Summary
The U.S. Congress directed the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to sponsor a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (National Academies) review and assessment of U.S. capabilities for monitoring, detection, and verification (MDV) of nuclear weapons and fissile material, including an evaluation of the current national MDV research and development (R&D) enterprise and the integration of roles, responsibilities, and planning for the MDV mission.1
GOVERNANCE OF THE MDV ENTERPRISE
The Need: The committee found that state and non-state actors remain serious proliferation threats. MDV challenges are increasing in multiple dimensions as states actively improve their nuclear weapon arsenals and as technology advances and cross-border illicit networks make proliferation more difficult to detect. To address these challenges, the United States needs a sustained and integrated MDV program that stewards capabilities; meets future technology, operations, and capacity needs; and minimizes surprise.
Enterprise Integration: The MDV mission is distributed across a number of federal agencies and departments, demanding a high level of integration and coordination. The MDV enterprise must ensure that there is an enduring interagency process that regularly evaluates and updates current and future proliferation
___________________
1 National Defense Authorization Act, 116th Congress, Pub. L. No. 116-92 § 3136 (2019).
and arms control challenges, assesses the adequacy of current organization and capabilities to address these challenges, develops strategic guidance for R&D planning, and advocates for funding.
Long-Range Vision: Some of the most important challenges in this mission space require long-range vision (10 to 20 years), planning, and investments. To get advice on future nonproliferation and arms control MDV R&D priorities, the National Security Council (NSC) should establish an external advisory board composed of experts who collectively have familiarity with the government agencies, as well as the national laboratories, academic institutions, and industry involved in MDV.
Stewardship of Capabilities: NNSA has taken significant steps in recent years to ensure that key MDV capabilities are stewarded with the development of a new Nonproliferation Stewardship Program and the establishment of national experimental test beds. These efforts are critical and should be sustained and expanded where appropriate. NNSA should assess opportunities for expanding test bed access to academic, commercial, and international partners.
Stewardship of Expertise: Sustaining current MDV expertise is an essential need for the MDV enterprise, especially in light of an aging workforce. The NNSA Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation (DNN) R&D university consortia play an important role in developing the next generation of MDV expertise and are expanding their reach to address future needs in fields such as the data sciences. The positive impact of the consortia could be maximized by incorporating benchmarks similar to other university consortia programs.
Strengthening Technology Transition: Concrete steps are necessary to address persistent challenges in transitioning MDV R&D to operational systems and tools. Operational users and technology providers should maintain close communications and coordination throughout the technology development and transition process, and the NNSA/DNN Deputy Administrator should institutionalize a process for close communication between DNN R&D and the NNSA Office of Nonproliferation and Arms Control to facilitate selection of high-priority innovative ideas and transition of promising technologies.
Increasing Innovation: The MDV R&D enterprise should look for ways to sustainably drive innovation for high-priority MDV objectives. DNN R&D should consider how to expand participation in its innovation portfolio and ensure that its university consortia have agility to incorporate new research directions and technologies. NNSA should also invest in technology scouting to be familiar with developments in the commercial sector that could be applicable to the MDV
mission, and engage industry to fast-track new data science methods into NNSA-relevant testing where possible.
TECHNICAL MDV CAPABILITIES AND R&D
MDV for Declared Facilities: MDV capabilities for the nuclear fuel cycle must evolve to keep pace with emerging technologies and the growing amount of global nuclear activity. NNSA should prioritize R&D efforts that (1) enhance efficiency, ease of use/deployment, and sustainability to maximize the viability of safeguards tools and technologies; (2) address MDV for advanced reactors, nontraditional and emerging enrichment techniques, and small and/or non-traditional reprocessing technologies; and (3) enhance capabilities to monitor and detect early capability development that could be a potential proliferation threat.
MDV for Undeclared Facilities: Environmental sampling is a key tool for monitoring and detecting nuclear activity. Understanding and modeling source term mechanisms, environmental fate, and atmospheric/aquatic transport of proliferation effluents are key to identifying when and where to sample and provide insight into proliferation activities from analyzed samples. DNN R&D, in coordination with interagency partners, should support R&D in these areas and develop integrated analytic processes to analyze environmental sampling results from all relevant sampling locations as a network. New cross-cutting MDV technologies, such as open-source assets and data and advanced data analytics, may also provide significant improvement for early detection of undeclared facilities.
MDV for Nuclear Test Explosions: Capabilities for global monitoring of nuclear explosions have improved since the National Academies 2012 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty report, but expanded R&D efforts could improve the accuracy of remotely determined nuclear yield estimates for uncalibrated test sites and low-yield tests. The United States should continue to support construction, technology refreshment, and improved capabilities for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s International Monitoring System (IMS), because a fully functioning IMS is beneficial to the United States.
MDV for Warheads: Future arms control agreements may rely on warhead confirmation techniques, but these capabilities are not yet mature. To ensure that capabilities are available when needed for future treaties, NNSA’s arms control MDV portfolio should be a sustained, core element of its program, regardless of technology needs based on current policies. NNSA should develop a test bed for warhead verification that is accessible to the academic, laboratory, industrial, and international community. Furthermore, the United States should actively establish and encourage both bilateral and multilateral international engagements to
develop techniques to monitor and verify warheads and dismantlement activities. NNSA, working with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the intelligence community, should plan to address future MDV challenges such as the verification of dual-capable missiles.
Open-Source Assets and Data: There has been a rapid expansion of commercial platforms providing remote sensing data over the past decade, and advances in spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution have unlocked additional applications to the MDV mission. Open-source data from nongovernmental assets have value to MDV efforts, particularly if they are being processed and interpreted by trusted entities such as commercial partners or established academics. The MDV enterprise should monitor open-source capabilities and look for opportunities to use open-source data to improve MDV capabilities. The enterprise should also explore techniques such as advanced data analytics that will enable open-source data to be leveraged more fully.
Advanced Data Analytics: Advanced data analytic capabilities have the potential to help detect signs of proliferation earlier and should thus be an MDV R&D priority. Data availability will be the limiting factor in the use of advanced analytics to support the MDV mission. The NSC should orchestrate an interagency program to build MDV-relevant data pipelines with multi-point data collection and curation, collaborating with international partners where feasible and including the growing amount of open-source data as appropriate. The committee recommends that the NSC designate NNSA as the lead agency in this effort.
The committee provides more detail, including findings and recommendations, in this interim report.
