Developing a System Evaluation Methodology for a Warhead Monitoring System

Past agreements limiting the numbers of nuclear weapons focused on nuclear weapon delivery systems and the warheads deployed on these systems. As the number of nuclear weapons decreases, future agreements may require the monitoring of nuclear warheads throughout greater portions of the weapons enterprise. Such agreements would pose a new set of verification challenges that may require new monitoring approaches, technologies, and procedures. The monitoring system for such agreements may be more intrusive than in past agreements, particularly as additional elements of the warhead lifecycle are potentially impacted, including deployment, storage, maintenance, transportation, and dismantlement, thereby creating significant operational, safety, and security challenges for a host country. Since the terms of future agreements are subject to negotiation and hence unpredictable, it is important to develop a range of technical solutions for potential warhead monitoring systems, as well as the capability to assess their effectiveness and explore tradeoffs. This paper describes the initial development of a system evaluation methodology for quantifying the system performance of a monitoring approach. The evaluation methodology includes (1) an evaluation framework that includes defining monitoring objectives, functional architectures and associated evaluation criteria, and evaluation scenarios, and (2) evaluation tools such as analysis algorithms and simulation tools for quantifying system performance. The basic tenets of this approach have been used by multiple communities [1][2] but have not been as well developed for arms control verification. When fully developed such a capability would support the technical community in designing and assessing monitoring approaches, inform the policy community about the performance and impacts of monitoring options, and potentially help guide future R&D investments for warhead verification and monitoring.