Nuclear Non-proliferation and Arms Control Verification

This opening chapter considers the basic concepts of arms control verification, and how it works with international agreements. It shows how verification differs from, but can contribute to, general confidence-building. Later, the text elaborates on the role of technology and technological expertise in a verification enterprise, touching on the current status of technologies employed in arms control and exploring the principles on which they have been designed. The chapter highlights, in particular, the need to protect sensitive data, the need for equipment to be jointly trusted, and the requirement that equipment is designed, specified and built taking host facility considerations into mind. The text exemplifies equipment development by looking at so-called information barriers—gear intended to detect a nuclear warhead’s attributes or to match a warhead against a template while protecting classified and proliferative information. Finally, the chapter points out the continuing importance of progress in arms control verification research and development, as well as in basic verification methodology.

Implementation of IAEA safeguards and the drawing of safeguards conclusions has changed dramatically from an ad hoc arrangement in 1962, to an approach focused on verifying nuclear material at declared facilities and drawing safeguards conclusions at the level of individual facilities, to one that assesses the consistency of all safeguards relevant information regarding a State’s nuclear programme and draws a safeguards conclusion for the State as a whole. The notion of implementing safeguards that considers a State’s nuclear and nuclear-related activities and capabilities, as a whole, is referred to as the State-level concept. The State-level concept is applicable to all States with a safeguards agreement in force. Through implementing safeguards in the context of the State-level concept, a number of benefits in terms of effectiveness and efficiency have been realized, including taking better account of State-specific factors which allow for the development and implementation of customized State-level approaches (SLAs). SLAs provide options for safeguards measures to be implemented in the field and at Headquarters, allowing the IAEA to compare their cost-effectiveness and providing greater flexibility in safeguards implementation. Instead of mechanistically applying the activities listed in the safeguards criteria, the implementation of SLAs is focused on attainment of technical objectives. By doing so, safeguards implementation is more performance-oriented and is helping the IAEA to avoid spending resources on doing more than is needed for effective safeguards. The objectives are established by the Secretariat using structured and technically based analytical methods conducted according to uniform processes and defined procedures. Utilizing the same technically-based processes and procedures for developing SLAs for all States helps to ensure consistency and non-discrimination in safeguards implementation, efficient performance of the work, and more soundly based safeguards conclusions.

Broadly speaking, current verification approaches—exemplified by traditional IAEA safeguards—seek to show whether a declaration made by a state under a particular treaty is true or false. The IAEA safeguards experience shows the limits to this approach—not all situations are so neatly bivalent. A major focus for safeguards development over the last 20 years or so is the problem of detecting, and drawing conclusions about, undeclared nuclear material and activities. This involves the difficulty of proving a negative—can absence of evidence be taken to be evidence of absence? As the scope of arms control is extended and nuclear disarmament progresses, future verification missions will be dealing with increasing degrees of uncertainty, having to make judgments about unknowns. Risk and systems driven verification, involving greater use of qualitative methods and judgments, will be an essential aspect of this. With greater uncertainty, the confidence-building objective of verification will be more difficult, and at the same time more important. A less definitive verification environment has major implications for the application of legal precepts such as the standard of proof, the duty to cooperate, and non-discrimination, and related policy issues such as the use of information. Compared with the traditional emphasis on the right of the state, more focus will be required on the international interest—emphasising the need for cooperation and transparency. The need for an effective approach to managing uncertainty should also be reflected in the way new treaty regimes are developed, for example in decision-making processes, non-compliance determinations, adaptability of verification procedures to meet evolving circumstances, dispute resolution, enforcement, and so on. In the development of risk and systems driven verification, and the associated legal and institutional aspects, the IAEA verification system has a deep and rich experience to draw on.

The nuclear safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency—the world’s most widely accepted scheme of multilateral verification—entails an inescapable paradox. While it is based on strictly scientific terms and methods of data collection and evaluation, equality of treatment and meticulous observance of non-discrimination among members of the Agency, its frame of reference is avowedly political, shaped by historical contingencies, steeped in the gradients of power and influence, prejudiced on mutual distrust and jealousy as is typical of international politics. The evolution of the safeguards system over time has brought this paradox more sharply to the fore. As demands on the technical accuracy and reliability of IAEA verification were being continuously increased, so was the ambition of Member States to bring their influence to bear on the definition and operation of safeguards. Efforts to resolve the paradox have resulted in an increasingly intimate meshing of politics and verification. By way of shifting the focus of safeguards from nuclear material accountancy and facility monitoring to “the State as a whole”, and more recently the adoption of the “State-level concept”, it is now the correlation of international power itself which has become dominant in the direction of the Agency’s safeguards effort. Balancing these competing interests will remain a big challenge for the IAEA. 2018 afterthoughts on current developments at the end of the chapter reconfirm the inherent dilemma of international verification.

