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Corral That Bomb Testing (C.T.B.T.) Part 3 – Verification
Travis | Mar 17, 2009 |
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International Monitoring System sites (CTBTO photo)
Part 3 of 4
Also see:
Corral That Bomb Testing Part 1 – Politics
Corral That Bomb Testing Part 2 – Messaging
Corral That Bomb Testing Part 4 – Cheaters
When the Senate voted against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1999, several leading Republicans based their opposition on concerns about verifiability. Typical was the conclusion reached by then Foreign Relations Committee chairman Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC): “This treaty is unverifiable, and dangerous to U.S. national security.”
Since that time, however, a number of technical reports have concluded that the CTBT is effectively verifiable.
For example, a 2002 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “Underground explosions can be reliably detected and can be identified as explosions, using [International Monitoring System] data, down to a yield of 0.1 [kiloton]…in hard rock if conducted anywhere in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America.” This conclusion was reinforced in 2006 when the International Monitoring System (IMS) easily detected the low yield (0.6 kiloton) nuclear test by North Korea.
Yet the IMS, which now has 89% of its facilities certified, operational, or under construction, is not the only way to detect nuclear explosions. Additional detection capabilities are provided by civilian seismic networks with new arrays and regionally-located stations; national technical monitoring systems; and interferometric synthetic aperture radars (InSAR).
This network of technologically advanced systems permits the detection of a nuclear test with a yield significantly less than one kiloton, the minimum level at which the IMS is designed to detect tests with high confidence. As physicist and nuclear weapons technical expert David Hafemeister wrote recently, “These developments mean that few questions should remain about whether the CTBT meets the standard for ‘effective verification.’” The standard has been met successfully and verification will improve as technology continues to advance.
Of course, there is no avoiding the debate over cheaters. Read about that in the final part of the series, Corral That Bomb Testing Part 4 – Cheaters.
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