Year
2010
Abstract
When States enter into treaties or executive agreements, verification of monitoring provisions is included in the agreement to allow the parties to determine whether the other party meets its agreed obligations. In many cases the verification or monitoring provisions require the use of technology. In the area of arms control and nonproliferation, the Office of Dismantlement and Transparency in the National Nuclear Security Administration manages a program focused on developing effective verification and monitoring options for use by the United States Government for dismantling nuclear equipment, weapons, and weapon components and on developing verification and monitoring equipment, technology, and tools to ensure that obligations undertaken by foreign governments are being met. The general purpose of this program is to increase the capability to determine the presence of nuclear materials and/or nuclear weapons that have been declared as part of a bilateral or multilateral agreement, and to establish control and track weapons and/or their components that have been declared as part of an agreement, from deployment through storage, dismantlement and disposition. To effectively implement technology in a regime, both parties need to be familiar with the proposed technology, and confident that the technology will perform as expected without compromising sensitive information. To be prepared to meet this requirement, the U.S. National Laboratories and the Russian Federation Science Institutes have over the past decade engaged in cooperative technology development to explore issues associated with equipment development, application and authentication for potential future arms control initiatives, and in this case developed a generic measurement system for verifying plutonium attributes that incorporated an information barrier to protect sensitive information. Both the historical context and policy rationale for this cooperation will be discussed.