Authenticating Nuclear Warheads With High Confidence

Negotiated deeper cuts in the nuclear arsenals may place limits on the total number of nuclear weapons in states’ stockpiles, which could require inspections on hundreds or thousands of warheads or warhead components currently in storage or in dismantlement queues. The process of authenticating treaty limited items, e.g. with passive or active radiation measurements, is likely to be a critical element of verified disarmament. We have been developing a template-matching approach under which, for maximum security, classified information is never measured or stored electronically during the inspection. While one-on-one measurements (template versus inspected item) are feasible, such a system would strongly benefit from optimized sampling strategies authenticating as many items as possible with minimum probabilities for cheating. This paper proposes and examines the effectiveness of a strategy for authenticating nuclear warheads with a particular emphasis on controlling false positive and false negative rates of the inspections.