Rostock 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung

AGA 2: Verifying Nuclear Disarmament

AGA 2.2: Hauptvortrag

Donnerstag, 14. März 2019, 10:30–11:30, U HS 3 Parkstr. 6

New approaches to verification in nuclear disarmament — •Pavel Podvig — UN Institute for Disarmament Research

Robust verification is an essential element of nuclear disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation. Elimination of nuclear weapons will require a sustained effort aimed at creating political conditions for disarmament and reducing the role of war in international security. As states will assume obligations to reduce their nuclear arsenals and stocks of weapon-usable fissile materials, it will be extremely important to ensure that these steps are done in a verifiable and irreversible manner. Every step of the way, effective verification arrangements will help build trust and confidence that are essential for making further progress toward nuclear disarmament possible. Also, innovative approaches to verification could open way for bold political disarmament initiatives. This presentation describes approaches to nuclear disarmament verification that are designed to avoid having to deal with sensitive information about nuclear weapons or weapon-related fissile materials. Protection of sensitive information emerged as one of the most difficult issues in verification and is currently seen as a serious obstacle on the way toward practical nuclear disarmament steps. To address this problem, UNIDIR developed an approach to verification of nuclear disarmament that relies on verifying the absence of nuclear weapons attached to delivery vehicles or stored at operational bases. This approach could be used in a variety of situations, from removal of non-strategic nuclear weapons from Europe to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Another concept deals with weapon-usable fissile materials. The deferred verification arrangement developed at UNIDIR proposes a mechanism that would allow nuclear-armed states to declare the amount of fissile material that they possess and, most importantly, do it in a verifiable way. This arrangement could be an important element of comprehensive nuclear disarmament, which would require placing all weapon-usable fissile materials under international control.