Verification of excess defense material

The international community in the post-Cold War period has expressed an interest in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) using its expertise in support of the arms control and disarmament process in unprecedented ways. The pledges of the US and Russian presidents to place excess defense materials under some type of international inspections raises the prospect of using IAEA safeguards approaches for monitoring excess materials, which include both classified and unclassified materials. Although the IAEA has suggested the need to address inspections of both types of materials, the most troublesome and potentially difficult problems involve approaches to the inspection of classified materials. The key issue for placing classified nuclear components and materials under IAEA safeguards is the conflict between these traditional IAEA materials accounting procedures and the US classification laws and nonproliferation policy designed to prevent the disclosure of critical weapon-design information. Possible verification approaches to classified excess defense materials could be based on item accountancy, attributes measurements, and containment and surveillance. Such approaches are not wholly new; in fact, they are quite well established for certain unclassified materials. Such concepts may be applicable to classified items, but the precise approaches have yet to be identified, fully tested, or evaluated for technical and political feasibility, or for their possible acceptability in an international inspection regime. Substantial work remains in these areas. This paper examines many of the challenges presented by international inspections of classified materials