Today’s arms control agenda is faced with many questions, some of which address the technical verification of proposed arms control agreements. How would you go about verifying that another state party is doing, or refraining from doing, what it promised to do, or not to do? Other questions are more speculative and academic. For instance, will states require higher assurance of compliance as the state parties move towards lower numbers of weapons? In a nutshell, how much verification is enough?
In a unique and world-leading collaboration, the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), managed by Serco, Lockheed Martin and Jacobs Engineering, a number of Institutes and VERTIC, a charitable organisation based in England, have been working together on issues relating to the verified dismantlement of nuclear warheads. It is anticipated that other countries may follow suit.
For AWE, this project is the continuation of a study into disarmament verification which concluded in 2005. For Norwegian experts, this is an opportunity to build on its nascent research commnity. The UK study focused on:
> Authentication of warheads and components to establish that an item declared to be a nuclear warhead or a component from
a nuclear warhead is consistent with those declarations
> Dismantlement of warheads and their components
> Monitoring the nuclear weapons complex.
Until 2005, the UK had looked into existing approaches and technologies, as well as novel areas of development. AWE paid particular attention to authentication, a process aimed at ensuring that accurate and reliable information is provided by a measurement system, and that irregularities are detected. The identification of characteristic signatures, which could be emissions from the plutonium pit or matching the weapon's serial numbers with custodial information, in combination with robust chains of custody was identified as the preferred approach.
UK-Norway Initiative
After a review completed in 2007, Norway and the UK set up a coalition of institutes known as the UK-Norway Initiative to take the work forward. They were tasked with looking at information barrier technology and on-site inspection methodology. The aim was to develop a robust, simple and cheap information barrier system that is capable of identifying a radiological source (representing the warhead) to a specified level of confidence, based on agreed attributes. The information barrier is essentially a filter which is placed between a sensor and the device being tested. The sensor will read the full emission spectrum but, because this is usually classified, the barrier filters away most of the information.
AWE, the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and the Institute for Energy Technology have developed initial designs for a limited prototype device for use on a radiological source: a small piece of software matches the known peaks of the emissions with a template. If everything matches up it shows a green light. If the peaks aren't where they are supposed to be it shows a red light. These designs were successfully tested in an exercise in June 2009.
The initiative also investigated procedures that may enable inspectors to gain access to a nuclear weapons complex under so-called managed access conditions. A scenario based on a mock generic disassembly facility was set up in Norway with a radioactive source representing a hypothetical nuclear warhead, with fictitious classified attributes, undergoing dismantlement. Norway played the part of the nuclear weapon state under inspection, whilst a group of UK officials assumed the role of non-nuclear weapon state inspectors. VERTIC is presently tasked with assessing and evaluating this exercise and the charity presented some of its preliminary conclusions at the 2009 Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Review Conference. It concluded that the verified dismantlement of nuclear arms is likely to be very resource intensive; it is also likely to be intrusive for the site operator. Various cost estimates have been produced in the past. A 1997 study by a number of US laboratories, for example, put the cost of the initial inspection at US$2.5-12 million and the annual cost of maintaining the regime to US$1.5-7 million. Put in its proper context, however, this cost is relatively small.
