PROGRESS TOWARDS CRITERIA FOR A SECOND-GENERATION PROTOTYPE INSPECTION SYSTEM WITH INFORMATION BARRIER FOR THE TRILATERAL INITIATIVE

In support of the Trilateral Initiative1, representatives from the United States, the Russian Federation, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are exploring means by which the IAEA could verify declarations of classified excess fissile material. The focus thus far is on sealed containers of plutonium in storage. Under the Trilateral Initiative, presence of plutonium, threshold values of plutonium mass and isotopic composition are required attributes for acceptance of plutonium-bearing materials into the monitoring regime. Verification of these attributes for some of the materials that might come under this initiative poses a difficult challenge because of the classified nature of the measurements necessary to confirm them. An information barrier may be used to protect the classified values while providing unclassified output, with assurance to the inspecting party that the outputs accurately describe the classified items that are examined. In 1997 and 1998, a series of joint International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)/Russian Federation/United States technical meetings were held to determine a conceptual framework for such a system, and a prototype Inspection System with Information Barrier (ISIB) was designed with input from all three Trilateral parties. The prototype was built at Los Alamos National Laboratory and demonstrated there at a US/Russian/IAEA Trilateral Technical Workshop in June 1999. The prototype ISIB performed gamma and neutron measurements on the nuclear material and produced an unclassified display that directly corresponded to the qualities of the objects measured. This paper presents the results, as viewed by the US technical experts involved in these discussions, of the ongoing collaborative effort by the three parties to design and build an enhanced second-generation prototype (termed the AVNG).