ETH Tagung: Inspection and Inference - Theories and Tools of Nuclear Arms Control Verification

Zurich, 5–7 May 2024

During the Cold War, the introduction of verification regimes—alongside the classic adage “Trust, but verify”—empowered nuclear arms control. Verification made possible the reduction of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, including eliminating entire classes of weapons. The world has changed, however. Today, there are more nuclear-armed states but fewer nuclear weapons. This has created the twin difficulties of expanding verification to new actors and “proving the negative,” i.e., verifying disarmament. Needless to say, demonstrating the outright absence of weapons poses new challenges.

Changes in technology accompany these evolutions in the security environment. On the one hand, enhanced sensor systems and zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs could open doors for nuclear verification. On the other hand, the military and civilian applications of artificial intelligence, satellite, and cyber technologies necessitate new thinking about verification. In both cases, questions of trust and confidence will be key. Against this backdrop, social scientific thinking about verification has stagnated when compared to the dynamics of international politics. Formal models of two-player U.S.–Soviet inspection games may serve as a useful foundation, but they can hardly account for today’s multi-actor world with its emerging technologies. The time for fresh thinking about verification is now, not tomorrow. Social scientists have played an essential role in designing verification arrangements in the past. Rigorous theorizing is needed to generate novel frameworks for controlling nuclear weapons and other armaments as the security environment evolves.

Drs. Alex Bollfrass and Stephen Herzog, in coordination with academic guest Prof. Steve Fetter, will host an interdisciplinary conference to promote new scholarship on the theories and tools of arms control verification. The central focus will be on analyzing past and present nuclear agreements to inform the next generation of arms control measures, including their application to new technological and weapons domains. Top scholars and practitioners from around the world will be invited to contribute.

We will ask scholars to produce drafts of articles for a special edited forum. The objective will be to include it in a journal like the Nonproliferation Review or the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. As verification research is just now returning to the social sciences, we intend for our conference to serve as an idea incubator to spur further scholarly contributions to the field and to inspire a broader research agenda.

Panel 1. The nuclear past.

Moderator: Alex Bollfrass, ETH Zurich
Discussant: Joseph Pilat, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Andrey Baklitskiy, UN Institute for Disarmament Research
Aaron Bateman, George Washington University
Marilena Gala, University of Roma Tre
Anna-Mart van Wyk, University of Johannesburg

Panel 2. New thinking on nuclear verification challenges.

Moderator: Stephen Herzog, ETH Zurich
Discussant: Nikolai Sokov, Vienna Center for Disarmament & Nonproliferation
David M. Allison, Yale University
Jane Darby Menton, University of California, Berkeley
Nicole Grajewski, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Jose Luis Rodriguez Aquino, George Mason University
Lauren Sukin, London School of Economics and Political Science

● Panel 3. Social science meets the bomb, emerging tech, and more.

Moderator: Alex Bollfrass, ETH Zurich
Discussant: Jeffrey Lewis, Middlebury Institute of International Studies
Justin Canfil, Carnegie Mellon University
Julie George, Harvard University
Andrew Reddie, University of California, Berkeley
Sanne Verschuren, Boston University
Tristan Volpe, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace