Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung

AGA 3: Nuclear Verification and Disarmament Research

AGA 3.1: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 10, 2016, 09:30–10:30, H3

Next Steps Toward Verified Nuclear Disarmament: A Research Agenda for Physicists without Security Clearances — •Alexander Glaser — Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (USA)

More than 70 years after the first use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki there still exist more than 16,000 nuclear weapons. Progress toward nuclear disarmament in the years after the end of the Cold War has slowed down dramatically. Along with a lack of political commitment and public attention to this issue, there remain substantial technical gaps in effective international verification of any treaty that would seek deep reductions in the nuclear arsenals.

It is often assumed that nuclear weapon states need to take the lead in this area of research and development because only they have the infrastructure and the experts to understand the technical requirements and constraints of eliminating the weapons. Despite decades of technical work, however, nuclear classification concerns have yielded ever more complex verification approaches that serve to raise concerns whether nuclear disarmament could in fact be reliably verified.

This talk proposes an agenda for unclassified cooperative research on nuclear verification approaches as a way to bring new ideas and perspectives to this field. It highlights some recent developments and reviews some of the possible paths forward on three key nuclear verification questions: how to confirm the authenticity of nuclear warheads; how to confirm numerical limits on nuclear warheads; and, how to confirm the absence of undeclared stockpiles of nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapon materials and the means of their production.