“The Strength of Our Weakness”: Bandung at 70

The year 2025 marked many well-known anniversaries of the nuclear age. Unbeknownst to many, it also marked the 70^th anniversary of the 1955 Bandung Conference, when delegates and heads of state from twenty-nine Asian and African countries, representing more than half of the world’s population, convened in Bandung, Indonesia. This unprecedented gathering of newly independent states defied contemporary expectations by identifying the nuclear-armed Cold War as the greatest threat to their political, economic and cultural development, claiming the cause of nuclear disarmament as a matter of shared concern for all countries. This commentary recounts the significance of the Bandung meeting for subsequent developments in multilateral nuclear diplomacy, including the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961, whose members proved central to securing the inclusion of Article VI disarmament commitments in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the negotiations that led to the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). As of November 2025, the TPNW has been signed by ninety-five countries and acceded to by another four countries, constituting a global majority whose stance reflects the long legacy of non-aligned nuclear multilateralism inaugurated at Bandung.