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11. Exploiting Evidence, Improving Protection: Weapons Technical Intelligence in UN Peace Operations

Author:
Emile LeBrun and David Lochhead
Publication Date:
06-2024
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Small Arms Survey
Abstract:
Over the last decade, UN peacekeepers and their beneficiaries have been the targets of threats from hostile actors armed with small arms and light weapons, rockets and mortars, IEDs, and related weapons. Assessing and countering these threats requires peacekeepers to have the capacity to focus on hostile actors’ access to and (mis)use of weapons and the destabilising effects of arms proliferation. Exploiting Evidence, Improving Protection: Weapons Technical Intelligence in UN Peace Operations is a new Briefing Paper from the Small Arms Survey’s Security Assessment in North Africa (SANA) project. The paper discusses the current and possible future deployment of weapons technical intelligence (WTI) roles and activities in UN—as well as hybrid and non-UN—peacekeeping operations. It also examines the contributions that WTI could make, if leveraged, for situational awareness, force protection, and mandate implementation, including the protection of civilians and human rights investigations.
Topic:
Security, Arms Control and Proliferation, United Nations, Peacekeeping, Weapons, and Protection
Political Geography:
North Africa

12. Realities, Challenges, and Opportunities: The Arms Trade Treaty in the Indo-Pacific region

Author:
Andrea Edoardo Varisco, Manon Blancafort, Yulia Yarina, and David Atwood
Publication Date:
08-2024
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Small Arms Survey
Abstract:
The Indo-Pacific region, in all its vastness and diversity, presents many international security challenges. It is also a region with, thus far, limited engagement with the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Only 11 Indo-Pacific countries are currently states parties to the ATT, and nine states from the region have signed the Treaty but not yet ratified it. Realities, Challenges, and Opportunities: The Arms Trade Treaty in the Indo-Pacific Region—a new Report from the Small Arms Survey's project on the ATT in the Indo-Pacific region—provides in-depth analysis of the differing attitudes to the ATT as well as obstacles that hinder universalization and compliance in the region. Additionally, the Report outlines opportunities for stakeholders to change the dynamic of engagement with the ATT in this critical geostrategic region for major global politics.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, Illegal Trade, and Arms Trade Treaty (ATT)
Political Geography:
Indo-Pacific

13. The Nuclear Iran “Concept” Is Already Here: Time Is Short to Prevent Israel’s—and America’s—Next Calamitous Intelligence Failure

Author:
Jonathan Schachter
Publication Date:
05-2024
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Hudson Institute
Abstract:
Groupthink and unchallenged false assumptions about enemy capabilities and decision-making led to the disasters of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 2023 Hamas-led terrorist invasion of Israel. The lessons of these failures demand that Israel’s political and military leadership and their American counterparts immediately reconsider their assumptions about the Iranian nuclear threat to avoid an even costlier miscalculation.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, Intelligence, Nuclear Weapons, October 7, and 1973 War
Political Geography:
Iran, Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

