Nuclear Proliferation and Arms Control Monitoring, Detection, and Verification A National Security Priority: Interim Report (2021) / Chapter Skim
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3 Technical MDV Capabilities and Research and Development
3 Technical MDV Capabilities and Research and Development
Pages 71-128
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efforts to improve capabilities.1 This assessment focuses on key and emerging MDV capabilities in three topical focus areas -- the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear test explosions, and arms control -- as well as open-source assets and data and advanced data analytics, which cross-cut the topical areas. Figure 3‑1 illustrates the role that these topical areas play across the nuclear weapon acquisition process.2 Note that the early steps of the nuclear weapon acquisition process involve motivation, capability development, and proliferation intent; these concepts are described in Box 3‑1.
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72 FIGURE 3‑1 Basic schematic of the nuclear weapon acquisition process. Motivation and capability development do not necessarily imply proliferation intent, but may enable a decision to proliferate and are thus an important part of the MDV landscape.
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Motivations and capability development are the more knowable and discern able indicators that may alert us to be watchful for proliferation intent. An entity's motivation to develop nuclear weapons has been called the "demand side" aspect of proliferation (Sagan, 2011) . Discerning and understanding an entity's motiva tions to proliferate provides an early opportunity to the policy and diplomatic communities to ameliorate these motivations.
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detection and attribution, are relevant to this study. The policy objectives within these elements related to the MDV mission are to • predict, detect, and characterize nuclear proliferation and weapons development activities; • provide timely and reliable verification and monitoring of states' com pliance with nuclear safeguards and arms control agreements; and • maintain effective operational capabilities to detect and characterize nuclear materials worldwide.
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, but not all topic areas saw an increase. The Monitoring and Verification Field-Testing Program (i.e., test beds; see Section 2.2.2 for additional information)
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Unilateral MDV for the nuclear fuel cycle will be discussed in more detail in the final report. Cooperative fuel cycle MDV is primarily carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
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This section addresses fuel cycle MDV that can be conducted on-site and in the surrounding environment. Stand-off sensing techniques like overhead sensing and seismic monitoring can also support fuel cycle MDV.
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Some of the R&D needs associated with four important classes of tools and methods -- nuclear material accountancy, containment and surveillance (C/S) , unattended monitoring, and environmental sampling -- are outlined below.5 Nuclear material accountancy involves determining the amount of nuclear material present within a defined area to assess consistency with a state's declarations.
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, as well as the Megatons-to-Megawatts Program, which down-blended 500 metric tons of Russian weapons HEU to LEU for use in commercial nuclear plants. Reliable tags and seals are useful MDV capabilities because they can provide evidence of treaty or agreement violation even if inspections occur infrequently.
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. The IAEA collects swipe samples inside and immediately outside enrichment plants and other facilities to help confirm the absence of undeclared nuclear material or nuclear activities.
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The IAEA is currently monitoring Iran's uranium mining sector under the JCPOA; this experience may provide valuable insight into how uranium mining can be better monitored globally. On the other end on the fuel cycle, there is work to be done in safeguarding spent fuel in storage.
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New MDV capabilities will be needed in the future to address these areas. 12 The Separation of Isotopes by Laser Excitation (SILEX)
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Some proliferation-related effluents have relatively long environmental lifetimes and thus can provide insights into historical as well as contemporary activities. As described in the previous section, the IAEA currently conducts swipe and environmental sampling inside and immediately outside declared facilities as part of its regular safeguards inspections.
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The IAEA has explored the application of wide-area environmental sampling (WAES) to "assist the Agency in drawing conclusions about the absence of undeclared nuclear material or nuclear activities over a wide area" (IAEA, 1997)
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monitoring for nuclear test explosion detection, which is described further in Section 3.3.4. Source Term Release Mechanisms Releases may be episodic or continuous and may interact with the facility or environmental media through which they transit during and after release (e.g., filters or geologic materials)
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In developing such a complex modeling system, algorithms should be verified and validated against experimental data. Unidentified Source Location Considering all sample collection locations as a network rather than single collection sites and coupling the aggregated detects and non-detects with the improved atmospheric and aquatic transport models mentioned above can greatly improve the ability to backtrack anomalous detections to possible source locations.
