Nuclear weaponsA farewell to (nuclear) arms: A novel technique could facilitate nuclear disarmament

A proven system for verifying that apparent nuclear weapons slated to be dismantled contained true warheads could provide a key step toward the further reduction of nuclear arms. The system would achieve this verification while safeguarding classified information that could lead to nuclear proliferation.

Scientists at Princeton University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are developing the prototype for such a system, as reported this week in Nature magazine. Their novel approach, called a “zero-knowledge protocol,” would verify the presence of warheads without collecting any classified information at all.

“The goal is to prove with as high confidence as required that an object is a true nuclear warhead while learning nothing about the materials and design of the warhead itself,” said physicist Robert Goldston, coauthor of the paper, a fusion researcher and former director of PPPL, and a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton.

A PPPL release reports that while numerous efforts have been made over the years to develop systems for verifying the actual content of warheads covered by disarmament treaties, no such methods are currently in use for treaty verification.

Counting warheads
Traditional nuclear arms negotiations focus instead on the reduction of strategic — or long-range — delivery systems, such as bombers, submarines, and ballistic missiles, without verifying their warheads. This approach, however, could prove insufficient when future talks turn to tactical and nondeployed nuclear weapons that are not on long-range systems. “What we really want to do is count warheads,” said physicist Alexander Glaser, first author of the paper and an assistant professor in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

The system Glaser and Goldston are mapping out would compare a warhead to be inspected with a known true warhead to see if the weapons matched. This would be done by beaming high-energy neutrons into each warhead and recording how many neutrons passed through to detectors positioned on the other side. Neutrons that passed through would be added to those already “preloaded” into the detectors by the warheads’ owner — and if the total number of neutrons were the same for each warhead, the weapons would be found to match. Different totals, however, would show that the putative warhead was really a spoof. Prior to the test, the inspector would decide which preloaded detector would go with which warhead.