14. Nuclear Verification’s Holy Grail: Verifying Nuclear Warheads — a new approach

Author:
Miles Pomper, William Moon, Marshall Brown, Ferenc Dalnkoki-Veress, Dan Zhukov, Dick Gullickson, and Yanliang Pan
Publication Date:
12-2024
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Nonproliferation Policy Education Center
Abstract:
This study is the culmination of four years of work to think through what would be required to track and monitor nuclear warheads in a verification process. It first began in 2021, shortly after President Joe Biden of the United States and President Vladimir Putin of Russia extended the New START Treaty until February 2026; the two presidents also announced the launch of bilateral strategic stability talks. This positive moment in the U.S.-Russian relationship, which became almost unimaginable after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, was the original impetus for the project. It also launched in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, commonly known as the INF Treaty. The Russians had been violating the Treaty with the production and deployment of the 9M729 missile, also known in NATO parlance as the SSC-8. All NATO allies concurred with the withdrawal, which the United States completed in August 2019. The effort began with two strands of activity. The study team knew that when the United States and Russia decided to return to the negotiating table, the United States would place a high priority on seeking direct limits on warheads. Prior treaties had focused on controlling and eliminating missiles but had not focused directly on the warheads that armed them. It had long been a goal of the United States to seek direct limits on warheads, in order to more accurately constrain a Russian preponderance in warheads designated for theaterand shorter-range systems.1 However, if such an agreement were negotiated, the European allies would be ill-equipped to participate. On-site inspections under the INF Treaty had ended on May 31, 2001, so it had been twenty years since the allies had had to participate in verification activities. Most had lost expertise and institutional memory; some had never participated at all. “Raising the IQ” of the NATO allies about participating in arms control implementation was thus the first strand of activity. The second strand grew up around a conviction in the study team that the well-practiced verification techniques that had been exercised in INF and strategic arms control treaties since the 1980s could be augmented with new technology and innovative techniques. Thus emerged the emphasis on using cryptography to underpin a unique warhead tracking system. This work took advantage of some of the finest experts in the field of cryptography at Stanford University, and also the extensive experience gained during the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s many years of work to strengthen warhead protection, control and accounting in Russian Ministry of Defense nuclear warhead storage facilities. This work, which spanned a period of over fifteen years from 1995- 2013, provided the study team with a great depth of knowledge about the normal operating procedures in Russian military warhead facilities. This deep knowledge was vital to developing a concept for the tracking system, providing it with a realism and accuracy that otherwise would not have been possible. These two strands of work culminated in 2022 in a significant study, “Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Non-Strategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe.”2 However, the team realized that only one element of warhead verification had been touched—the broad outlines of a system for maintaining and exchanging information over the life of an agreement. Other verification elements such as on-site inspections and particular verification technologies had not been considered. They therefore resolved to expand the scope of work to imagine an entire closed system for nuclear warhead verification. With the cryptographic element as its foundation, the team reviewed the extensive experience of treaties, agreements and other activities such as exhibitions and joint experiments that had been built up over the many years of U.S.-Soviet and Russian cooperation on nuclear weapons control. From this, they created a comprehensive menu of measures that could be considered for a future warhead control regime, calibrating the measures according to the level of their intrusiveness.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, Nuclear Weapons, and Nonproliferation
Political Geography:
Russia and United States of America

15. The Future of NATO’s Nuclear Posture and Arms Control in Today’s More Dangerous World

Author:
Miles Pomper, David Santoro, and Nikolai Sokov
Publication Date:
09-2024
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Nonproliferation Policy Education Center
Abstract:
Since the late 1960s, NATO has sought to balance two objectives—maintaining a strong nuclear deterrent while supporting efforts to buttress strategic stability through arms control and advance nonproliferation and disarmament through the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty process. The success of this strategy was most evident in the dual-track strategy of deployments and negotiations that led to the signing and implementation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987. The end of the Cold War also led to substantial cuts in U.S. and Russian strategic systems. Since then, NATO Allies have regularly voiced their support for continuing to pursue these two objectives, including supporting the goal enunciated by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009 “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”1 In the last decade, however, Russia’s malign behavior has undermined NATO arms control efforts to the point that it appears traditional arms control will be effectively dead when the New START agreement—already suspended by Russia—expires in 2026. Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, its repeated nuclear saber-rattling in that conflict, and the deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons to Belarus has also forced the alliance to look to ways to enhance its deterrence, including its nuclear deterrence. Meanwhile, the massive increase in China’s nuclear arsenal and its growing partnership with Russia, is generating additional pressure to increase U.S. nuclear forces as well as questions about the ability of the U.S. to provide extended deterrence simultaneously to Allies in Europe and Asia. Those doubts have been reinforced by political developments in the United States—and in the war in Ukraine—that have raised anxieties about a decoupling of European and U.S. deterrence and defense and led to fresh discussion of a potential “Eurodeterrent.” Meanwhile, developments in North Korea and Iran—and their increasingly close ties with Moscow—further threaten the viability of the already shaky nuclear and missile nonproliferation regimes and have eroded longstanding cooperation between Washington and Moscow to manage nuclear nonproliferation risks in third countries. In response to these developments, Allies and experts, such as the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, have proposed various adaptations to the alliance’s nuclear posture, including to its nuclear sharing arrangements. This report examines these deterrence proposals, particularly considering how they support the alliance’s other longstanding objectives of arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. The paper begins with some background on US/NATO nuclear policy from the end of the Cold War to the further invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It then delves into changes in Russian nuclear doctrine, Moscow’s nuclear behavior during the Ukraine War, and the Kremlin’s views on future arms control. The report next discusses China’s nuclear modernization and views on arms control and the reaction among NATO and Asian Allies and the international community to these changes. It then discusses potential future U.S. and NATO posture options, including those already being undertaken by NATO or proposed by the US. Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board. It concludes with an analysis of the potential impact of various options on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation and offers some policy recommendations.
Topic:
NATO, Arms Control and Proliferation, and Nonproliferation
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Europe, and United States of America

