“To be clear, this is Plan B,” Matt Korda, deputy director of the Federation of American Scientists, tells WIRED. Korda wrote a report at FAS that outlines a possible future for arms control in a world where all the elderly treaties are dead. IN Inspections without inspectorsKorda and co-author Igor Morić describe a recent way to monitor the world’s nuclear weapons, which they call “cooperative technical means.” In miniature, satellites and other remote sensing technologies would do the work that was once done by scientists and inspectors on the ground.
Korda says artificial intelligence can assist with this process. “Artificial intelligence is good at pattern recognition,” he says. “If you had a large enough and well-curated dataset, you could theoretically train a model that could identify both small changes in specific locations and potentially identify individual weapons systems.”
Recent START, the Obama-era treaty that circumscribed the number of nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia, expired last week on February 5. (Don’t worry, countries apparently still plan to maintain the status quo – for now.) Both countries are spending billions to build recent and different types of nuclear weapons. China is building recent silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles. As America retreats from the world stage, its nuclear safeguards are less vital, and countries like South Korea are eyeing the bomb. Trust between nations is at an all-time low.
In this situation, Korda and Morić want to apply existing infrastructure to negotiate and enforce recent treaties. No country wants “on-site inspectors hanging around its territory,” Korda says. Otherwise, the world’s nuclear powers will be able to apply satellites and other remote sensors to remotely monitor the world’s nuclear weapons. Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems would then take this data, sort it, and pass it on to a human for review.
It’s an imperfect proposition, but it’s better than the literal version Thread the world has now.
For decades, the United States and Russia have worked to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world. There were more than 60,000 in 1985. That number has fallen to just over 12,000. It took decades of dedicated work by politicians, diplomats and scientists to eliminate some 50,000 nuclear weapons. The death of Recent START negates decades of work. These on-site inspections strengthened trust between Russia and the US and laid the groundwork for easing tensions during the Chilly War. That era is now over, replaced by an era of ferocity and a renewed nuclear arms race.
“In this paper, we came with an idea: What if there was some kind of middle ground between no arms control and plain spying, and arms control combined with intrusive on-site inspections that may no longer be politically viable?” – says Korda. “What can we do remotely if countries work together to facilitate a remote verification system?”
Korda and Morić propose using a network of existing satellites to monitor intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos, mobile missile launchers and plutonium tank production sites. The huge hurdle is that good implementation of a remotely enforced treaty regime would require some level of cooperation. Nuclear powers would still have to agree to participate.