Civil Remote-sensing Satellites and a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty: Some Case Studies on Verifying Nonproduction

A universal fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT), which bans the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, has long been seen as a key building block in nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. There remains strong support for the prompt negotiation and conclusion of an FMCT, as demonstrated by the 2000 NPT Review Conference's call for the Conference on Disarmament to commence negotiations immediately with a view to their conclusion within five years. The principle focus in negotiating the FMCT will be verification. FMCT verification would focus in the first instance on the past military nuclear production facilities in the five nuclear weapon states and the three states. After an FMCT, most of these facilities would be shut down. This paper explains how civil remote-sensing satellites would be useful in verifying the shutdown status of plutonium production reactors, reprocessing plants, and uranium-enrichment plants used to produce fissile material for weapons in the past. The satellites considered are the new-generation satellites with fine spatial resolution images in the visible and near infrared band (VNIR). It is concluded that high-resolution commercial satellite VNIR imagery would play a valuable role in monitoring, nonintrusively, the shutdown status of these nuclear facilities under an FMCT. de facto nuclear