The military dimensions associated with nuclear arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation verification of a state’s commitments are key for any significant and solid progress to be made. Verification of compliance and assurances of the absence of cheating are very sensitive issues, in particular with respect to the military capabilities that form the foundation of strategic and political posture at a national, regional and global level. This article sets the scene through a brief historical review of the influence that verification has on the credibility of arms control measures, the effectiveness of nuclear non-proliferation efforts and the importance of the nuclear disarmament process. In the framework of nuclear disarmament verification the main features of the military nuclear system are the doctrines, research & development, production, deployment and elimination of nuclear weapons, and the verification measures associated with disarmament commitments. Finally, a brief description of the complexity of regional, multinational and international instruments is provided. Using a systems concept to establish a verification mechanism, taking into account the specificity and the issues impacting individual states, could overcome the global complexity and national antagonisms and provide the confidence needed to enhance world global security.

Strategic, or dual-use, goods and associated knowledge have played a key role in the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and their means of delivery since WWII’s nuclear developments. Nuclear export controls and international safeguards have therefore developed in parallel in various phases, triggered by major international events, which showed how the insufficient scope of the controls existing at that time, as well as how legal framework’s loopholes, could be exploited to acquire sensitive goods. Following a phase of ‘country-to-country’ support in the development of nuclear programmes, the history of proliferation has shown how in particular in the 1980s–1990s the illicit transfer of strategic goods and technology has been an additional key element and threat allowing the development of competences and capabilities. The control of strategic trade was therefore set up as a barrier against the diffusion of sensitive materials, components and technologies, which could be used for the proliferation of nuclear biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. The result has been a continuously evolving multi-layered regime which comprises Treaties, International Agreements, UN Security Council Resolutions, embargo measures and national laws. This formed a sort of system of “defence in depth” system, which has legal as well as political grounds, various procedural and technical key elements contributing to deter, delay and detect proliferation activities. The chapter reviews the background and key aspects of strategic export control, developing on the contents and challenges and its relevance to countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as its relevance to disarmament and arms control.

The NTI Nuclear Security Index (NTI Index) is a first-of-its-kind public assessment of nuclear security conditions on a country-by-country basis in 176 countries. Initially launched in 2012 (a fifth edition is planned for release in June 2020), the NTI Index helps spark international discussions about priorities required to strengthen security and most important, encourages governments to provide assurances and take actions to reduce risks. Developed with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and with input from a respected international panel of nuclear security experts, the NTI Index draws on NTI’s nuclear expertise and the EIU’s experience in constructing indices, and the reach of the EIU’s global network analysts and contributors. This chapter examines whether the NTI Index methodology could apply to the state-level concept (SLC) in the nonproliferation and arms control verification context, including a discussion of the benefits and constraints of developing an index tool for assessing a country’s compliance with nonproliferation and arms control commitments. For further details on the NTI Index, please see the NTI Index website: www.​ntiindex.​org.

The theory of directed graphs and non-cooperative games is applied to the problem of verification of State compliance to international treaties on arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Hypothetical treaty violations are formulated in terms of illegal acquisition paths for the accumulation of clandestine weapons, weapons-grade materials or some other military capability. The paths constitute the illegal strategies of a sovereign State in a two-person inspection game played against a multi- or international Inspectorate charged with compliance verification. The effectiveness of existing or postulated verification measures is quantified in terms of the Inspectorate’s expected utility at Nash equilibrium. A case study involving a State with a moderately large nuclear fuel cycle is presented.

