Perspective: Nuclear sleuthsToday, Everyone’s a Nuclear Spy

There was a time when tracking nuclear threats was the domain of secret agents, specialists at high-powered government intelligence agencies, and think-tank experts. Not anymore.

Amy Zegart writes in Defense One that today, the world of new nuclear sleuths looks like the Star Wars bar scene.

Among those tracking hidden nuclear activities in North Korea, Iran, and other potential nuclear weapons proliferators are journalists, hobbyists, professors, students, political-opposition groups, advocacy groups, nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, think tanks, and former senior government officials with informal links to international weapons inspectors, American policy makers, and intelligence leaders.

Zegart writes:

Among this wildly eclectic mix of individuals and organizations, some are amateurs. Others have extensive expertise. Some are driven by profit, or political causes. Others are driven by a mission to protect the United States and reduce global nuclear risks. Nearly all harbor an obsessive interest in nuclear secrets and finding creative ways to unlock them. Together, these self-appointed watchdogs are transforming American nonproliferation efforts—and largely for the better. Yet they also create new challenges for the U.S. government, which once enjoyed a near-monopoly on detailed surveillance imagery of hostile countries with nuclear ambitions. American intelligence agencies must now operate in a world where highly revealing information is sitting out in the open, for anyone to see and use.

Zegart notes that not all of the work generated by this army of new nuclear sleuths is accurate, but much of it is pathbreaking, and all of it is unclassified.

What has empowered these nuclear detectives and made their work possible is the fact that in the last 15-20 years, commercial satellites have become common – and their capabilities, although not at the level of spy satellites, are not too far behind. The resolutions offered by today’s commercial satellites is roughly 900 percent better than what they were just 15 years ago.

Open-source amateur nuclear sleuthing comes with risks, Zegart notes: errors could go viral; nefarious actors could inject deliberate deceptions; amateur sleuthing may reach different conclusions than official nuclear tracking, raising the risk that falsehoods will be believed, truth will be doubted; adversaries may be tipped off to weaknesses in their camouflage, concealment, and deception techniques that they didn’t know existed,  causing them to take new measures that make monitoring by everyone more difficult.

Zegart says that despite these risks, the democratization of nuclear-threat intelligence is likely to be a boon to the cause of nonproliferation. Aspiring nuclear states have always gone to great lengths to conceal their atomic ambitions and activities,

But dark programs can quickly spiral into global dangers—as Americans saw in October 1962, when the Soviets’ determination to surprise the United States with a nuclear fait accompli in Cuba brought the world to the brink of total nuclear war. Thanks to the new nuclear sleuths, estimating nuclear dangers isn’t just for governments anymore. For would-be proliferators like Iran and North Korea and future regimes that might consider following in their footsteps, hiding the evidence is going to get a whole lot harder.