Weapons-Free Zone

A weapons-free zone (WFZ) is a region designated by international agreement in which a defined class of weapons—typically nuclear, but also chemical, biological, or sometimes conventional categories—is banned from being stationed, tested, manufactured, or otherwise possessed. The concept is most developed in the form of nuclear-weapon-free zones (NWFZs), which the UN General Assembly formally defined in resolution 3472 B (1975) as zones recognized by the Assembly in which states have undertaken to exclude nuclear weapons entirely.

Five regional NWFZ treaties are in force:

• Treaty of Tlatelolco (1967) — Latin America and the Caribbean
• Treaty of Rarotonga (1985) — South Pacific
• Treaty of Bangkok (1995) — Southeast Asia
• Treaty of Pelindaba (1996, in force 2009) — Africa
• Treaty of Semipalatinsk (2006) — Central Asia

Mongolia has also declared itself a single-state nuclear-weapon-free territory, recognized by the UN in 2000. Beyond regional pacts, the Antarctic Treaty (1959), Outer Space Treaty (1967), and Seabed Treaty (1971) create weapons-free regimes for specific environments.

Each treaty typically includes protocols open to the five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the NPT (the US, UK, France, Russia, and China), under which they pledge not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against zone parties—so-called negative security assurances. Adherence to these protocols has been uneven; several nuclear powers have signed with reservations.

Proposals for additional zones remain politically contested. The most prominent is a Weapons of Mass Destruction–Free Zone in the Middle East, first proposed by Egypt and Iran in 1974 and reaffirmed at the 1995 NPT Review Conference, but never realized. A UN conference series on the topic began in 2019 under General Assembly decision 73/546, though Israel and the United States have not participated.

WFZs are widely viewed as confidence-building instruments that complement, rather than replace, the global non-proliferation regime.