The State-level approach to safeguards aims to draw safeguards conclusions about the State as a whole in contrast to facility-specific classical safeguards. To do so, the integrated safeguards approach aims to integrate all safeguards-relevant information about each State. To achieve this goal procedures and metrics are needed for generating standardized and measurable results on the basis of the available data. While the information pertaining to the declared nuclear fuel cycle is quantitative and measurable, activities outside the declared nuclear fuel cycle may either not be well defined or quantifiable. Some of that information may be quantitative while other may be descriptive and qualitative. Also information about possible clandestine undeclared activities, by its nature, includes uncertainties about its validity and accuracy. The uncertainties inherent in the information available for evaluating the State as a whole present a challenge to the development of a safeguards system that is objective and transparent. This chapter examines the challenges associated with the development of such a system and specifies the necessary attributes and metrics of the information used in the development of such a system. It associates a set of metrics for the attributes of correctness, completeness, transparency and timeliness that can be used to measure the relevance of the information to the evaluation of the State as a whole.

In the context of arms control and disarmament, inspections are procedures designed to provide data with which a State’s compliance or non-compliance to a treaty, an agreement or other set of rules can be assessed. There is always, potentially at least, a conflict between the inspection authority (in the following Inspectorate) and the State (in the following Inspectee) who is required to comply, but who may have an interest not to do so. Non-cooperative game theory provides the appropriate tools to analyse these kind of conflicts. The solution concept is hereby the so-called Nash equilibrium. Since inspections, beyond their assessment of compliance or non-compliance, should induce the State to legal behaviour, one may say that effective inspections should be designed such that the Inspectee’s equilibrium strategy of the game theoretical model describing these inspections is legal behaviour of the Inspectee. Game theoretical analyses of arms control and disarmament verification have been performed since the early sixties of the last century. It was, however, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which stimulated more detailed analytical work. During the last 10 years two kinds of topics have been addressed in greater detail, unannounced interim inspections and acquisition path analysis. In this paper, assumptions necessary for a quantitative modelling of unannounced interim inspections are discussed, and one example is presented in major detail. Some thoughts on the art of modelling conflicts of both technical and political nature complement the previous thoughts.

Societal verification—the use of data produced by the public to support confirmation that a state is in compliance with its nonproliferation or arms control obligations—is a concept as old as nonproliferation and arms control proposals themselves. With the tremendous growth in access to the Internet, and its accompanying public generation of and access to data, the concept of societal verification has undergone a recent resurgence in popularity. This chapter explores societal verification through two mechanisms of collecting and analyzing societally-produced data: mobilization and observation. It describes current applications and research in each area before providing an overview of challenges and considerations that must be addressed in order to bring societally-produced data into an official verification regime. The chapter concludes by emphasizing that the role of societal verification, if any, in nonproliferation and arms control will supplement rather than supplant traditional verification means.

Over the last 40 years, the verification of compliance with disarmament treaties for Weapons of Mass Destruction has steadily evolved using several technological solutions. Today’s technological progress promises a variety of possible future and emerging technologies that may contribute to even better verification techniques. However, the latter might originate from technology areas far away from those usually monitored by the verification community. Scientifically-based futures research offers several validated approaches and methodologies that can provide orientation in this complex technology landscape and help to carve out the most probable technological future developments. We suggest to include a futures-research approach in the verification debate, complementing the expert community’s findings and improving the awareness of technology-based opportunities and threats. Four different methodological approaches are described, which require specialized futurists to be exercised. The classical approach to technology foresight systematically studies appropriate scientific literature, looking for “known” and “unknown unknowns” and considering the interdependencies of the “technology complex”. Bibliometrics can, although inherently retrospective, be used to characterise and forecast research topics and scientific networks. Modern text-mining tools can be used to extract unexpected information from the internet (“web mining”), potentially uncovering “unknown unknowns”. Solution assessment by serious gaming can help to structure multi-perspective discussions.

While arms control verification nowadays refers to the verification of delivery vehicles, there seems to be fairly broad agreement that verification should include nuclear warheads and military fissile material. Due to the sensitivity of information that could be gained from measuring these items, information barriers may likely be required. One type of system utilises the attribute approach: The inspected party would declare attributes that characterise the treaty accountable item to be authenticated. Criteria for proposing appropriate attributes are preventing leakage of sensitive information, minimising the possibility of cheating, robustness and a low complexity of measurements/analysis. Measurement issues that arise because inspectors may not know the configuration of the items and possible shielding must be understood as they introduce systematic uncertainties. Measurements of dismantled warhead components may be more reliable than measurements of fully assembled warheads where less information on shielding will likely be available. In any case, false positives and negatives should be as low as technically achievable. Procedures to cope with uncertainties are repeated measurements to deal with statistical uncertainties, measurements based on complementary measurement techniques to deal with systematic uncertainties and consultations between inspector and host. Despite remaining challenges, attribute information barriers may significantly add to the confidence in disarmament when embedded in a web of additional verification measures.

