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| Then U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Frank A. Rose
A new initiative will help us adapt an old formula for a new generation of nuclear arms control agreements.
“Trust, but verify.” This phrase, once cited by President Ronald Reagan in the context of 1980’s arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, has come to define the international community’s approach to developing arms control treaties and agreements.
From its earliest efforts at arms control in the midst of the Cold War, the United States has weighed the degree of verification intrusiveness it could accept on its side against the verification uncertainty it could tolerate on the other side. The goal today, as it was then, is to employ verification solutions that are powerful enough to reliably detect and deter would-be cheaters, without compromising our own security.
These verification regimes form the backbone of arms control treaties and agreements. For example, the New START Treaty text is 17 pages long, but annexes that cover the monitoring and inspection procedures, and define the measures necessary to ensure compliance and stability, contain more than 350 pages.
Of course, the arms control agreements of tomorrow will be different in scope and scale. As arsenals shrink, verification or monitoring to ensure compliance with disarmament goals will require a wider array of capabilities and platforms. “Trust, but verify” remains the goal, but verification will become more difficult.
Fortunately, past cooperative efforts between nuclear weapon states (NWS) and non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) provide a foundation on which to collaboratively build these verification and monitoring capabilities, and to construct bigger and better verification regimes. Those efforts helped to inspire a new initiative focused on developing the tools and technologies necessary to verify the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons—the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV).
Read the full story at The Diplomat