Abstract
Each of the superpowers has its own national technical means of verification. For the United States, this consists of an extensive network of technological capabilities, collection systems, and other intelligence and analytical resources. The technology includes photoreconnaissance satellites, radars of various kinds, sensitive electronic communication interception and collection equipment, and seismic and acoustic sensors. For strategic nuclear arms agreements such as SALT I and SALT II, the single most important of these are reconnaissance satellites. However, full compliance could not be assured without additional and complementary information from other systems. Indeed, were those systems not also available for monitoring and cross-checking, many provisions of the agreements would never have been negotiated. For monitoring compliance with nuclear explosion limitation agreements, seismic sensors are the most important, and several other systems also play crucial roles.
We have spent billions of dollars on these systems, and it has been money well spent. I find our intelligence capabilities truly astonishing in their technological capacity — especially to a soldier who began his career in World War II, when we seldom knew what was hap-pening six hundred yards away, let alone six thousand miles away.
General George M. Seignious II Director, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1979–81)
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References
Blair, Bruce and Brewer, Garry. Verifying SALT Agreements. ACIA Working Paper #19. Los Angeles: Center for International and Strategic Affairs, UCLA, 1980, 61 pp. Also in Verification and SALT. Edited by William C. Potter. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980, pp. 7–48. The authors provide a detailed and technical description of U.S. verification capabilities based upon unclassified sources. Their report “is a survey of the relevant technical means of verification and a description of the strengths and weaknesses of each in the context of SALT II verification requirements.”
Hafemeister, David. “Advances in Verification Technology.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January, 1985, pp. 35–40. This article discusses several advances in satellite monitoring technology and data processing. It concentrates on image enhancement methods such as digital image processing and charge-coupled devices which assist analysts in extracting maximum information from satellite photographs.
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Scribner, R.A., Ralston, T.J., Metz, W.D. (1985). National Technical Means. In: The Verification Challenge. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6678-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6678-0_3
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