Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
10/17/2014
Stockpiled nuclear material around the world continues to be a nuclear security threat, and the international community should not wait on the U.S. and Russia to strengthen nuclear material verification measures, Corey Hinderstein of the Nuclear Threat Initiative told attendees of a State Department-hosted briefing at U.N. headquarters this week. While the U.S. and Russia have more expertise on nuclear material verification than any other nations—both countries house 90 percent of the world’s nuclear stockpile—Hinderstein, vice president of NTI’s Material Security and Minimization division, cited after the event the opportunity for other members of the verification community to incorporate modern advancements in technologies such as IT and satellite imagery, and called on nations to build a greater global capacity for verification systems. “If we don’t do it, then we are handicapping ourselves,” she told NS&D Monitor. “We are mimicking ourselves. It shouldn’t be just up to the U.S. and Russia to determine or to develop the next set of tools, not just because we want others to be involved, but also because there’s great expertise and creativity and contribution that could be made from the rest of the world.”
Report Focuses on Hurdles to Verification
Along with other speakers, Hinderstein summarized key points of NTI’s four-report series Innovating Verification: New Tools & New Actors to Reduce Nuclear Risks, which involved an overarching working group and warhead and nuclear materials subgroups. Measurement systems with built-in information barriers constitute a technical challenge of the verification process, according to Hinderstein. Information barriers—a system of procedures, devices or software used to protect sensitive, and sometimes classified, information—can prevent validation of the efficiency of testing apparatuses, according to the report. To assist in verifying measurement tools, states should re-evaluate what information qualifies as classified, the report states. “Revisiting classification would make some verification easier because you could do direct measurements of materials or direct observation of items without needing to design ways to block or obscure classified characteristics,” Hinderstein wrote in an Oct. 16 email to NS&D Monitor. “That said, it will not be acceptable or advisable to expose all currently classified information, as that would risk proliferation of nuclear weapons information and technology. A dialogue among states with nuclear weapons could help identify that which must remain protected and that which might possibly be discussed in order to enable verification and monitoring.”
Different container types stand out as another challenge, and the warhead subgroup identified the standardization of testing containers as a potentially useful area for international cooperation. “Right now we don’t have, and never have attempted, frankly, to develop any sort of standard container or container specification that a classified item could be in that could allow measurements,” Hinderstein said. “So if you think about if each container has its own characteristics, then whatever measurement tool you might use, you have to take into account, what is the distance from the wall of the container to the item, what is the size of the item, what is the space around the item filled with? All those things could affect a measurement.” Standardized containers could establish common parameters and reliable calibration, she said.
Verification as a Brake, or an Engine?
Scientific advances can propel political action, and Hinderstein pointed to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which involved scientific experts working for 20 years on the verification system for the treaty. “Sometimes you can lose motivation to work on technical processes while a political process is stalled,” she said. “When policymakers come to you and say, ‘We’re thinking about a certain commitment that we could make. Do we have a verification answer?’ You’d like to be able to respond positively to that. [CTBT] is an example where nuclear verification can either be a brake or an engine. If a policymaker doesn’t believe that something can be verified, they also won’t make the commitment, so that’s where it can be a brake.”
CTBT was an engine for verification, Hinderstein said, because scientific experts said “they believed that they could verify a zero-yield test ban that actually gave the boost to the negotiators to conclude a zero-yield test ban. Until then, there had been a lot of discussion about whether there should be a yield limit so it wouldn’t actually be a comprehensive test-ban. It would be a lower threshold test ban, because they thought, ‘Why should we make a zero-yield commitment if we can’t verify a zero yield?’ So it was the ability to verify that played a huge part in the successful conclusion of a zero-yield test ban.”
