The International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV) is an ongoing initiative that includes more than 25 countries with and without nuclear weapons. Together, the Partners are working to identify and develop practical solutions to the technical and procedural challenges associated with effectively verifying nuclear disarmament.
The Partners draw on expertise from their national institutions—including government agencies, military services, and academia—to identify potential procedures and technologies that can be used in future nuclear disarmament agreements and test their application in scenario-based exercises and technical demonstrations.
Goals
The IPNDV is working to solve two fundamental verification challenges. Overcoming these challenges is necessary to support future arms control agreements that not only reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons, but also verifiably dismantle nuclear weapons.
The first challenge is that there are no internationally agreed upon procedures to verify the dismantlement of nuclear weapons. The IPNDV’s solution has been to develop a toolkit of inspection and monitoring options for verifying the dismantlement of nuclear weapons based on the 14-Step Model. The Partners continue to test and hone the proposed procedures and technologies through realistic technical demonstrations and in-person exercises.
The second challenge is that for multilateral nuclear disarmament verification to succeed in the future, countries will need to build the technical capacity to support the verification process. The IPNDV’s solution is to build international capacity and expertise at the technical level by convening experts from countries with and without nuclear weapons for mutually beneficial knowledge exchanges.
History and Approach
Over the past three decades, the number of nuclear weapons has decreased dramatically from the peak arsenals of the Cold War. Key to achieving these reductions has been the ability of countries to verify each other’s compliance with arms control agreements. Verification will undoubtedly play an important role in the success of future nuclear disarmament efforts as well, making it important to strengthen the global capacity to address verification issues. The IPNDV is an important forum where countries are strengthening their capacity to address verification-related issues and collaboratively developing solutions that can be implemented for verifiable disarmament in the future.
The IPNDV was established in December 2014 on the principle that all countries have a role to play in developing verification solutions. The U.S. Department of State and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), through a public-private partnership, serve as the IPNDV’s Secretariat and work closely with the Partners to facilitate their work. The IPNDV set into motion a key recommendation from NTI’s Innovating Verification: New Tools & New Actors to Reduce Nuclear Risks series, released in July 2014: states should come together to begin an international process to assess verification gaps, develop collaborative technical work streams, and contribute to overall global nuclear threat reduction. The Partnership’s work also builds on the U.S.-Russia monitoring and verification experience, the U.S.-UK Program on Nonproliferation and Arms Control Technology and the UK-Norway Initiative on Nuclear Warhead Dismantlement Verification.
The Partners have conducted their work over three phases to date, each of which built on the work of the preceding phase. In Phase I, the Partners built a conceptual roadmap; in Phase II, they moved from paper to practice; and in Phase III, they are addressing complexities and building confidence. During each phase, the Partners form working groups to address the core concepts and goals of the phase. Working groups have regular virtual meetings and present their progress to the Partnership during periodic in-person working meetings. The Partners meet in person several times a year to exchange information and conduct exercises and technology demonstrations.
This website and the dismantlement interactive were developed with generous financial support from the Government of Canada.
