DoE on Verifiable Dismantlement of Nuclear Warheads
In anticipation of future nuclear arms control agreements that would require the dismantlement of nuclear warheads, the Department of Energy undertook a technical study during the Clinton Administration to determine how such dismantlement could be verifiably accomplished. The resulting report, experts say, is still the best available treatment of the subject.
A copy of the unclassified report, marked “official use only,” was obtained by Secrecy News and posted online today.
The DOE authors identified ten types of activities that could be used in a warhead dismantlement regime, involving various forms of monitoring at successive stages of the process. One or more of the ten could be employed, depending on the degree of confidence desired.
In principle, it should be fairly straightforward to dismantle a given nuclear warhead with confidence. However, “determining that an item to be dismantled is actually a nuclear warhead is very difficult” without compromising classified information, the report states. The use of x-rays or radiographs to confirm that an object is in fact a warhead “would be highly intrusive and would reveal highly classified nuclear warhead design information” to foreign inspectors, potentially exposing design vulnerabilities and other sensitive information. Such concerns might be addressed by other forms of monitoring, the report says.
The study concluded that “transparency measures for monitoring warhead dismantlement can be applied… with up to a moderate level of confidence that dismantlement has taken place if implemented at the Unclassified to [Confidential] level.” Verification that an actual weapon has been dismantled — which is a more demanding standard than mere “transparency” — can be achieved with an appropriate exchange of classified nuclear weapons design information.
The report provides a detailed description of the dismantlement process, a summary of previous dismantlement studies (including one by the Federation of American Scientists and another by the JASONs, but not the 1960s-era Project Cloud Gap study), and other valuable information that could serve to inform and accelerate current analyses of nuclear warhead dismantlement.
See “Transparency and Verification Options: An Initial Analysis of Approaches for Monitoring Warhead Dismantlement,” prepared by the Department of Energy Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation, May 19, 1997.
As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”
To better understand what might drive the way we live, learn, and work in 2050, we’re asking the community to share their expertise and thoughts about how key factors like research and development infrastructure and automation will shape the trajectory of the ecosystem.
Recognizing the power of the national transportation infrastructure expert community and its distributed expertise, ARPA-I took a different route that would instead bring the full collective brainpower to bear around appropriately ambitious ideas.