Global Nuclear-Materials Control

The Non-proliferation Treaty has created a comprehensive international regime for the control of fissile materials in the non-weapons states. Since the end of the Cold War, active work has begun by governments and the IAEA on a set of proposals which would expand that regime to cover much of the huge quantities of weapons-usable fissile materials in the five acknowledged nuclear-weapon states and three \"threshold\" states. These proposals include: a global ban on the production of additional fissile material not subject to safeguards; the placement of U.S. and Russian civilian and excess weapons materials under bilateral and international safeguards; and the irreversible disposition of their excess stocks of weapons materials. Negotiations on all of these proposals have bogged down. However, they have spawned an active research agenda which will lay the basis for rapid progress once the political obstacles have been overcome. Also the \"lab-to-lab\" research collaborations which have developed between the U.S. and Russian nuclear-materials security communities -- hopefully to be expanded to include the other nuclear-weapon and threshold states -- are creating an international community of experts who will be able to educate their governments on the verification requirements. This paper examines particular elements of the new control regime that must be constructed and the associated research agenda.