Civil Society Contributions to Monitoring and Verification of Nuclear Arms Control Treaties

Civil Society is increasingly involved in the policy area of international arms control. Their opportunities are very limited for monitoring and verification in the nuclear nonproliferation regime due to its particular sensitivity. This paper starts off with a discussion of technical failures in the official verification of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and of its political obstruction and biased interpretation. The severe gaps not being able to detect clandestine facilities render little civil society contributions highly influential and controversial. More and more data get available for the civil society that can be used to expose potential violations of the NPT and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). Based on systematic considerations the contributions that civil society offer are analyzed with regard to the different stages of verification and to the various degrees of integration with the official procedures. This paper picks up the three stages of verification (fact-finding, review, assessment) described by Den Dekker (2001 [1]), extends them by a fourth stage (determination of a rule violation according to the treaty text and related regulations). These four stages are framed by a preparatory stage (development of verification methods and procedures) and a post processing stage (political judgement on treaty compliance). The degree of integration of civil society activities with the official procedures (indirect or informal interaction, official contribution) are adopted from Meier/Tenner (2001[2]) and extended by the case where a norm but no treaty is in place. From both parameters a matrix is formed with the stages in the lines and the degree of interaction in the columns. The fields in the matrix are used to locate a number of historic cases where civil society actors contributed to the monitoring and verification of the NPT or the CTBT. The distribution of cases over this matrix shows the current strength of civil society as actors in the context of arms control verification. It also reveals the relevance that available sensor data (e.g. satellite images, seismic event data) have for civil society to extend its classical approaches like whistle-blowing, defection and societal monitoring towards science-based analysis.