Nuclear Arms Control with Physics

Work by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wilson44691

Arms Control as a whole concerns itself with a variety of problems related to the threat of conventional and nuclear arms to global prosperity. Here, when referring to arms control we primarily mean nuclear arms control. While arms control is not strictly defined, there are a few salient and persistent problems that concern (or should concern) policy makers, policy experts, and scientists.

Treaty Verification

The nuclear weapons arsenals have shrunk since the times of the Cold Warm from ~ 70000 units to about ~13000. These reductions have been made possible via a series of arms control treaties, most of which have been signed between USA and USSR/Russia. However, treaties are only as good as their verification regimes.

As of 2019, there are estimated 13,000 nuclear weapons that make up the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia. Such large arsenals may be one of the greatest threats to our civilization. While high, these numbers are a significant reduction from the Cold War era, as a result of series of arms control treaties. The past treaties between United States of America and Soviet Union/Russia, however, primarily focused on the verified dismantlement of the delivery systems, such as ballistic missiles and strategic bomber aircraft. This circumstance in part was driven by the notion that the delivery systems can be a good proxy for the states’ strike capability during a nuclear war. It was also driven by the difficulty of verifiably dismantling the warheads themselves without leaking sensitive information about the weapon designs in the process. This approach has left behind large stockpiles of surplus nuclear weapons, exposing them to the risk of theft and unauthorized or accidental use, as well as transfer to third countries. This state of the affairs elevates the risk of nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The need for more effective arms control treaties is recognized by the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, which noted that “The United States will continue its efforts to seek arms control agreements that enhance security, and are verifiable and enforceable.” Furthermore, there are increased worries that unless new treaties are implemented the current arsenal sizes will stagnate at the current numbers. New treaties involving the verified dismantlement of nuclear warheads will significantly improve global security. However, new types of technologies are necessary to enable such treaties. These technologies will have to detect hoaxing attempts, clear honest warheads as such, while simultaneously protecting sensitive information about the weapon designs.

A variety of paradigms of verification have been proposed by a number of scholars and scientists. The most recent of these, the template verification paradigm, is based on the expectation that the inspection party will be able to acquire an authentic device (henceforth referred to as the genuine reference object) and then use relevant encrypted data (known as a template) from this device to compare with equivalent data acquired from candidate devices of the same design. The key to this verification process is a proof system that can guarantee that no treaty accountable item (TAI) undergoing verified dismantlement is secretly modified. A number of works have been published on the philosophy behind this template verification—in the US national laboratories, think tanks, and academia—and a variety of concepts have been proposed. Common to all these studies is the concept of the genuine reference object, which is acquired based on a situational context and brought to the testing facility via a chain of custody.

Requirements for a template verification system

The template verification system needs to satisfy the two standard requirements of any detection system — sensitivity and specificity — as well as an addition requirement on privacy:

  1. Sensitivity: the system needs to detect a hoaxing attempt

  2. Specificity: the system needs to clear honest items

  3. Privacy: the system should produce true/false, 0/1, binary outputs. No other information about the weapon can be inferred from the measurements.

For example, measurements of radiation from a nuclear device are not sufficient to confirm that the device is honest, as many sources of radiation exist. Even measurements confirming that the device contains plutonium is insufficient — plutonium metal does not yet mean a bomb.

Current Research

Currently, LANPh is pursuing the problem of warhead verification using neutrons beams in Neutron Resonance Transmission Analysis (NRTA) configuration. NRTA exploits the nuclear resonances which give a nuclear “fingerprint” to every isotope, allowing for a verification of a weapon’s combined isotopic-geometric configuration. The measurement is done in a physically cryptographic manner, allowing for strong comparisons and making it impossible to infer absolute quantities.

Team:

Other topics: Nonproliferation of nuclear weapons

The proliferation of nuclear weapons refers to the development of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear weapons states. Currently, examples of proliferators are Iran and North Korea. Other non-signatories of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) include Israel, which is known to posses a nuclear arsenal but engages in a policy of “strategic ambiguity.”

Research in nonproliferation involves both policy research as well as technological research. Many of the technological topics in this area focus on the detection of clandestine weapons programs, as well as the detection and characterization of nuclear weapons test.