Future arms control treaties may place limits on the total number of warheads in the arsenals of weapon states, which would introduce qualitatively new verification objectives, including confirming numerical limits on declared nuclear warheads and confirming the authenticity of nuclear warheads prior to dismantlement. Meeting these objectives would require on-site inspections at new types of facilities, including warhead storage sites, which could put at risk highly sensitive information both related to military operations and warhead design. Weapon states may be reluctant to consider some of the anticipated procedures. As a way to address this challenge, in this paper, we examine the potential of verification approaches that emphasize non-intrusiveness from the outset. Relevant examples include innovative tagging approaches and hashed declarations to confirm the correctness of warhead declarations and novel types of inspection systems to confirm the authenticity of nuclear warheads, while satisfying the different and sometimes conflicting requirements by the host and the inspector. New international R&D efforts could usefully focus on non-intrusive technologies and approaches, which may show more promise for early demonstration and adoption. If demonstrated, such non-intrusive verification approaches could be particularly important for moving forward discussions about expanding the scope of current agreements and facilitating discussions with weapon states that have so far not been part of formal nuclear arms control agreements.

Seismic and acoustic (infrasound) monitoring form important parts of the International Monitoring System (IMS) for verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Of the globally planned 170 seismic plus 60 infrasound stations, 87% have been certified. Understanding of the propagation in the Earth and the atmosphere has improved markedly, instruments and evaluation algorithms have become more sophisticated. Thus the detection threshold has decreased to values below 0.1 kt TNT equivalent for teleseismic signals, and below 0.5 kt for infrasound, much better than the IMS design goal of 1 kt. A seismic aftershock monitoring system (SAMS) can be set up during on-site inspections by the CTBT Organization. Semi-automatic evaluation of the SAMS signals is used to localise the hypocentre of an underground explosion precisely. Other research focuses on the reduction of periodic disturbances e.g. from aircraft. Acoustic and seismic sensors can detect land and air vehicles in the monitoring of peace-keeping agreements, and ballistic-missile launches for improved early warning. Local systems of seismic sensors have promise for safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for final repositories of spent nuclear fuel.

Direct measurements of radiation signatures can be utilized as a key functional component to verify a country’s commitments in a transparency agreement. Special nuclear material comprises isotopes of uranium and plutonium, where each has unique signatures that differentiate it from the other isotopes when measured with radiation detection equipment. Depending on the type of confirmatory information desired, a wide range of radiation detection methods are available including several nondestructive methods of gamma spectroscopy, neutron and gamma counting, multiplicity counting, and imaging, and some destructive methods of alpha spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. Each method provides information indicative of material composition, isotopic composition, or processing method where radiation detection equipment is often utilized in the laboratory and field to perform these analyses. This chapter aims to provide a brief introduction to the radiation signatures of interest for radiation detection, an overview of how these signatures are utilized for standard radiation detection-based verification techniques utilized in non-proliferation and arms control monitoring and verification, as well as a description of some of the challenges associated with implementation of these techniques into international agreements.

Locard’s principle “every contact leaves a trace” is the overarching foundation for any kind of forensic investigations, including nuclear forensics. In some instances, it doesn’t even take a contact to leave a trace, as we know from emissions of gases or particles (e.g. from industrial facilities) which can then be found in the environment and interpreted as footprint of the facility. Such trace can be understood as “signature” of the process they originate from. In the present chapter we want to illuminate the power of “signatures” (i.e. characteristic parameters that point at the provenance, history or intended use of nuclear material) and their application in nuclear forensics and in nuclear safeguards. Particular attention will be given to environmental particle analysis as applied for safeguards purposes but also for nuclear forensic investigations. Moreover, nuclear forensic signatures of bulk samples will be discussed with emphasis on uranium and plutonium age dating, isotopic signatures in Pu and chemical impurities in natural uranium. Ensuring measurement quality by providing appropriate reference materials and establishing state-of-the-practice through interlaboratory comparison exercises are essentially contributing to the credibility of results. Synergies between nuclear material analysis for safeguards purposes, for nuclear security applications and for non-proliferation are discussed.

