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Introduction: Monitoring Nuclear Stockpiles and Reductions
 Inspecting the warheads from an SS-20 missile. |
The direct purpose of most proposed monitoring and data-exchange
measures is to confirm that agreed nuclear arms reductions
or limitations are being implemented. Monitors only check
that particular items are where and what they should be –
they are not able to actually prevent theft of nuclear
weapons or materials. But these measures can have substantial
indirect benefit in reducing the risk of theft of nuclear
weapons and materials, easing the access that facilitates
cooperation, highlighting weaknesses in security and accounting,
and providing an incentive to fix potentially embarrassing
problems before they are revealed. (See below
for a more specific discussion of the ways that monitoring
and data exchanges can indirectly contribute to reducing the
risk of theft of nuclear material.) At the same time, as nuclear arms reductions continue, past verification approaches that focused only on delivery systems are likely to be seen as insufficient: monitoring and data-exchange measures focused on nuclear warheads themselves and the materials needed to make them are likely to be crucial for achieving deep reductions in nuclear arms in the future.[1] Overall, the goal in building a transparency regime should be to put in place sufficient monitoring and data exchanges to build confidence that nuclear stockpiles are secure and accounted for, agreed reductions are being implemented and the overall size of stockpiles accurately understood, and assistance funds are being spent appropriately. |
To date, U.S.-Russian transparency initiatives have largely focused on what might be called individual "islands of transparency" surrounding particular cooperative projects, rather than looking toward any comprehensive transparency regime for nuclear warheads and materials. Key initiatives described in this section include:
 |
HEU Purchase Agreement Transparency: Transparency for the U.S.-Russian HEU Purchase Agreement is the only U.S.-Russian transparency initiative that is being successfully implemented on a large scale – because it is the only one where there was a large financial incentive to reach agreement. U.S. monitors observe steps throughout the process of converting HEU warhead components to low-enriched uranium (LEU), to confirm that the LEU the United States is purchasing in fact comes from HEU, and build confidence that this HEU comes from weapons. Russian monitors check at U.S. fuel enrichment and fabrication facilities to ensure that the material the United States purchases is used only for civilian reactor fuel. |
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Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility Transparency: The United States and Russia have been negotiating for years over transparency measures for the Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility, and are now reportedly nearing agreement as the facility nears completion. The eventual measures are expected to allow U.S. monitors to confirm that the material placed in the facility is weapons-grade plutonium, that it is safe and secure, and that it is not returned to weapons. |
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The Trilateral Initiative: For years, the United States, Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been working to develop new legal and technical arrangements to allow IAEA verification of the permanent removal of nuclear material from weapons programs. While considerable progress has been made in outlining the needed approaches, it is unlikely that the United States or Russia will place substantial quantities of excess nuclear material under the arrangements developed in the trilateral in the near term. Some excess U.S. material is already under safeguards under the United States’ "voluntary offer" agreement with the IAEA. |
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Warhead Dismantlement Transparency: U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons scientists have been working together to jointly develop procedures that could be used to confirm the dismantlement of nuclear warheads – and confirm other aspects of reductions in warhead and fissile material stockpiles – without revealing sensitive information. A range of promising approaches have been developed, though none have yet been applied operationally. |
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Stockpile Declarations: During the Clinton-Yeltsin years, the United States and Russia agreed that they would finally tell each other how many warheads they had, and how much plutonium and HEU. This agreement in principle was never implemented – but the United States has made detailed unilateral declarations about its plutonium stockpile (along with some limited pieces of information about its warhead and HEU stockpiles), and U.S. and Russian experts are working together on carrying out a similar accounting of Russia’s civilian plutonium stockpile, with the hope that this might be extended to Russia’s entire plutonium stockpile in the future. The United States, Russia, and seven other leading nuclear states now make annual declarations of their civilian plutonium stockpiles and plans to the IAEA. In addition, in 2000, the United States proposed detailed exchanges of data on nuclear warhead and fissile material stockpiles as part of the now-abandoned START III negotiations. |
Several additional transparency approaches are not discussed in separate pages in this web section. First and most important is the international nuclear safeguards regime – implemented by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and by regional organizations such as EURATOM and the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC). International safeguards existed long before threat reduction efforts began, and their scope, effectiveness, and future are critical issues beyond the scope of this web section. [2] A few brief points are in order, however:
- Every country which is a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) or a comparable nonproliferation commitment is required to place all of its civilian nuclear material under international safeguards. This category now includes nearly all the nations of the world, except for the five NPT nuclear weapon states (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China) and the three other states with nuclear weapon capability – Israel, India, and Pakistan. (North Korea is subject to this requirement, but is violating it.)
