Nuclear weaponsFor nuclear weapons reduction, a way to verify without revealing
In past negotiations aimed at reducing the arsenals of the world’s nuclear superpowers, chiefly the U.S. and Russia, a major sticking point has been the verification process: How do you prove that real bombs and nuclear devices — not just replicas — have been destroyed, without revealing closely held secrets about the design of those weapons? New isotope-detection method could prove compliance but avoid divulging secrets.
In past negotiations aimed at reducing the arsenals of the world’s nuclear superpowers, chiefly the U.S. and Russia, a major sticking point has been the verification process: How do you prove that real bombs and nuclear devices — not just replicas — have been destroyed, without revealing closely held secrets about the design of those weapons?
Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a clever solution, which in effect serves as a physics-based version of the cryptographic keys used in computer encryption systems. In fact, they’ve come up with two entirely different versions of such a system, to show that there may be a variety of options to choose from if any one is found to have drawbacks. Their findings are reported in two papers, one in Nature Communicationsand the other in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with MIT assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering Areg Danagoulian as senior author of both.
Because of the difficulties in proving that a nuclear warhead is real and contains actual nuclear fuel (typically highly enriched plutonium), past treaties have instead focused on the much larger and harder-to-fake delivery systems: intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and bombers. Arms reduction treaties such as START, which reduced the number of delivery systems on each side by 80 percent in the 1990s, resulted in the destruction of hundreds of missiles and planes, including 365 huge B-52 bombers chopped into pieces by a giant guillotine-like device in the Arizona desert.
But to avert the dangers of future proliferation — for example, if rogue nations or terrorists gained control of nuclear warheads — actually disposing of the bombs themselves and their fuel should be a goal of future treaties, Danagoulian says. So, a way of verifying such destruction could be a key to making such agreements possible. Danagoulian says his team, which included graduate student Jayson Vavrek, postdoc Brian Henderson, and recent graduate Jake Hecla ’17, have found just such a method, in two different variations.
“How do you verify what’s in a black box without looking inside? People have tried many different concepts,” Danagoulian says. But these efforts tend to suffer from the same problem: If they reveal enough information to be effective, they reveal too much to be politically acceptable.