Arms control treaties rely on extensive collection, processing and analysis of data to ascertain compliance with treaty obligations. Monitoring and evaluation relies on a broad range of technologies for sensing, communications and processing to collect, transmit and analyze the data necessary to detect non-compliance. The effectiveness of a treaty verification system depends on the ability of the information management system to collect and evaluate the information necessary to ascertain compliance with the treaty obligations. The information management systems for treaty verification have the same architecture because they are similar in concept and operation. They collect, transmit, store, process and analyze data. The effectiveness of each of these operations is a function of the capabilities of the associated technology. This chapter presents an overview of the technologies available for use in each of the elements of a treaty information management system. In sensing, these range from low frequency seismic sensors to multispectral and hyperspectral imaging. Data can be transmitted in the order of hundreds of Gigabits per second through fiber optic cables for terrestrial communications and tens of Megabits per second for satellite channels, while available technologies allow for storing petabytes of data and processing speeds of tens of Gigabytes per second. These capabilities are more than sufficient to collect the necessary data for use in sophisticated analysis algorithms for detecting treaty violations.

Hidden within our rapidly growing global streams of business, scientific, and communications data, is information that can reduce the global danger of nuclear weapons proliferation and use. Significant advances in machine learning, the explosion of available data and the ability of high performance computing that can be used to process massive amounts of data has the potential to provide a leap-ahead in the ability to detect proliferation and verify treaty commitments.

Indeed, within its State Level Concept, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) envisions an objectives-based and information-driven approach for designing and implementing State Level Approaches (SLAs). To achieve its objectives, the IAEA foresees a holistic approach, in which all the information gathered is analyzed and assessed as a whole.

This chapter will take a journey in the world of open source analysis and, through a holistic systems thinking approach, will highlight the potential and the challenges that open source analysis can offer to gain insights about various aspects of a complex engineering programme such as the nuclear fuel cycle.

International safeguards verification is based on the analysis of a large variety of information from different sources including state-declared information, inspection data, open source and third-party information. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used for the management and analysis of spatial information, such as satellite imagery and site maps declared under the Additional Protocol. They can also be utilized for the management of non-spatial safeguards information which often relates to a specific site, facility or location. Mobile geospatial technologies can facilitate on-site inspector tools such as positioning and navigation; location-based information retrieval; location-tagging of information for efficient post-inspection analysis; and Augmented Reality (AR) applications. These capabilities can put the inspector in a more pro-active and investigative role and can further integrate safeguards activities in the field and at headquarters. This chapter discusses the current and possible future use of geospatial information and technologies for safeguards analysis at the inspectorates’ headquarters and illustrates the potential of mobile geospatial tools for on-site inspections.

Remote sensing offers analysts the ability to observe buildings and structures within nuclear facilities without visiting the localities in person. This chapter highlights some of the modern methods and technologies related to remote sensing data as it relates to nuclear non-proliferation and arms control verification. Commercially available techniques are discussed and examples related to the nuclear fuel cycle are used to illustrate the application for nuclear non-proliferation and arms control practices used by analysts. This chapter explains the sources of remote sensing data, how the data is stored and how it can be processed. Specific processing techniques including supervised and unsupervised classification, pixel and object oriented classifications as well as change detection methods are examined through the lens of non-proliferation and arms control studies. Throughout the chapter, common use case scenarios are provided in order to give the reader a better idea of how the topics are applied to verification activities. These paragraphs provide examples where the section’s topic is applicable in a non-proliferation or arms verification scenario.

Although commercial satellite imagery has already been proven to be an effective and accepted means for nuclear monitoring, verification, and mission planning for IAEA safeguards purposes, it is continuing to advance as a result of significant new improvements in terms of temporal, spatial, and spectral resolutions from increasingly diverse and rapidly growing international satellite constellations. It remains a critical verification technology that provides an optimal, non-intrusive, capability to both follow-up on geospatial cueing information from other open-sources and to remotely “peer over the fence” to obtain new and unique information from otherwise inaccessible areas, anywhere on earth, on a consistently repetitive basis. The improving (“faster, better, cheaper”) means of access to this multi-resolution imagery diversity is providing increased opportunities for open-source information augmentation and unexpected data-fusion synergies. The open-source geospatial tools (e.g., Google Earth) continue to keep pace as efficient and cost-effective means to contextually visualize that imagery in 3D as well as promote greater global transparency. This ongoing commercial satellite imagery (r)evolution continues to add to the expanding and transforming open-source tool-kit to derive and assess new nuclear non-proliferation relevant information critical for enhanced global nuclear security.

