Designing Protocols for Nuclear Warhead Verification

Future arms-control and disarmament treaties could place numerical limits on all categories of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of weapon states, including tactical weapons, non-deployed weapons, and weapons awaiting dismantlement. Verification of such agreements is likely to require new types of inspection equipment — but also new verification protocols. This paper offers a set of definitions and building blocks to design verification protocols relevant to nuclear weapon authentication. It discusses how to construct and use physical interactive protocols with zero-knowledge property for inspections. The discussion illustrated by examples include topics such as perfect and statistical zero-knowledge, properties of the prover and the verifier, using trusted and non-trusted apparatus and detectors, physical commitment schemes and composition of zero-knowledge protocols.