Low-Intrusion Techniques and Sensitive Information Management for Warhead Counting and Verification: FY2011 Annual Report
Future arms control treaties may push nuclear weapons limits to unprecedented low levels and may entail precise counting of warheads as well as distinguishing between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. Such advances will require assessment of form and function to confidently verify the presence or absence of nuclear warheads and/or their components. Imaging with penetrating radiation can provide such an assessment and could thus play a unique role in inspection scenarios. Yet many imaging capabilities have been viewed as too intrusive from the perspective of revealing weapon design details, and the potential for the release of sensitive information poses challenges in verification settings. A widely held perception is that verification through radiography requires images of sufficient quality that an expert (e.g., a trained inspector or an image-matching algorithm) can verify the presence or absence of components of a device. The concept of information barriers (IBs) has been established to prevent access to relevant weapon-design information by inspectors (or algorithms), and has, to date, limited the usefulness of radiographic inspection. The challenge of this project is to demonstrate that radiographic information can be used behind an IB to improve the capabilities of treaty-verification weapons-inspection systems.