Strategic trade analysis is about national and global trade flows of items with strategic military value. Strategic items include goods with exclusive military use, but also dual-use items that have both military and civil uses. Because of their strategic nature, dual-use goods are controlled as a measure of non-proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Trade analysis in dual-use items, in particular the nuclear related ones listed for export controls by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, is the focus of this contribution. Despite the global dimension of strategic trade and controls, no specific data are available on global strategic trade. We thus suggest using open source data on global trade to support strategic trade analysis. The data are not specific to strategic trade, but related to it, providing a portrait of strategic trade in the absence of more specific data. It can be expected the effectiveness of controls be enhanced in several ways by the analysis of trade data related to strategic goods. By understanding the national and global trade in strategic-related commodities, officials may better focus controls, select companies for in-reach and audit, target transactions for analysis, verification, and inspection, and assess potential economic impacts of trade control regulations. The chapter covers data sources, a methodology for data selection, underpinning tools and data use cases. The context for strategic trade analysis is briefly recalled by introducing lists of items subject to export controls, with a focus on the nuclear-related ones.

Future agreements that limit and reduce total warhead stockpiles may require monitoring nuclear warheads, potentially necessitating new monitoring approaches, technologies, and procedures. A systems approach for evaluating a warhead monitoring system can help ensure that it is evaluated against all requirements, and that the evaluation is objective, standardized, transparent, and reproducible (not analyst dependent). All engineered systems are designed to meet a set of requirements based on inputs and assumptions about the environment and processes. For arms control monitoring, identifying requirements is challenging because treaty objectives are often strategic or political, and must be translated into technical monitoring objectives that are agreed upon by multiple stakeholders. The monitoring objectives are the foundation of the evaluation framework, which also includes evaluation scenarios that reflect strategic concerns, performance metrics based on detection goals, and a functional architecture of how objectives are achieved by system components. This framework embodies the system requirements against which the monitoring system can be evaluated. Computational simulations, when validated by experimental activities and field exercises, can help characterize monitoring system performance. One such class of simulations is the discrete-event simulation, which can cohesively model weapons enterprise processes and monitoring and inspection activities. In conjunction with analysis algorithms that correlate inspection outcomes with declarations and other information streams, these simulation results can be used to quantify the confidence with which a monitoring system can detect and differentiate scenarios. The capability to evaluate the effectiveness of monitoring options and explore tradeoffs is essential in supporting technical design activities, guiding future R&D investments and supporting future treaty negotiations.

This chapter describes how a systems based approach to physical model and acquisition path analysis may be used for nuclear disarmament studies by expanding the physical model to include both civilian and military nuclear domains and extending the model to the final stage of weapon deployment. The results show how such an approach may contribute to future treaty design and implementation. The approach shows the principal applicability of this concept to evaluate effectiveness and efficiency of verification activities in countries with commercial and military fuel cycles and activities. This chapter also demonstrates how other verification regimes, specifically biological weapons, may also be evaluated using a systems based approach to acquisition path analysis.

Over the course of 2014 and 2015, a group of international experts held a series of technical meetings to explore how to use a systems approach to promote the technical analysis of structural factors associated with arms control agreements and guide the development of creative verification solutions. The goal was to develop a framework that could be effectively applied to the satisfaction of multiple stakeholders and provide a means for identifying how technical verification approaches could be better aligned to meet strategic concerns, in support of state security priorities and objectives. Participants found that scenario based exercises provided a practical way to further develop the methodology and could be employed to improve communication between international experts with diverse backgrounds, as well as encourage new ways to approach this difficult issue. One aspect explored during the meetings was how to identify solutions that might satisfy states with diverging perceptions regarding their respective security environments. Interesting ideas for future work on how a systems approach could be used to address verification challenges are presented in the final section.