For half a century, the world’s nuclear powers relied on an intricate and complex series of treaties that slowly and steadily reduced the number of nuclear weapons on the planet. Those treaties are gone now, and it doesn’t appear that they’ll be coming back anytime soon. As a stopgap measure, researchers and scientists are suggesting a bold and weird path forward: using a system of satellites and artificial intelligence to monitor the world’s nukes.
“To be clear, this is plan B,” Matt Korda, an associate director at the Federation of American Scientists, tells WIRED. Korda has written a report at FAS that outlines a possible future for arms control in a world where all the old treaties have died. In Inspections Without Inspectors, Korda and coauthor Igor Morić describe a new way to monitor the world’s nuclear weapons they call “cooperative technical means.” In short, satellites and other remote sensing technology would do the work that scientists and inspectors once did on the ground.
Korda says AI could help this process. “Something that artificial intelligence is good at is pattern recognition,” he says. “If you had a large enough and well-curated dataset, you could, in theory, train a model that’s able to identify both minute changes at particular locations but also potentially identify individual weapon systems.”
New START, an Obama-era treaty that limited the amount of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia deployed, expired last week, on February 5. (Don’t worry, the countries reportedly still plan to maintain the status quo—for now.) Both countries are spending billions to build new and different kinds of nuclear weapons. China is building new intercontinental ballistic missile silos. As America withdraws from the world stage, its nuclear vouchsafes mean less, and countries like South Korea are eyeing the bomb. Trust between nations is at an all-time low.
In this environment, Korda and Morić’s pitch is to use existing infrastructure to negotiate and enforce new treaties. No country wants “on-site inspectors roaming around on their territory,” Korda says. So, failing that, the world’s nuclear powers can use satellites and other remote sensors to monitor the world’s nuclear weapons remotely. AI and machine-learning systems would then take that data, sort it, and turn it over for human review.
It’s an imperfect proposal, but it’s better than the literal nothing the world has now.
For decades, the US and Russia have worked to reduce the amount of nuclear weapons in the world. In 1985 there were more than 60,000 nukes. That number is down to just over 12,000. Eliminating roughly 50,000 nuclear weapons took decades of dedicated work from politicians, diplomats, and scientists. The death of New START represents the refutation of those decades of work. These on-site inspections fostered trust between Russia and the US and laid the groundwork for a drawdown of tensions during the Cold War. That era is over now, replaced by an age of acrimony and a renewed nuclear arms race.
“The idea we had in this paper was, what if there was a sort of middle ground between having no arms control and just spying, and having arms control with intrusive on-site inspections which may no longer be politically viable?” Korda says. ”What can we do remotely if the countries cooperate with each other to facilitate a remote verification regime?”
Korda and Morić’s proposal is to use the web of existing satellites to monitor intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos, mobile rocket launchers, and plutonium pit production sites. One big hurdle is that a good implementation of a remotely enforced treaty regime would require a certain level of cooperation. The nuclear powers would still need to agree to participate.