16. The Biological Weapons Convention: Challenges and Opportunities

Author:
Jaroslav Krasny
Publication Date:
06-2024
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Geneva Centre for Security Policy
Abstract:
Amid geopolitical challenges that have led to the weakening of international arms control and disarmament efforts, the Ninth Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Review Conference (RevCon) provided a “glimmer of hope” for control and disarmament regimes. Delegates at the Non-Proliferation Treaty RevCon in 2022 and the Chemical Weapons Convention RevCon in 2023 were unable to reach a consensus on these conferences’ respective final documents. By contrast, the Ninth BWC RevCon held from 28 November to 16 December 2022 successfully adopted the final document. While conflicting positions on how to reflect recent allegations that some states are undertaking biological-weaponsrelated research prevented agreement on the article-by-article review, the final document included a forward-looking section that established a Working Group on the Strengthening of the BWC. This Working Group is designed to “strengthen the effectiveness and to improve the implementation of the Convention” and generate recommendations for enhancing and institutionalising it across a number of important areas, including confidence-building measures (CBMs), transparency, compliance and verification, and the national implementation of the BWC. The Working Group's sessions, therefore, provide a long-awaited opportunity to address several critical issues related to the Convention, including international cooperation and a verification mechanism. The Working Group also presents a valuable opportunity to advance work on national implementation under Article IV and interlink obligations. The recent convening of the Working Group from 4 to 8 December 2023 and the subsequent meeting of states parties from 11 to 13 December offer pertinent insights into progress made in strengthening the BWC. Ahead of the next session of the Working Group scheduled for August 2024, this Policy Brief seeks to outline some of the security challenges presented by biological weapons and lay out some of the policy implications and recommendations that flow from these challenges.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, International Cooperation, Geopolitics, and Biological Weapons
Political Geography:
Global Focus

17. North Korean Support to Iran’s Proxy Partners

Author:
Bruce E. Bechtol
Publication Date:
04-2024
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Journal of Korean Studies
Institution:
International Council on Korean Studies
Abstract:
This essay details the role of North Korea weapons, delivery systems, and technical expertise to Iran’s regional allies (Syria, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas) – starting during the Cold War and transitioning into the PostCold War period. Pyongyang has proliferated chemical weapons, ballistic missiles, conventional arms, and sent advisers, trainers, engineers, and technicians for a variety of projects to Syria. The 2012-2020 Syrian civil war moreover expanded the Assad regime’s need for all kinds of North Korean arms. Hezbollah’s military intervention on behalf of the Syrian regime has also forced the Lebanese guerilla movement and its Iranian patron to become increasingly dependent on North Korean weapons and expertise. The Israeli war with Hamas that began on October 7, 2023, has seen a terrorist force supplied with weapons by both North Korea and Iran – often in collaboration when it comes to getting the weapons and training to Hamas operatives.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, Syrian War, Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, and Proxy Groups
Political Geography:
Iran, Middle East, Asia, North Korea, and Syria

