Chain of Custody Field Evaluations

Potential future arms control initiatives may require new technical accountability measures that could include chain of custody (CoC) technologies to provide information and assurances of the location and possibly the status of nuclear weapons and components throughout the nuclear weapons lifecycle. Developing a better understanding of how these technologies could be applied to declared warheads and assessing potential operational impacts of such a monitoring regime will help prepare policy makers as they consider options. This paper describes new work, sponsored by the NNSA Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development, that is developing facilities and technical capabilities to help address these topics. The Chain of Custody project is developing and evaluating technical options for maintaining CoC of nuclear weapons as part of potential future arms control initiatives. This paper presents an overview of CoC within the nuclear weapons (NW) lifecycle, describes elements of a CoC system and illustrates how the CoC system can be evaluated at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site (NNSS) Test Bed using a notional operational scenario.