Assessment of Alternative for Non-Intrusive Techniques for Treaty Verification

Since entry into force in 1970, Nuclear Weapons States have agreed to and have been expected to abide by their commitment to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Over the last 40 plus years, while there has been progress in technology development related to international safeguards, there has been little progress towards delivering verification options for warhead confirmation, monitoring or dismantlement. To date, options have been comprised almost entirely of radiometrically-based nondestructive assay (NDA) technologies, which typically require an information barrier or other robust form of information protection scheme to protect sensitive design information. While nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and low-intrusion (LI) approaches have been considered for specific limited roles within a warhead verification system, a comprehensive NDE/LI regime has never been considered. NDE, NDA, and LI based technologies all differ from one another with the main difference is utilizing radiation sampling technology. NDA utilizes solely radiation based technology, NDE utilizes no radiation based technology, and LI utilizes a mix of NDE and NDA based technology.