On May 7, 2026, the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV) marked the conclusion of Phase III with a side event at the NPT Review Conference, hosted by the Government of Australia. Arms control consultant Michael Edinger delivered keynote remarks reflecting on a decade of Partnership work and outlining priorities for the field going forward.
A Foundation a Decade in the Making
Edinger opened by placing Phase III in the context of a broader arms control landscape reshaped by the lapse of the INF and New START treaties. With the traditional treaty architecture largely gone, he argued, today’s lull in active negotiations is precisely the moment to invest in the technical and conceptual groundwork that will make future agreements verifiable — rather than waiting for a diplomatic window that opens without warning.
That groundwork is what the IPNDV has built since its founding in 2014 by the U.S. Department of State and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Over three phases and thirty participating countries plus the European Union, the Partnership has developed a practical “toolkit” of verification mechanisms to enable multilateral verification that nuclear weapons have been dismantled and their materials rendered permanently unusable. Phase I produced a 14-step illustrative model of the warhead dismantlement process; Phase II moved that model “from paper to practice” through exercises and technical demonstrations.
Testing the Framework Under Realistic Conditions
Phase III, running from January 2020 through December 2025, subjected that foundation to more demanding scrutiny. Rather than a simplified verification scenario, the Partnership built out a detailed notional multilateral treaty — the Nuclear Weapons Reductions Treaty (NWRT) — involving several notional nuclear-armed states, including one called Ipindovia, obligated to reduce deployed arsenals from 1,000 to 500 warheads. In 2023, the Partnership added reductions-to-zero and limitations sub-variants, allowing working groups to examine verification challenges specific to each stage of the disarmament process, supported throughout by a Cross-Cutting Concepts Working Group and a Technology Track.
Four Priorities for the Road Ahead
Edinger closed with an agenda for future work, organized around four priority areas:
- Concept development, including further refinement of “plant-within-a-plant” facility concepts, segregated warhead storage areas, closeout and challenge inspection modalities, data management and security, and the question of verification in a “Global Zero” world.
- Technology assessment and testing, with particular emphasis on advancing highly enriched uranium detection capabilities, information barrier systems, tamper-indicating technologies, and a five-year technology assessment plan to prioritize investment — while carefully weighing the opportunities and risks of AI, machine learning, and blockchain-based tools.
- More ambitious validation exercises, conducted in operationally realistic, in-person settings and covering challenge inspections, multi-site reductions-to-zero planning, and the Partnership’s “Quad Chart” analytic framework for evaluating verification options.
- Sustaining global capacity, by continuing hands-on exercises, engaging the proposed Group of Scientific and Technical Experts (GSTE) on Nuclear Disarmament Verification, and convening an annual stakeholder meeting to maintain the broader community of expertise the IPNDV has cultivated over the past decade.
The verification toolkit the Partners have developed, the conceptual frameworks they have refined, and the community of experts they have built serve as tangible contributions to the effort of making future nuclear arms control not merely aspirational but verifiable.
The IPNDV thanks Ambassador Sadleir and the Government of Australia for hosting the side event.
