Monitoring for nuclear proliferation should be a top United States national security objective, but the nation is not yet organized, nor fully equipped, to address this, according to a recently released Defense Science Board report.
The report, Assessment of Nuclear Monitoring and Verification Techniques, said for the first time since the early decades of the nuclear era, the United States needs to be equally concerned about both “vertical” proliferation (increase in capabilities of existing nuclear states) and “horizontal” proliferation (increase in number of states and non-state actors possessing or attempting to possess nuclear weapons).
U.S. leadership should take these concerns seriously, the report said, because the nuclear world has changed dramatically since the Cold War. The actual or threatened acquisition of nuclear weapons by more actors, with a range of motivations, capabilities and approaches, is emerging in numbers not seen since the early ’90s. Nuclear forces are seen to these actors as the most affordable and effective alternative to deter superior conventional forces and as a legitimate warfighting capability. Growth in nuclear power worldwide also offers more opportunity for “leakage,” or hiding small programs.
The technical approach for monitoring cannot continue to derive only from treaty and agreement dictates for “point” compliance to numbers formally agreed upon and geographically bounded, the report argues. Proliferation in this future context is a continuous process for which persistent surveillance, tailored to the environment of concern, is needed.
One major scientific and economic trend exploitable for increasing the capacity and persistence of monitoring coverage worldwide is the spread of satellite sensing capability throughout the world and into the commercial sector. Information collected by a growing number of states and companies and shared widely for academic and commercial purposes makes information from space relevant to arms control monitoring and proliferation concerns, more easily shareable and accepted in the international realm, the report argues.
The report predicts the number of commercial remote sensing platforms will grow and be accelerated by increases in hosted payloads, in cube- and mini-satellites and in new business enterprises offering innovative lift for payloads, including suborbital spaceplanes. But there are some limitations and drawbacks to commercial remote sensing. The report said the increase in volume of data and reports of non-governmental entities analyzing commercial imagery may introduce additional noise into U.S. and international monitoring systems.
Despite these limitations, the report argued it is better to have more information from remote sensing systems, both commercial and dedicated national assets, than less information. To capitalize on this information, the United States needs to improve its ability to process and analyze information proactively and to find weak signals of threat or noncompliance, even with the most cluttered and noisy environments. The ready availability of commercial imagery and other open source data also increases the ability of the United States to share or discuss data with international partners in ways that serve to protect the most perishable of intelligence sources and methods, the report argues.