Verification Challenges after the Canberra Commission

The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons was an international group of seventeen very distinguished experts on security and disarmament issues convened by the Australian government to develop ideas and proposals for a concrete and realistic program to achieve a world totally free of nuclear weapons. Its report was presented to the Prime Minister of Australia on 14 August 1996, to the UN General Assembly in September 1996 and to the Conference on Disarmament in January 1997. Whatever one's view of the detail of the Commission's report, NPT parties at least are committed to nuclear disarmament by Article VI of the Treaty, a commitment which was reaffirmed at the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference. And the report makes it plain that the challenges to the verification community posed by working towards a world free of nuclear weapons will be significant. Even setting on one side questions which will have to be answered outside that community, such as how much assurance will be enough, and how sufficient resources might be made available for a much enlarged verification regime, many other questions remain. This paper identifies some of the verification issues which will arise if the international community adopts something like the Canberra Commission's approach to the elimination of nuclear weapons, with the greatest emphasis on those which would arise early in the process, and endeavours to suggest how they might be addressed in practice.