- International safeguards are based on observations and measurements designed to check that the records kept by the state itself concerning how much nuclear material is present, where, and what is done with it are accurate, so as to provide timely detection of the diversion of enough nuclear material for a bomb by the host state. They were never designed to prevent theft of nuclear material – though as with other monitoring measures, they do make important indirect contributions to that objective, as described below.
- For a decade and a half, the IAEA has been kept to a zero-real-growth safeguards budget, even as the amount of material under safeguards increased more than three-fold, and the number of countries and facilities where safeguards are being implemented also increased dramatically. IAEA Director General ElBaradei recently warned that "the Agency can no longer continue with a policy of zero real growth. ...[W]ithout additional resources in the next biennium [the agency's two-year budget cycle], we will no longer be able to guarantee credible safeguards." [3] Yet the amounts involved are extraordinarily small by comparison to the security stakes: the entire global safeguards budget is in the range of $85 million a year – roughly the same as the budget of the Indianapolis police department. ElBaradei estimates that the safeguards budget was under funded by at least $20 million in 2002 – roughly what the U.S. Department of Defense spends every half hour of every day.[4] To the Bush administration’s credit, it has called for substantial increases in the IAEA’s budget – but has not yet succeeded in convincing the other member states.[5]
Second are the wide range of U.S.-Russian inspections carried out to verify the terms of bilateral arms control agreements. Since these have not included data exchanges or monitoring focused on nuclear warheads themselves or the materials needed to make them, they are not discussed further here.
Some other transparency initiatives that are focused on nuclear warheads or weapons-usable nuclear materials are not discussed in separate pages here because there is too little yet to say about them. This includes arrangements to verify the shut-down of Russia’s plutonium production reactors – which include both occasional monitoring to confirm that Russian and U.S. reactors that are already shut down remain shut down, as well as monitoring of the weapons-grade plutonium produced in Russia ’s production reactors since 1995. As of the end of 2002, monitoring of this excess plutonium had not yet gotten fully underway – in 2002, U.S. monitors were finally allowed to visit the storage area and to count the plutonium-filled cans, but not to take the measurements called for in the agreement.[6] Similarly, U.S.-Russian discussions of the specific transparency measures to confirm that disposition of both U.S. excess plutonium and Russian excess plutonium is being carried out as agreed have barely begun[7] – in part because it will be years before the relevant facilities are built and operating.
Finally, it is important to understand that while most formal U.S.-Russian transparency initiatives have been stymied by continuing secrecy concerns and the lack of strong incentives for both governments to agree to them, informal measures have created an absolutely unprecedented degree of openness, transparency, and cooperation between the two nuclear weapons complexes. As a result of a broad range of scientific and threat-reduction cooperation, U.S. and Russian experts have now visited most of the key facilities in the other nation’s nuclear weapons complexes, and there has been a huge increase in the level of detailed understanding of what goes on at individual facilities and buildings within these complexes. Some threat reduction programs have formalized this transparency with specific agreements regulating access to sensitive sites. Both sides (particularly the United States ) have also unilaterally revealed a wealth of information about their nuclear stockpiles and complexes, in both published reports and other sources. The level of openness that now exists would have been completely unthinkable as recently as early 1994 (when it was still true that Russia was refusing to allow U.S. experts direct access for implementing security upgrades at any facility in Russia where actual HEU or plutonium existed).
