Send message to Author

Short abstract

WMD treaties must constantly navigate a ‘verification trap’ in which states simultaneously want to access and restrict information to assess treaty compliance. Digital-analogue data interfaces present opportunities and challenges for those wanting to escape the verification trap.

Long abstract

This paper describes the interfaces between analogue and digital systems in weapons of mass destruction (WMD) treaty verification, and how they represent opportunities and challenges to global arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation. It argues that WMD treaty verification – that is, systems for confirming compliance and / or detecting non-compliance – is perceived as essential to effective treaties but is difficult to achieve in practice, since it must balance a need for high-quality information against requirements to protect military and commercial secrets, whilst remaining cost-effective. Treaties must therefore navigate the possibility that verification becomes a political trap: indispensable yet impossible, and thus a means for bad-faith actors to stall WMD arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation.

Benchmark treaties – developed during the Cold War – resolved such trade-offs through complex analogue verification arrangements which restrict what information can be used, how it can be collected, and who can be involved. This paper considers how digital ecosystems disrupt these arrangements: on the one hand, digital tools and technologies enable more people to access and make sense of more data that could help meet information needs, on the other hand, they risk undermining the carefully-negotiated compromises that allow treaties to function.