4

Conclusion

The committee offers 16 recommendations to strengthen monitoring, detection, and verification (MDV) of nuclear weapons and fissile materials around the world. If the recommendations are implemented, the MDV enterprise will be better equipped to steward MDV capabilities, and be better prepared to meet future capability needs and minimize surprises. The relationship between each recommendation and these three functional areas is shown in Appendix B.

The MDV research and development (R&D) and operational enterprise is distributed throughout the U.S. government (the Department of Energy [DOE] National Nuclear Security Administration Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the intelligence community). All these organizations have important roles, but no one organization is responsible for coordinating the enterprise as a whole. This distributed construct demands a level of integration and coordination that the committee found fell short of what is needed to ensure that the enterprise can meet current and future capability needs. Enhanced coordination and strategic planning is critical, and the committee recommends that the National Security Council ensure that there is an enduring interagency process that includes regular preparation and release of an MDV R&D strategic plan as well as the establishment of an external advisory board to assist in longer-term planning. The committee will assess whether the MDV enterprise requires additional coordination mechanisms in the final report.

The R&D providers, mainly the DOE national laboratories and academia, bring considerable commitment and capabilities to the MDV mission. However, the innovation ecosystem could be strengthened by increasing low-technology readiness level solicitations and solicitation methods, and including academia and commercial participation early and more regularly. Also, the enterprise would

benefit from enhanced technology scouting and more formality in transitioning R&D to operational capabilities.

Active, high-quality R&D programs exist for each of the three technical focus areas of this report: MDV for the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear test explosions, and nuclear arms control. The committee did not see evidence of waste or inefficiency in these programs. Rather, the MDV R&D enterprise is constrained by its budget and currently unable to fully address the following important R&D needs:

• Nuclear Fuel Cycle MDV: New tools for efficiency and support of the International Atomic Energy Agency Additional Protocol, monitoring techniques for milling and mining operations, monitoring techniques for new reactor types using new fuels and new enrichment technologies, and wide-area environmental sampling.
• Nuclear Test Explosions MDV: Detection of low-yield tests at known test sites and better estimates of the yield of tests at uncalibrated sites, and the development of higher resolution computational models that can take advantage of more data sources.
• Arms Control MDV: Trusted techniques with information barriers for warhead confirmation measurements, portal monitors for explosives and HEU, and techniques for dual-capable missile characterization.

The extent to which the MDV budget should be increased to address these needs and the relative priority of these needs are open questions that the committee will revisit with additional information in the final report.

In addition, the MDV R&D enterprise should incorporate open-source assets and data as much as possible and continue to develop advanced data analytics techniques that can be applied to the MDV mission. To better leverage these technologies, the enterprise should establish partnerships with the private sector, which is making rapid technological advancements in these areas.