National labsSandia’s Cooperative Monitoring Center: 20 years of work supporting international security agreements

Sandia National Laboratories’ Cooperative Monitoring Center (CMC) is celebrating its twentieth anniversary of promoting the principles of cooperation and the value of technology in support of international security agreements.

A Sandia Lab release notes that since it was established in 1994, the CMC has worked to address security issues by bringing together policy and technical experts from different nations; showing participants how to use technology and confidence-building measures to solve regional and global security concerns; and creating institutions to promote security in regions around the world.

“The whole principle is that these problems can’t be solved by one country alone; they require cooperation, and technical cooperation is part of that,” said Arian Pregenzer, a CMC founder and Sandia consultant.

Rodney Wilson, director of Sandia’s Global Security & Cooperation Center, recently hosted a celebration for the CMC in Washington, D.C.“We’re celebrating 20 years and I hope there’s 20 years more to come,” he said. “There are a lot of people who really believe in the CMC and they want to contribute to the idea.”

CMC created to encourage technical understanding, cooperation
After the cold war ended, Pregenzer became aware at chemical weapons talks in Geneva that those negotiating the treaties overpromised technology and did not fully understand its capabilities and limitations. At the same time, she observed renewed optimism, particularly in the Middle East, about resolving long-standing issues and instituting confidence-building measures. She recognized that policymakers needed to understand how technology could help.

“There were all these regions where there seemed to be political will to move toward agreements, and those agreements would be nothing if they weren’t implemented — and that meant technology,” Pregenzer said.

Sandia also recognized that many of the technologies developed to address security and arms control issues during the cold war could be applied to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, said Kent Biringer, manager of International Nuclear Threat Reduction at Sandia.

The CMC started with a half dozen researchers in a portable building, but later moved to what is now the Sandia Science & Technology Park. Its current home is in the Center for Global Security and Cooperation in the research park.

Visitors to the CMC can use conference rooms for training, offices for research, and the CMC’s Technology, Training and Display area for a hands-on look at technologies, Rodney says.

The release reports that in the early 1990s, the CMC established trust between researchers in the United States and