monitoring

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DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD | DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
• Observation of earth from satellites is no longer just within the purview of
compartmented defense and intelligence programs. Information is collected by a
growing number of states and companies and shared widely for academic and
commercial purposes. This makes information from space, which is relevant to arms
control monitoring and proliferation concerns, more easily shareable and accepted in
international fora.
• International monitoring bodies themselves are increasingly engaged in the use of
imagery from space. The IAEA, for example, has established a Satellite Imagery Analysis
Unit. IAEA presentations note that commercial satellite imagery is now routinely used
as an integral part of the safeguards system by which IAEA seeks to monitor
independently the correctness and completeness of the declarations made by states
about their nuclear materials and activities.
• There is a growing body of academic and non‐governmental organization (NGO)
literature that uses imagery from commercial or declassified sources to analyze
activities or installations of proliferation concern. This literature identifies
methodologies for the employment of information from satellite systems to improve
monitoring regimes and has provided crowd‐sourcing techniques for the detection of
activities and places of monitoring concern. These methodologies employ readily
available visualization tools and historical imagery available from websites such as
Google Earth. Some observers, with some hyperbole, have referred to these techniques
as “a new era in global transparency.”
• Despite the funding vagaries of the commercial satellite industry, the number of
commercial remote sensing platforms seems likely to grow. This growth will be
accelerated by increases in hosted payloads, in cube‐ and mini‐sats, and in new business
enterprises offering innovative lift for payloads, including suborbital spaceplanes.
This proliferation of commercial remote sensing satellites does have some limitations and
drawbacks:
• The increase in the volume of data and the reports of nongovernmental entities
analyzing commercial imagery may introduce additional noise into U.S. and
international monitoring systems. Some experts are concerned that bad data and bad
analysis could increasingly tarnish or mask more reliable data. Moreover, these experts
are concerned that such data and analysis would divert government professionals from
more important tasks in the quest to corroborate or refute commercially derived claims.
• The greater availability and dissemination of data will constrain the ability of the United
States to keep its options open in dealing with potential violations of international
agreements or other threatening behavior. The distinction between the gathering of
information through monitoring and the making of political judgments in the verification
process will erode, and raw information gathered by commercial or international
sources may become matters of public discourse that could hamper quiet resolution of
noncompliant or ambiguous activities more difficult.
DSB TASK FORCE REPORT Chapter 5: Improve the Tools: Access, Sense, Assess | 59
Nuclear Treaty Monitoring Verification Technologies
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