18. Is the Pursuit of Nukes Driven by Leaders or Systems?

Author:
So Yeon (Ellen) Park
Publication Date:
06-2023
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC)
Abstract:
Nuclear weapons are widely regarded as one of the most lethal aspects of military arsenals ever created. As such, international relations and security experts have long been concerned about their proliferation. To prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, both policymakers and academic researchers have focused on what are commonly thought to be the primary drivers of proliferation: security concerns and domestic politics and economies. This brief examines another important driver: the role of national leaders themselves. Based on a study of 1,400 leaders in office between 1945 and 2000, author Ellen Park shows that leader personality and experience drive decisions about whether—or not—to pursue nuclear weapons, a finding that holds true across countries (rather than being limited to a few unique cases). Put simply, the pursuit of nuclear weapons is systematically influenced by certain attributes of leaders, such as college major, socioeconomic background, and military and international experience. To predict when and where the spread of nuclear and other emerging technologies will emerge next, policymakers should promote interdisciplinary dialogue to cultivate leader profiles and expand their use.
Topic:
Security, Arms Control and Proliferation, Nuclear Weapons, and Leadership
Political Geography:
Global Focus

19. Arms Control Tomorrow: Strategies to Mitigate the Risks of New and Emerging Technologies

Author:
Shannon Bugos
Publication Date:
05-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Arms Control Association
Abstract:
Over recent years, the topic of new and emerging technologies with military applications has ignited a dynamic debate among defense officials, political leaders, diplomats, policy experts, and technical experts. This report provides an overview of the potentially destabilizing effects of several new and emerging technologies and their respective military applications. It aims to provide decision-makers with a better understanding of how to mitigate the risks and reduce the chances that a major power conflict or confrontation escalates to the nuclear level through a range of arms control and risk reduction measures. This report focuses on six significant, distinct emerging military capabilities: hypersonic weapons systems, direct offensive cyberoperations, offensive counterspace capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled capabilities, drones, and lethal autonomous weapons systems. This report distills information and ideas from a series of workshops, involving dozens of technical and policy experts in each technology area, that the Arms Control Association conducted in 2021 and 2022. It identifies four overarching themes that highlight the greatest concerns over how the military employment of new and emerging technologies might increase the risk of nuclear weapons use. Increasing the pace of conflict. Increasing uncertainty. Reducing the human role. Incentivizing arms racing. This report identifies near-term risk mitigation measures that are likely achievable now or within the next five years: crisis communications systems, definition establishment, norms, unilateral declarations and actions, and confidence-building measures. This report also outlines long-term measures that are achievable within the next 10 years or beyond: arms control and risk reduction arrangements (e.g., treaties, agreements) that involve more than one country and are more formal than confidence-building measures, although not necessarily legally binding.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Risk, and Artificial Intelligence
Political Geography:
Global Focus

20. The Value of Reporting: National Reporting Practices under the UN Sanctions Regime on North Korea

Author:
David Atwood, Gian Giezendanner, and Sophie Timmermans
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Small Arms Survey
Abstract:
The UN Security Council has imposed a broad range of sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, requesting member states to report on how they are implementing these measures. Many factors affect the national reporting practices of states, with some having failed to submit any reports. Reporting serves as an important measure of transparency and trust-building concerning state compliance with international commitments in general. The frequency and depth of reporting on national implementation of the sanctions by UN member states help to discern the regime’s effectiveness. Failure to meet reporting deadlines, the use of vague language, and limited information on national implementation all dampen the usefulness of reporting on the implementation of the DPRK sanctions regime. The Value of Reporting: National Reporting Practices under the UN Sanctions Regime on North Korea—a report from the Survey’s Strengthening Implementation and Enforcement of the Arms Embargo on North Korea (SAENK) project—highlights factors that affect reporting, providing a more nuanced picture of national practices. The report also examines national DPRK sanctions regime reporting in relation to reporting on other international arms control instruments, with the aim of revealing potential mutually beneficial synergies.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, United Nations, and Sanctions
Political Geography:
Asia, North Korea, and Global Focus