/p>\n

Latin America\u2019s tradition in nuclear diplomacy prompts a serious reckoning with an alternative model within the current nuclear architecture that has already worked for an entire region, a prohibition paradigm that has spread through subsequent nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaties in the South Pacific and Oceania, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and later globalized in the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.<\/a> Originally, the Tlatelolco framework was itself built against resistance to nuclear-state disarmament. Its architects understood that the legal architecture of prohibition had to come first, before the political will of the most powerful actors could be moved.<\/p>\n

The danger is the weapons themselves, regardless of who holds them or how responsibly they claim to. This is the logic of the Treaty of Tlatelolco. It rejects the deterrence premise outright: As long as the weapons exist, the risk of use\u2014through accident, miscalculation, escalation, or plain malice or folly\u2014is intrinsic and cannot be safely managed indefinitely, with or without AI. Yet nonproliferation and disarmament are not rival imperatives. While disarmament is the envisioned outcome, nonproliferation is the means to that end. The whole force of Latin America\u2019s tradition is that it refused the middle paradigm\u2019s compromise of nonproliferation and went straight to prohibition 60 years early, which is exactly the alternative the region is holding up against today\u2019s AI-NC3 crisis. As the AI arms race picks up speed, the impulse to limit AI in NC3 systems opens a narrow window for nuclear disarmament to become the end goal.<\/p>\n

– Marcel Anduiza<\/a>, Published courtesy of Lawfare<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The answer to one of the world\u2019s most dangerous security problems was drafted in Mexico City nearly sixty years ago. Latin America built the world\u2019s first nuclear-free zone in 1967, and ever since, it has been at the forefront of innovation in nuclear diplomacy, responsible international behavior, and nonproliferation norm-setting.  Over 20 countries in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":10369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/lawfare-assets-new.azureedge.net\/assets\/images\/default-source\/article-images\/u-s-nuclear.jpg?sfvrsn=49e0c22d_5","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[214],"class_list":["post-10368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security-public-safety","tag-thedailybrieffriday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10370,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10368\/revisions\/10370"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}