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Background mapping is an area where open-source data could be particularly valuable. Field Testing In addition to advancing these MDV capabilities, conducting a field test for atmospheric and aquatic measurements would illustrate the utility, costs, and operational problems to be solved for environmental sampling within the context of a useful proliferation monitoring tool and confidence building measure.
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These efforts will enhance MDV capabilities for both the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear test explosions (see Section 3.3 below) and should include the following: (a)
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Recommendation 9. DNN R&D, in collaboration with interagency and international partners, should support R&D to characterize known sources of radionuclides of interest and regional background variations to enhance MDV capabilities for both the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear test explosions (see Section 3.3 below)
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states that while the United States will not seek to ratify the CTBT, it will continue to support the architecture established to monitor and verify the treaty, described below in Section 3.3.1. Nuclear test explosion MDV capabilities were previously assessed in the 2012 National Academies report The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty: Technical Issues for the United States.
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and infrasound sensors (to detect sound waves produced by explosions in the atmosphere) and a system of RN sensors (to detect the fission and activation products produced by a nuclear explosion which may leak from an underground test)
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Substantial progress in regional wave analysis for both large and small tests has been made since the 2012 National Academies CTBT report was released. Improved remote MDV capabilities have been demonstrated by many analyses of 34 See Box 1‑2 for more information on the WC-135 aircraft.
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. Nuclear test explosion detection and identification has proved robust for the North Korean tests, which included an event that was likely sub-kiloton.
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. 39 This is related to the fate and transport research for environmental monitoring of the nuclear fuel cycle described in Section 3.2.2.
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, exploiting all available data sources (including open 40 See also Recommendations 8 and 9 in Section 3.2.3, which are relevant to enhancing MDV capabilities for both the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear testing.
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In the bilateral START I43 and New START44 treaties, the verification regimes were negotiated alongside other treaty provisions such as limits, obligations, restrictions, and declarations. In each of these treaties, the treaties limited the number of delivery vehicles as a way to limit deployed nuclear weapons.
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and Russian deployed strategic nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles have been constrained by treaties for decades, non-deployed strategic weapons and deployed and non-deployed tactical nuclear weapons are of increased interest in possible future arms control treaties with Russia. It is also expected that any comprehensive treaty or agreement with China would need to include shorter-range systems and associated warheads.
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With this lifecycle in mind, the WVP developed three approaches: • Baseline approach that builds from New START and measures the ab sence of nuclear weapons. • Additional approach that adds warhead confirmation measurements and dismantlement confirmation, including chain of custody during transport and dismantlement processes.
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DNN R&D held a meeting in December 2020 to determine future priorities for this portfolio, which could include supporting the WVP stretch goals. MDV Capabilities for Warhead Absence In past verification regimes, it has been generally accepted that there was no benefit to declaring a non-weapon item to be a nuclear weapon when the treaty limited the number of weapons.
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. There is considerable ongoing research on confirmatory approaches for nuclear weapons MDV, largely aimed at new approaches to information barriers that increase confidence the system cannot be spoofed while protecting sensitive information.
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Such test beds could eventually stimulate ways to combine the best technical ideas or generate new ideas for specific applications that may arise in arms control negotiations. Capabilities for Limited Access The inspected state will likely limit inspector access to any sensitive military sites and nuclear facilities because free access may reveal operational or other national security information.
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Some MDV capability needs for dismantlement include verifying that the fissile material mass entering a dismantlement facility equals the fissile material mass exiting the facility (i.e., a fissile material mass balance for the actual dismantlement process) , monitoring the disposition of fissile material from dismantled weapons, monitoring a mass balance and disposition of tritium from dismantled weapons, monitoring the disposition of weapon physics package materials other than fissile materials, and validating that the empty external weapon cases belonged to a nuclear weapon and were not substituted.
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This work has included defining the 14 distinct steps of the nuclear dismantlement process; from defining and verifying baseline inventory declarations; through the verification of warheads as they are removed from deployed delivery vehicles; through storage and transportation; during dismantlement; and ending after disposition of fissile material, non-nuclear components, and high explosives. To date, IPNDV has included detailed technical analysis of potentially applicable measurement and MDV techniques, table-top and practical exercises, and experimental test beds, in addition to written analysis.
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Personnel entrances were also monitored. A portal monitor for future arms control treaties that require warhead verification would likely have different requirements than portal monitors for missiles.
