Nuclear disarmament of Libya

The disarmament of Libya was a process of eliminating the weapons of mass destruction when Libya under Muammar Gaddafi voluntarily agreed upon disbanding its chemical weapons and ending the long pursuit of nuclear weapons on 19 December 2003.. Upon inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the IAEA, had said: Libya's nuclear program was "in the very initial stages of development" at the time.

In 1968, Libya under King Idris had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), ratified the treaty in 1975 under Gaddafi, followed by concluded a safeguards agreement in 1980 in a view of starting nuclear power generation with the Soviet Union. Despite Libya's official commitment to the NPT and its international obligations, Libya under Gaddafi attempted to engage in pursuit of acquiring nuclear weapons with numbers of nuclear-armed nations and later used proliferation network to localized its efforts for acquiring nuclear weapons.

In 1970, Libya under Gaddafi secretly acquired the chemical weapons capability from the Soviet Union and maintained Soviet missiles in its ballistics missile program. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, followed by the tightened sanctions in 1996, Libya under Gaddafi began to negotiate with the Clinton administration to resolve its crises with the United States. After the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, followed by the Iraq war in 2003, Gaddafi agreed upon voluntarily disarmament of Libya's pursuit of nuclear and chemical weapons on 19 December 2003. The United States assisted Libya on nuclear disarmament with independent verification by the IAEA.

On 6 January 2004, Libya under Gaddafi acceded to become a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) worked on destruction of Libyan chemical weapons by January 2014 as the deadline. In response to the Libyan civil war in 2011, the NATO reportedly destroyed Libya's ballistics missile program in series of successful airsrtikes.

In February 2014, the Libyan government announced that it had finished destroying Libya's entire remaining Gaddafi-era stockpile of chemical weapons. Destruction of Libya's chemical weapon precursors was completed in November 2017.

Libya signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons on 20 September 2017, but has not ratified it.