Nuclear Disarmament Verification In Virtual Reality

Any future nuclear disarmament treaty will most likely include a comprehensive verification regime. Since 2015, more than 25 states are engaged in the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV) developing possible verification approaches, strategies, technologies and procedures. This work includes exercises such as the Nuclear Disarmament Verification (NuDiVe) Exercise, hosted by France and Germany. Organizing and running such exercises is complex, time-consuming, and logistically difficult. To simplify the participation in these exercises, an implementation in virtual reality is highly attractive. The participants will not have to meet at a nuclear facility, and safety and radiation protection restrictions will not become an issue. The scenario can be easily adapted, modified, and extended. On the other hand, developing a nuclear disarmament verification virtual reality requires substantial effort. In this talk, we present our project on developing a virtual reality, which is based on the scenario of the NuDiVe exercise and simulates the dismantlement of a nuclear warhead using the procedures developed by the IPNDV. An attractive verification option are radiation measurements, as both gamma and neutron radiation may be used to verify the fissile material declarations. Our strategy for implementing spatial neutron flux densities in our virtual reality is presented for specific scenarios. It is based on calculating neutron fluxes of fissile materials using the simulation toolkit GEANT4 within a small cube voxel grid. These data are fed into the virtual reality software, scaled according to the scenario (e.g. mass of weapons grade plutonium present) and converted to a detector readout.