Probabilistic Verification: A New Concept for Verifying the Denuclearization of North Korea

Photo Credit: KCNA VIA REUTERS

Excerpt from Arms Control Today:

Although U.S.-North Korean talks have stalled, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has abided by an apparent moratorium on nuclear testing, keeping alive hopes that an agreement can be reached to denuclearize North Korea. Implementing such an agreement with North Korea, if one can be negotiated, would constitute an unprecedented challenge for the international community.

Verifying such an agreement would require building a monitoring regime that goes well beyond traditional international safeguards and bilateral arms control approaches while accommodating legitimate North Korean concerns over intrusiveness, which would practically preclude “anytime, anywhere” inspections. Creativity will be needed to design a verification scheme to which the United States and North Korea could agree and that could be implemented in affordable and practical ways and that politicians would deem credible.

Verification is the means by which parties to an agreement assure themselves that the agreement is being implemented faithfully. A central tension lies at the heart of verification: the need to balance confidence on one side with the sensitivities regarding intrusive monitoring on the other. In nuclear activities negotiations, verification traditionally has been accomplished through two means: international safeguards inspections on fissile material production and bilateral arms control monitoring of nuclear delivery vehicles, such as missiles and bombers. Both systems focused narrowly on just a few activities or items intrinsic to nuclear weapons and constructed monitoring approaches that would provide high confidence of detecting noncompliance.

Over time, the distinctions between these two types of verification regimes have blurred as some states pursued clandestine nuclear weapons programs. In South Africa in 1990, Iraq after 1992, and Libya in 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) undertook activities that went beyond the narrow confines of fissile material accountancy to verify that all three states had ceased nuclear weapons-related activities. More recently, the IAEA investigated “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear activities, including experiments related to nuclear weapons design and testing.

The North Korean verification challenge is more substantial than these prior examples. Complete, irreversible denuclearization would require defining and implementing “disarmament” of a whole category of weapons and the pertinent infrastructure to develop, produce, and upgrade them—in real time. Still, as challenging as nuclear verification in North Korea may be, these historical approaches and ad hoc innovations offer lessons on how to design an approach that can work in North Korea. Experience from other verification regimes, such as the Chemical Weapons Convention, also can be helpful.

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