How Transparency Helps Security
As noted already, transparency and monitoring measures in general are designed to confirm some agreed aspect of nuclear stockpiles, not to prevent insiders or outsiders from stealing these stockpiles.[8] But such measures, if well designed, can contribute substantially to improving security and accounting for nuclear weapons and materials, in a number of ways:
- Sizing the problems. Neither Russia nor any other nuclear weapon state has ever officially confirmed how many nuclear weapons it has. Nor has Russia or most other nuclear weapon states made any statement as to how much plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU) they have in their stockpiles.[9] This lack of official information, forcing reliance on uncertain estimates from various sources, inevitably makes it more difficult to specify the scope of the problems involved in insecure nuclear weapons and materials, and to plan programs to address these problems. Official declarations related to these stockpiles could help size these problems and thereby ease the task of fixing them.
- Facilitating cooperation. Being able to discuss which facilities are at issue, which buildings at those facilities have nuclear weapons or materials in them, the quantities and types of materials at these facilities, and the like is crucial to being able to work out effective cooperation for improving security and accounting measures. Direct access to these sites is often also crucial, in order to observe the security and accounting measures already in place, and to confirm that upgrades are being done to agreed standards and that money is being spent appropriately. If information has already been exchanged, and access has already been agreed to, through some type of monitoring arrangement, other cooperative efforts are greatly facilitated. For example, because of START monitoring provisions, there have been few problems with access or information in threat reduction programs focused on dismantling nuclear missiles and bombers. But because no such monitoring arrangements had ever been agreed for warhead storage facilities, arranging the information and access needed to cooperate effectively in upgrading security for these facilities has proved to be tremendously difficult. Caution is warranted, however, because there may be some cases in which a negotiation over monitoring arrangements turns access to a particular site into a bargaining chip, making it more sensitive than it would have been had the monitoring negotiation never taken place.
- Identifying weak points. Inspectors or visitors sometimes identify weak points in security and accounting. In several cases, for example, reports by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to the IAEA Office of Physical Protection on situations in which nuclear material they inspected did not appear to be adequately secured have been followed by the IAEA successfully cooperating with the states concerned to arrange for international peer reviews and upgrades of the security arrangements. [10] Similarly, to support IAEA safeguards, states must prepare their own accounting of the nuclear materials under their control, and provide this accounting regularly to the IAEA. Examination of such national reports often makes it possible to identify facilities where the quality of the measurements taken and the accounts kept needs to be improved if there is to be confidence that nuclear material has not been removed. Thus, international safeguards create a multilateral discipline in nuclear material accounting that is not present in nuclear weapon states such as the United States and Russia , or at unsafeguarded facilities in states such as Pakistan , India , and Israel . Of course, transparency measures do not have to involve formal inspection such as IAEA safeguards to fulfill this role: informal visits by U.S. personnel to Russian facilities, for example, have been the main means of identifying and agreeing on areas where security and accounting upgrades were needed.
- Encouraging states to fix potentially embarrassing problems. The very process of preparing for a declaration forces a state to examine its own internal accounts and try to put them in order, so as to avoid embarrassment when the declaration is made. When South Africa , for example, was preparing to submit its nuclear program to IAEA safeguards, it made sure, to the best of its ability, that all of its accounting records for its nuclear material had been brought into balance. Once a declaration is made (for example, as part of an arms control agreement), the other parties have an opportunity to ask questions and raise concerns, which may then lead to further accounting improvements. In its first declaration under the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, for example, the United States neglected some aging Pershing I missiles stored in Texas; Soviet arms experts pointed out the omission, and the United States corrected the declaration. These kinds of discussions can open the way for additional correction of embarrassing problems, or identify fruitful areas for cooperation in improving accounting. The potential arrival of inspectors at a facility creates an additional incentive to remove any potential embarrassments – cleaning up, fixing holes in fences, replacing obviously broken equipment, and the like. For example, in 1994, when Russian experts were expected to tour the U.S. plutonium weapon component production facility at Rocky Flats for the first time, the United States spent hundreds of thousands of dollars reviewing security arrangements at the site in preparation for the visit (largely to prevent Russian spying). These very mundane, human reactions to the prospect of being held up to the scrutiny of the outside world can produce significant improvements in security and accounting arrangements.
