10 Years of Nuclear Disarmament Verification: Lessons from the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification

The International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV) was launched in December 2014, by the U.S. Department of State in partnership with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), and now includes 31 countries and the European Union. Its primary purpose is to identify technical and procedural challenges to effective verification of future nuclear disarmament and to develop practical solutions for those challenges. It began from a recognition that there is no internationally agreed set of concepts, tools, and approaches to verify the types of nuclear disarmament agreements likely to be negotiated in the future. Though work remains to be done, this paper sets out the IPNDV’s accomplishments over the past decade by presenting what the Partners have learned about how to effectively verify future nuclear disarmament. Given today’s challenging international security environment, that knowledge and understanding provides a critical resource of concepts, tools, and technologies to inform negotiators of future nuclear disarmament agreements when the time again is ripe for progress.  Whether such progress comes as a revival of traditional nuclear arms control agreements or as a part of a more farreaching pursuit of global nuclear disarmament, the insights gained through the IPNDV will help ensure that an eventual verification regime for nuclear disarmament can provide needed confidence and assurance to all countries. The paper breaks down the work of the IPNDV into four areas. The first looks at how the Partnership has developed its thinking on verification of nuclear disarmament, identifying principles, defining objectives, and articulating how to build confidence over time. The second area examines the process of building, testing and refining a nuclear verification toolkit that could be employed by future arms control negotiators. These insights provide a menu of options rather than a prescriptive pre-made regime.  They also underline the importance of thinking strategically when developing a verification regime, e.g., thinking about how most efficiently and cost effectively to integrate different monitoring and inspection options. The third area highlights the capacity building that has occurred through the Partnership over the last ten years. Finally, the fourth section explores future areas of work and pathways to support multilateral verification in future nuclear disarmament efforts.