Last week, Mike Edinger presented a paper he co-authored with former Defense Department official David Hodson at the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM) Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. The talk, “International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV) – Necessary Preparation for Future Arms Control,” focused on a question that has taken on new urgency in recent months: what should the arms control community be doing right now, in the absence of any active nuclear arms control treaty implementation?
An Interlude, Not a Pause
With the lapse of the New START treaty, some might be tempted to view this moment as a period to wait out until the political conditions for a new agreement re-emerge. IPNDV has demonstrated the opposite. These periods between arms control agreements are precisely the time when the most consequential technical and conceptual groundwork can be addressed. The verification tools, frameworks, and expertise that make a treaty negotiable and implementable rarely materialize on demand; they need to be built in advance, during exactly the kind of interlude we find ourselves in now.
The central message of the talk was simple: we should treat this moment as preparation time, not downtime. If we wait for the next diplomatic opening to begin building verification capability, we will already be behind.
Looking Ahead
The Partners are grateful to INMM for the opportunity to share this work with such an engaged technical community, and to the broader IPNDV partnership for the collaborative effort that continues to make this work possible.
