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Future agreements that limit and reduce total warhead stockpiles may require monitoring nuclear warheads, potentially necessitating new monitoring approaches, technologies, and procedures. A systems approach for evaluating a warhead monitoring system can help ensure that it is evaluated against all requirements, and that the evaluation is objective, standardized, transparent, and reproducible (not analyst dependent). All engineered systems are designed to meet a set of requirements based on inputs and assumptions about the environment and processes. For arms control monitoring, identifying requirements is challenging because treaty objectives are often strategic or political, and must be translated into technical monitoring objectives that are agreed upon by multiple stakeholders. The monitoring objectives are the foundation of the evaluation framework, which also includes evaluation scenarios that reflect strategic concerns, performance metrics based on detection goals, and a functional architecture of how objectives are achieved by system components. This framework embodies the system requirements against which the monitoring system can be evaluated. Computational simulations, when validated by experimental activities and field exercises, can help characterize monitoring system performance. One such class of simulations is the discrete-event simulation, which can cohesively model weapons enterprise processes and monitoring and inspection activities. In conjunction with analysis algorithms that correlate inspection outcomes with declarations and other information streams, these simulation results can be used to quantify the confidence with which a monitoring system can detect and differentiate scenarios. The capability to evaluate the effectiveness of monitoring options and explore tradeoffs is essential in supporting technical design activities, guiding future R&D investments and supporting future treaty negotiations. |
