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ABSTRACT
Nuclear disarmament is often seen as eventually requiring access to nuclear warheads or to the warhead-dismantlement process to verify that a state has not hidden weapons or weapon-materials despite promising to disarm. This article suggests this view is misplaced, and that what is needed is a verification mechanism able to provide reliable assurances of the absence of fissile materials available for use in weapons after a state has disarmed. Such a mechanism will need an initial declaration of the amount of fissile materials held by a state for all purposes, military and civilian. In a state with a nuclear arsenal awaiting elimination, this declaration would have to include materials that may not be available for verification because they are in nuclear weapons or are in other classified or proliferation-sensitive forms. This article describes a verification arrangement that does not require access to materials in weapons and in sensitive forms while still allowing checks on the overall accuracy of the declaration. Verification of the completeness and correctness of the declaration is deferred to the time when the weapons-relevant material enters the disposition process, at which point it no longer has any sensitive attributes. By removing the focus on monitoring warheads and dismantlement, this new approach could provide a more manageable path to nuclear disarmament.
Acknowledgments
Pavel Podvig developed the original concept of deferred verification. Joseph Rodgers contributed to the elaboration of the details of the arrangement. The work on the concept was carried out as part of United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) research projects: “Technical Aspects of the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty,” supported by the MacArthur Foundation and the government of Germany, and “New Approaches to Transparency and Verification in Nuclear Security and Disarmament,” supported by the government of Germany, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. A series of discussions held at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security were particularly useful for developing the concept. The authors would like to give special thanks to Alexander Glaser for his support of the idea and to Zia Mian for his comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
1 “Group of Governmental Experts to Make Recommendations on Possible Aspects that Could Contribute to but Not Negotiate a Treaty Banning the Production of Fissile Material for Nuclear Weapons or Other Nuclear Explosive Devices. A/70/81,” United Nations General Assembly, May 7, 2015, para. 23.
2 Guidance for States Implementing Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements and Additional Protocols (Vienna: IAEA, 2016), p. 21, <www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/SVS-21_web.pdf>. Material-balance area can be described as a basic unit to which material accounting can be applied. First, its boundaries are established in a way that allows any transfer of material in or out of the area to be detected and documented and, second, the amount of material inside the area can be determined when necessary by taking the physical inventory, i.e., by directly measuring the amount of material. See IAEA Safeguards Glossary (Vienna: IAEA, 2002), para. 6.4.
3 Peter Dessaules, “The U.S. Plutonium and HEU Declarations,” in Global Fissile Material Report 2009: A Path to Nuclear Disarmament (Princeton, NJ: International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2009), pp. 42–47, <http://ipfmlibrary.org/gfmr09.pdf>.
4 Some activities in the closed segment, such as chemical processing of the material or conversion of the material into unclassified form, could result in a non-zero inventory difference, which is a difference between the amount of the material as reflected in the record and that which can be measured during physical inventory. For example, some material can be held up in the reprocessing equipment or discarded with waste. This difference, however, can be kept at a minimum level and any held-up or discarded material would be available for direct measurement when the facility that processed it is dismantled.
5 This is similar to the approach that was taken by the United States when it concluded an Additional Protocol with the IAEA. The Additional Protocol allows the IAEA to inspect any US facility, but the United States reserves the right to invoke the national-security exclusion if a facility is not available for verification. “INFCIRC/288/Add.1. Protocol Additional to the Agreement between the United States of America and the International Atomic Energy Agency for the Application of Safeguards in the United States of America,” IAEA, March 9, 2009, Article 1.b.
6 For the analysis of the declarations, see “Global Fissile Material Report 2010: Balancing the Books: Production and Stocks,” International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2010. <http://ipfmlibrary.org/gfmr10.pdf>. In 2016, the United States provided updated information about its HEU holdings. The White House, “Transparency in the U.S. Highly Enriched Uranium Inventory,” March 31, 2016, <www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/03/31/fact-sheet-transparency-us-highly-enriched-uranium-inventory>.
7 The deferred verification arrangement could also be included in the verification system that will be developed for the purposes of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In this case, the closed segment would probably have to be limited to a small number of safeguarded sites containing all nuclear weapons and materials in classified form. Dismantlement of weapons and conversion of the materials to unclassified form would be the responsibility of the host state.
8 Pavel Podvig, “Fissile Material (Cut-off) Treaty: Elements of the Emerging Consensus,” UNIDIR, 2016, <www.unidir.org/files/publications/pdfs/fissile-material-cut-off-treaty-elements-of-the-emerging-consensus-en-650.pdf>.
9 As part of the FMCT verification regime, irradiated naval fuel would be kept under monitoring to ensure that the fissile materials that are contained in the fuel are not diverted. In addition, all reprocessing facilities that could recover fissile materials would be subject to monitoring.
10 “Report of the Group of Governmental Experts A/70/81,” para. 47.
11 South Africa produced about 990 kilograms (kg) of HEU, about 480 kg of which was in the nuclear-weapons program. David Albright and Andrea Stricker, "Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Its History, Dismantlement, and Lessons for Today," 2016, p. 66, <http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/RevisitingSouthAfricasNuclearWeaponsProgram.pdf>; Frank V. Pabian, “The South African Denuclearization Exemplar: Insights for Nonproliferation Monitoring and Verification,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2015), pp. 27–52, <https://doi.org/10.1080/10736700.2015.1071969>.
12 IAEA, “The Denuclearization of Africa. Report by the Director General,” September 9, 1993, <www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC37/GC37Documents/English/gc37-1075_en.pdf>; Adolf von Baeckmann, Garry Dillon, and Demetrius Perricos, “Nuclear Verification in South Africa,” IAEA Bulletin, No. 1 (1995), pp. 42–48; Olli Heinonen, “Verifying the Dismantlement of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” in Henry Sokolski, ed., Nuclear Weapons Materials Gone Missing. What Does History Teach? (Washington, DC: Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, 2014), pp. 89–95, <http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/Verifying%20the%20Dismantlement%20-%20Heinonen%20Chapter%208.pdf>.
13 Canada separated about 17 kg of plutonium in 1949–54 and then produced about 250 kg of weapon-grade plutonium in spent fuel for the United States in 1959–64. Institute for Science and International Security, “Nuclear Weapon Programs: Canada,” n.d., <http://isis-online.org/country-pages/canada>. The records submitted by Canada included more than 300,000 pages of documents. Interview with a former IAEA official, August 24, 2014.
14 Nathan E. Busch and Joseph F. Pilat, “South African Rollback: Revisiting Monitoring and Verification Lessons after 20 Years,” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2014), pp. 236–61, <https://doi.org/10.1080/01495933.2014.897132>.
15 Heinonen, “Verifying the Dismantlement of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” p. 172.
16 The experience of the United States and the United Kingdom suggests that it would take a state several years to complete this process internally. However, the process would take longer if an external verification body were involved.