SAFE: Secure Automatic Failsafe Eraser for Treaty Verification

Since its foundation, the United Nations has been interested in disarmament. The United States and Russia, formerly the Soviet Union, have been negotiating nuclear disarmament treaties for more than 60 years. One of the biggest challenges to the implementation of these treaties is the verification of warhead disarmament. Each nation has its own secrets concerning nuclear weapons, making it very difficult to come to a common agreement about how exactly to verify disarmament. The different state departments usually discuss a diplomatic solution to this problem that demands an extremely challenging scientific solution because the political rules require complicated constraints on the measurements to be made. However, there still needs to be scientific verification of the items agreed upon in the treaty. Los Alamos National Laboratory designed and demonstrated a self-contained analysis device, the secure automatic failsafe eraser (SAFE) that can ensure complete data loss in the case of power interruption or tampering. This modern-technology approach will allow for more sophisticated analysis and higher-quality verification and monitoring. We will present the current status of the design.