Warhead Monitoring Technology Project

In mid-1998, many U.S. and Russian experts were reportedly favoring warhead transparency approaches based on the use of chain-of-custody and radiation-template technologies. The Warhead Monitoring Technology Project (WMTP) exploits known technologies to include government and commercial off-the-shelf items to address potential transparency requirements. To realize warhead transparency, the United States and Russia will have to make linked advances on both the technology and policy fronts. The two countries must address major policy issues related to arms control, financial assistance for Russian warhead dismantlement, classification, and warhead complex and stockpile asymmetries. WMTP is a DTRA and DOE funded project to assess a warhead monitoring scenario concept involving Department of Defense assets, to develop and integrate existing monitoring technologies to support warhead verification and transparency, and to determine impacts to DoD/DOE facilities and operations. STRATCOM and AF are project sponsors. The program develops and integrates technologies that are exercised through Field Trials at an Air Force operational intermediate weapon storage area. Given the array of challenges posed by any warhead monitoring regime, it is clear that new levels of trust and transparency in the U.S.- Russian nuclear security relationship will have to be achieved. Such openness would have been unthinkable during the Cold War but may be achievable in the coming years. There have already been many transparency breakthroughs in the 1990s and the challenges involved no longer appear insuperable, though they remain formidable.