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There may also be an opportunity to leverage significant investments that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made in radiation portal monitors, albeit for nuclear security rather than arms control applications.55 However, portal monitors designed for other applications (e.g., border security)
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(a) Warhead confirmation techniques that can be practically deployed, au thenticated, and certified, especially with trusted information barriers, are not yet mature and would benefit from test beds in order to compare strengths and weaknesses in standard and real-world conditions.
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3.5 CROSS-CUTTING TECHNOLOGY: LEVERAGING DATA In recent years, the number of data sources and amount of generated data has grown immensely, including data of relevance to the MDV mission. A great
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Not only do they support fuel cycle monitoring, nuclear test explosion monitoring, and arms control monitoring, they can also support MDV in the earliest phases of nuclear weapon acquisition: motivation, capability development, and intent. For example, some current projects in the DNN R&D Data Science portfolio are focused on assessing capability development by detecting and tracking nuclear expertise and research and assessing indicators of intent by distinguishing between benign and illicit use of weapons-usable technologies (DNN R&D, communication to committee, September 18, 2020)
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Increasing authentication and analysis rates, potentially through the use of advanced data analytics, could increase the utility of open-source data streams. In addition, unauthenticated data can be used to tip and cue more trusted NTM assets for closer examination.
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. Satellite imagery of the site, which is believed to be an important component of the North Korean weapons program, has also been analyzed extensively by nongovernmental researchers.
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interpretable, available facilities, transit of materials available and applied imagery in very fine resolution and patterns-of-life to the MDV mission.
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The technologies listed in Table 3‑2 are becoming more applicable to the MDV mission due to significant improvements in spatial and temporal resolution. The spatial resolution62 of satellite imagery has continued to improve in recent years.
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TECHNICAL MDV CAPABILITIES AND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT 113 FIGURE 3‑5 Satellite images of an airplane at 3 m (top) , 70 cm (middle)
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This vastly increased tempo of surveillance reduces the ability to mask activity and increases analytic surety. As discussed in Section 2.3.4, the MDV enterprise needs to stay apprised of rapid technical developments in the commercial sector to identify advancements that could improve MDV capabilities.
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3.5.2 Establishing a Robust Data Pipeline As demonstrated above, open-source assets and data are of value to the MDV mission space independently of advances in data science. However, emerging data analytical methods can extract additional insight from both open-source and government datasets and strengthen the complementary nature of these different data streams.
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) have launched initiatives focused on advanced data analytics.68 For example, DOE is planning a focused initiative in AI that seeks to advance the foundation of advanced data analytics, as well as applications to 67 This comes under the rubric of data science and is the integration of statistical and computational sciences.
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. While advanced data analytics are not silver bullets for the MDV mission and have some significant limitations, addressed below, they can support the MDV mission in a variety of meaningful ways, providing insight and decision support and allowing for a more efficient allocation of resources.
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.70 The interagency has sought to capture these innovative new ideas. For example, a data analytics workshop hosted by LANL in 2017 brought together interagency 69 While NNSA is not the only agency exploring how data science can support the MDV mission, the committee focused primarily on NNSA's efforts in this area for this interim report.
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In addition, there is room to better leverage commercial industry, which is leading innovation in some data science fields, as noted in Section 2.3.4. Limitations of Advanced Data Analytics to the MDV Mission While the MDV enterprise is rightfully pursuing advanced data analytics R&D, it is also important to note the limitations of these techniques.
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Finding 16. Advanced data analytics are rapidly emerging techniques with the potential to facilitate earlier proliferation detection and better decision making.
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2018. "Commercial satellite imagery analysis for countering nuclear proliferation." Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 46:99-121.
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n.d. Nuclear fuel cycle.
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2015. "International Monitoring System correlation detection at the North Korean nuclear test site at Punggye-ri with insights from the source physics experiment." Seismological Research Letters 86(4)
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2011b. The nuclear fuel cycle.
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2012. Managing the nuclear fuel cycle: Policy implica tions of expanding global access to nuclear power.
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2018. "Focus section on North Korea's September 2017 nuclear test and its aftermath." Seismological Research Letters 89: 6.
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2016. "Safeguards considerations for thorium fuel cycles." Nuclear Technology 194:281-293.
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