December 16, 2024
Miles Pomper, William Moon, Marshall Brown, Ferenc Dalnoki Veress,
Dan Zhukov, Dick Gullickson, and Yanliang Pan
Foreword
Rose Gottemoeller
This study is the culmination of four years of work to think through what would be required to track and monitor nuclear warheads in a verification process. It first began in 2021, shortly after President Joe Biden of the United States and President Vladimir Putin of Russia extended the New START Treaty until February 2026; the two presidents also announced the launch of bilateral strategic stability talks. This positive moment in the U.S.-Russian relationship, which became almost unimaginable after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, was the original impetus for the project. It also launched in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, commonly known as the INF Treaty. The Russians had been violating the Treaty with the production and deployment of the 9M729 missile, also known in NATO parlance as the SSC-8. All NATO allies concurred with the withdrawal, which the United States completed in August 2019.
The effort began with two strands of activity. The study team knew that when the United States and Russia decided to return to the negotiating table, the United States would place a high priority on seeking direct limits on warheads. Prior treaties had focused on controlling and eliminating missiles but had not focused directly on the warheads that armed them. It had long been a goal of the United States to seek direct limits on warheads, in order to more accurately constrain a Russian preponderance in warheads designated for theaterand shorter-range systems.1 However, if such an agreement were negotiated, the European allies would be ill-equipped to participate. On-site inspections under the INF Treaty had ended on May 31, 2001, so it had been twenty years since the allies had had to participate in verification activities. Most had lost expertise and institutional memory; some had never participated at all. “Raising the IQ” of the NATO allies about participating in arms control implementation was thus the first strand of activity.
The second strand grew up around a conviction in the study team that the well-practiced verification techniques that had been exercised in INF and strategic arms control treaties since the 1980s could be augmented with new technology and innovative techniques. Thus emerged the emphasis on using cryptography to underpin a unique warhead tracking system. This work took advantage of some of the finest experts in the field of cryptography at Stanford University, and also the extensive experience gained during the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s many years of work to strengthen warhead protection, control and accounting in Russian Ministry of Defense nuclear warhead storage facilities. This work, which spanned a period of over fifteen years from 1995- 2013, provided the study team with a great depth of knowledge about the normal operating procedures in Russian military warhead facilities. This deep knowledge was vital to developing a concept for the tracking system, providing it with a realism and accuracy that otherwise would not have been possible.
These two strands of work culminated in 2022 in a significant study, “Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Non-Strategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe.”2 However, the team realized that only one element of warhead verification had been touched—the broad outlines of a system for maintaining and exchanging information over the life of an agreement. Other verification elements such as on-site inspections and particular verification technologies had not been considered. They therefore resolved to expand the scope of work to imagine an entire closed system for nuclear warhead verification. With the cryptographic element as its foundation, the team reviewed the extensive experience of treaties, agreements and other activities such as exhibitions and joint experiments that had been built up over the many years of U.S.-Soviet and Russian cooperation on nuclear weapons control. From this, they created a comprehensive menu of measures that could be considered for a future warhead control regime, calibrating the measures according to the level of their intrusiveness.
Intrusiveness is a key concept for any military establishment participating in an arms control regime to understand and accept. While the United States may seek maximum intrusiveness to be assured that the Russians or other counterparts are not cheating on an agreement, the U.S. Air Force and Navy will want to calibrate that intrusiveness to sustain their operational flexibility and timeliness.
Arms control regimes must be completely reciprocal for all parties to agree to them. Therefore, whatever intrusive techniques are applied to Russian facilities will also have to be endured in U.S. Air Force and Navy facilities. If the measures slow or interrupt operational tempo too much, then they become unacceptable. Likewise—especially where warheads are concerned—if the measures provide too much sensitive information about U.S. warhead capabilities, then they also become unacceptable, to their Department of Energy and Department of Defense stewards but also to the entire U.S. government. Thus, negotiators must seek a balance of intrusiveness and tolerance for operational and secrecy requirements. This balance will be a vital goal for any future agreement that attempts to directly limit warheads.
Although the prospects for nuclear controls and limitations have retreated into the distance with the advent of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Cold War history teaches that the appetite for negotiation can change at any time. Because the war in Ukraine has produced a massive proliferation in the deployment and operational use of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles, an urge to negotiate constraints on them might emerge fairly soon, out of nearterm negotiations to end the war. From the U.S. perspective, warheads controls will be a necessary component.
The easiest constraint to describe in agreement text if not to implement would be a total ban on nuclear-armed missiles of all ground-based types used in this war, whether Russian, Ukrainian or NATO in origin. No one has an interest in the wide number of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles launched daily in this war being nuclear-armed. A total ban on nuclear-armed intermediate- and shorter-range ground-based missiles might therefore be a goal of the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, with NATO also participating. In that case, this study is an excellent compendium, or menu, of warhead monitoring measures that could be considered to implement the ban.
One great advantage of this study has been the interdisciplinary and intergenerational nature of the team that carried it out. The lead substantive players were the most experienced manager of the DTRA warhead programs in Russia, William Moon and a top U.S. arms control treaty lawyer, Marshall Brown. Understanding of the Soviet/Russian point of view was provided by Nikolai Sokov, a leading expert with many years of arms control negotiating experience in the Soviet and Russian Ministries of Foreign Affairs. Technical expertise on warhead monitoring was provided by Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a master of technical possibility. And the younger generation of cryptographic and nuclear experts was ably represented by Neil Perry, Daniil Zhukov, and Yanliang Pan, who contributed significantly to the technical success of the project. All of this action was ably orchestrated by Miles Pomper, who led the project from its outset and provided its strategic direction. For me, it has been a huge privilege to work with this team.
