monitoring

UNCLASSIFIED
DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD | DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
In this unfolding nuclear future, monitoring to support treaties is but one part of the overall
monitoring requirement that should be driven by monitoring for proliferation. This broader
scope presents challenges for which current solutions are either inadequate, or more often, do
not exist. Among these challenges are monitoring of:
• Small inventories of weapons and materials, even as low as a single “significant quantity
of fissile material”;
• Small nuclear enterprises designed to produce, store, and deploy only a small number of
weapons––intended as a proliferant’s end goal, or as the first steps to achieve larger
inventories or more sophisticated capabilities;
• Undeclared facilities and/or covert operations, such as testing below detection
thresholds, or acquisition of materials or weapons through theft or purchase;
• Use of non‐traditional technologies, presenting at best ambiguous signatures, to acquire
both materials and components;
• Theater nuclear forces and associated doctrine, exercises, and training complicated by
the use of mobile, dual‐use delivery systems;
• Many more players to whom access by the U.S. or its allies will be limited or extremely
difficult, some of whom will be globally networked with global access to relevant science
and technology.
In short, for the first time since the early decades of the nuclear era, the nation needs to be
equally concerned about both “vertical” proliferation (the increase in capabilities of existing
nuclear states) and “horizontal” proliferation (an increase in the number of states and nonstate
actors possessing or attempting to possess nuclear weapons). These factors, and others
discussed more fully in the body of this report, led the Task Force to observe that monitoring
for proliferation should be a top national security objective––but one for which the nation is
not yet organized or fully equipped to address.
The technical approach for monitoring cannot continue to derive only from treaty and
agreement dictates for “point” compliance to the numbers and types formally agreed upon and
geographically bounded. Proliferation in this future context is a continuous process for which
persistent surveillance, tailored to the environment of concern, is needed. This leads to the
need for a paradigm shift in which the boundaries are blurred between monitoring for
compliance and monitoring for proliferation, between cooperative and unilateral measures.
Monitoring will need to be continuous, adaptive, and continuously tested for its effectiveness
against an array of differing, creative and adaptive proliferators.
A Comprehensive Monitoring Framework: Two “Whats” and Three “Hows”
The Task Force observed early in its deliberations that there are many communities involved in
tackling a piece of the monitoring “elephant,” but found no group that could clearly articulate
the entire problem nor a strategy for addressing it in any complete or comprehensive fashion.
DSB TASK FORCE REPORT Executive Summary| 2
Nuclear Treaty Monitoring Verification Technologies
UNCLASSIFIED