- Detecting thefts – or providing confidence that they have not occurred. In some cases, while monitoring measures cannot in themselves prevent thefts, they may be able to detect that they have occurred. IAEA safeguards, for example, are designed to be able to detect the removal of enough nuclear material for a bomb – though the removal may not be noted until days or weeks after it has occurred. Real-time monitoring – such as with security cameras uploading their data to a central station or a satellite – can provide detection of thefts in progress, triggering response forces to intercept the thieves. In the more usual case in which no theft has occurred, accurate accounting systems and inspections can confirm for all participants that this is the case.
In short, transparency measures such as declarations and monitoring have considerable importance even if considered only as part of the effort to keep nuclear weapons and materials out of hostile hands. Such measures play a crucial part in the broader arms reduction picture, as they are likely to be an essential foundation for future agreements to reduce the still huge stockpiles of nuclear warheads and materials that exist around the world.
Links
| Key Resources | |
|
Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier, and John P. Holdren, Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan (Washington, D.C.: Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, March 2003). |
| This new report, as part of comprehensive review of U.S. actions, assesses the U.S. budgets for programs working to monitor existing nuclear stockpiles and reductions in those stockpiles (Download 538K PDF), examines how much has been accomplished on this goal thus far (Download 847K PDF), and makes recommendations for next steps (Download 424K PDF). | |
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Steve Fetter, "A Comprehensive Transparency Regime for Warheads and Fissile Materials," Arms Control Today (January/February 1999). |
| Provides a
useful overview of what a complete regime of declarations
and monitoring for all nuclear warheads and weapons-usable
nuclear materials would look like, and what purposes
it would serve. Fetter has another useful paper, similar
in some respects to the Arms Control Today article:
"Verifying
Deep Reductions in Nuclear Forces," in Harold
Feiveson, ed., The Nuclear Turning Point: A Blueprint
for Deep Cuts and De-Alerting of Nuclear Weapons (Washington,
D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1999). |
|
|
Nikolai Sokov, "Recent Developments in Nuclear Weapons Verification," in Trevor Findlay and Oliver Meier, eds., The Verification Yearbook 2002 (London: Verification Research, Training, and Information Centre, 2002). |
| This paper offers a useful brief account of the lack of progress in transparency and verification related to nuclear warheads and materials in recent years. Also includes a description of the data exchanges proposed in the U.S. START III draft treaty in 2000. Previous editions of The Verification Yearbook have offered other articles summarizing the need for transparency measures for warheads and weapons-usable nuclear materials, and the progress or lack of progress in steps toward that end. | |
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Oleg Bukharin and Kenneth Luongo, U.S.-Russian Warhead Dismantlement Transparency: The Status, Problems, and Proposals, PU/CEES Report No. 314 (Princeton, N.J.: Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University, April, 1999). |
| This report gives a good overview of U.S.-Russian transparency efforts related to warhead dismantlement, with recommendations for next steps. Unfortunately, although this paper was published in 1999, it is only modestly out of date, as there has been little progress in formal U.S.-Russian transparency negotiations since then. | |
|
The Applied Monitoring and Transparency Laboratory (AMTL). |
| The AMTL, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, works to develop and demonstrate monitoring technologies and procedures for a broad range of mainly U.S.-Russian initiatives. AMTL’s Electronic Library includes papers on topics ranging future approaches to verifying deep nuclear reductions to technologies for the Trilateral Initiative and for HEU Transparency. | |
|
Matthew Bunn, "Urgently
Needed New Steps: Monitoring Stockpiles and Reductions,"
in The Next Wave: Urgently Needed New Steps to Control
Warheads and Fissile Materials (Washington, D.C.
