Verification and Monitoring for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons: Key Opportunities and Challenges

In 2007 former Secretaries of State, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense, William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn launched the Nuclear Security Project which is a major initiative to galvanize global action to reduce urgent nuclear dangers and build support for reducing reliance on nuclear weapons. While important work has been done over the years to define major mileposts on the path to disarmament, there are still a number of key areas - including verification - where there are gaps in the conceptual framework and technical details. This paper examines the current political climate for discussions on verification of a world free of nuclear weapons. It highlights the technical findings of a study aimed to contribute to the analysis of the complex subject of verification by identifying key technical, political and diplomatic challenges associated with verification, monitoring and enforcement of a world free of nuclear weapons and potential solutions to these challenges. The paper elaborates one of the a key challenges of particular interest to the nuclear materials management community - establishing confidence in the accuracy of global inventories of nuclear materials, nuclear materials production capabilities, numbers of nuclear weapons, and possibly nuclear weapon delivery systems.