and Cambridge, Mass: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace and Harvard Project on Managing the Atom, April
2000), pp. 95-97. Download 530K PDF |
|
Matthew Bunn, "The
Current Response: Monitoring Stockpiles and Reductions,"
in The Next Wave: Urgently Needed New Steps to Control
Warheads and Fissile Material (Washington, D.C.:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Harvard
Project on Managing the Atom, April 2000), pp. 45-50. Download 504K PDF |
| These excerpts from a 2000 report outlines the status of U.S.-Russian transparency efforts at that time – including the wide range of measures that had been agreed to at the summit level, but never implemented, then advances proposals for next steps in moving U.S.-Russian transparency forward. | |
| Agreements and Documents | |
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Joint Statement on Parameters of Future Nuclear Reductions, March 21, 1997 |
| This statement, outlining what was then expected to be a "START III" treaty, called for the agreement to include "measures relating to the transparency of strategic nuclear warhead inventories and the destruction of strategic nuclear warheads and any other jointly agreed technical and organizational measures, to promote the irreversibility of deep reductions including prevention of a rapid increase in the number of warheads." The two Presidents also agreed that the START III negotiators should "explore, as separate issues, possible measures relating to nuclear long-range sea-launched cruise missiles and tactical nuclear systems, to include appropriate confidence-building and transparency measures," and should also "consider the issues related to transparency in nuclear materials." | |
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Joint Statement on the Transparency and Irreversibility of the Process of Reducing Nuclear Weapons, May 10, 1995. |
| Statement from the May 1995 summit by Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin, committing to a series of transparency measures, ranging from reciprocal inspections of weapons-usable material in storage to declarations of nuclear warhead and material stockpiles. | |
|
Joint Statement on Strategic Stability and Nuclear Security By the Presidents of the United States and Russia, September 28, 1994. |
| Joint statement by Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin covering many topics related to nuclear nonproliferation, the security of nuclear materials, cooperative efforts by the two countries, and arms control. Includes a commitment to exchange data on the number of warheads and the quantities of weapons-usable nuclear materials in each side’s stockpiles. | |
| FOOTNOTES | |
| [1] | See, for example, Nicholas Zarimpas, ed., Building a Nuclear Stockpile and Warhead Dismantlement Transparency Regime: Issues and Options (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997); Frank Blackaby and Joseph Rotblat, ed., Nuclear Weapons: The Road to Zero (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998); and Steve Fetter, Verifying Nuclear Disarmament (Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson Center, Occasional Paper No. 29, October 1996). |
| [2] | For discussions of international safeguards, see, for example, David Fischer, History of the IAEA: The First Forty Years (Vienna: IAEA, 1997), and Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Safeguards and the International Atomic Energy Agency (Washington, D.C.: OTA, 1995). |
| [3] | Mohammed ElBaradei, IAEA Director General, "Introductory Statement to the Board of Governors" (address given to the IAEA Board of Governors Meeting, Vienna, Austria, November 28, 2002). For an eloquent statement on the need for the world to give the IAEA the resources to do its job, see Charles Curtis, "Reducing the Nuclear Threat in the 21st Century" (address to the IAEA Safeguards Symposium, Vienna, Austria, October 29, 2001). |
| [4] | ElBaradei, "Introductory Statement to the Board of Governors," op. cit. |
| [5] | Spencer Abraham, U.S. Secretary of Energy, Remarks at the International Atomic Energy Agency 46th General Conference (Vienna, Austria, September 26, 2002). |
| [6] | Interview with State Department official, November 2002. |
| [7] | Interview with Department of Energy official, December 2002. |
| [8] | An exception would be very far-reaching transparency amounting to partial ceding of sovereignty over these stockpiles and operations using them. Over the years, for example, there have been a number of proposals to require that facilities handling weapons-usable nuclear material in the civilian cycle be under international, rather than national, ownership and control – which might also mean an international guard force. One Sandia analyst has put forward a concept in which every U.S. and Russian facility where nuclear weapons or weapons-usable materials were stored would have a perimeter patrolled by both U.S. and Russian guards, and nothing could be brought out of the perimeter without joint inspection. See Robert Rinne, An Alternative Framework for the Control of Nuclear Materials (Stanford, Cal.: Center for International Security and Cooperation, May 1999). We believe such an arrangement would substantially improve security, but is unlikely to be acceptable to either government (or the governments of other countries where it might be applied) in the near term. |
| [9] | The United States released a very detailed statement on its plutonium stockpile in the mid-1990s, but many other weapon states have not followed suit, and the United States itself has neither updated the publicly released information nor fulfilled a promise to release similarly detailed information on its production and stockpile of HEU. |
| [10] | Personal communication with IAEA personnel, September 2002. |
Written by Matthew Bunn.
Last updated by Anthony Wier on October 28, 2002.
The Securing the Bomb section of the NTI website is produced by the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) for NTI, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents. MTA welcomes comments and suggestions at atom@harvard.edu. Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.