Discretely Inspecting Nuclear Weapons With An Encryption Process
A new Commander in Chief will soon have access to the nuclear codes. That’s a big responsibility. For the past 50 years or so, world powers have pretty much had to rely on officials to inspect weapons facilities (or coups to overthrow leaders we can’t trust; but that’s a whole other story) to make sure everyone is following international laws. But on-site UN inspecting crews might soon be a thing of the past because nuclear physicists are developing a “no-knowledge” encryption system for inspecting nuclear weapons.
Instead of actually visiting a weapons facility, inspectors would use a type of physical encryption that would allow them to determine if a nuclear warhead is either active, disarmed, or dismantled without revealing materials or design secrets– which could leave countries vulnerable to enemies. This is a huge issue when we look at rivalries that span generations: think of Russia and the United States, or Iran and Israel.
So how does this work? Basically the inspecting crew would emit x-rays towards a nuclear warhead which would absorb the rays and then reflect them back. At this point the reflected x-rays would hit what’s called an “encryption foil” which would scramble the results and emit them back to the inspector as a gamma ray. The process is called nuclear resonance fluorescence and this new encryption foil could revolutionize nuclear weapon inspecting.
This new method doesn’t come without its own issues though. First the process has to be tested on an active warhead so they have some kind of “constant” to work with when they interpret the gamma rays in the future. We’re talking about holding the most deadly power in the world here, so inspectors better make sure this system works right. Also, the owner of the warhead will be in charge of how the encryption foil is made and which materials are used to make it. Could they choose materials that scramble the encryption in order to produce a “dismantled” result? Probably.
As of 2009 (kind of scary that this is the latest year I could find estimates for) there were about 23,300 nuclear weapons at 111 sites world wide. For the most part, only a few world powers own facilities, but they are spread throughout several countries. This is why alliances are so important to the people in charge. The United States for instance has facilities spread across fellow NATO countries (and here at home). Israel has facilities in India and Pakistan. Again, these are big secrets so these are all estimates and some speculation. But it’s easy to draw reasonable conclusions when you start looking at who-sells-other-weapons-to-who and alliances that form in order to protect nuclear interests. No conspiracy here, just follow the money and weapons.
So you can see why inspection– and secrecy– is so important. But the physicists (based in New York by the way) involved in the new encryption program don’t think it will actually be put into practice for several decades. Why? Diplomacy. But when has that ever stopped anyone before?
Follow Randi Nord on TWITTER
Randi Nord lives in Pontiac, Michigan. She is a journalist for the The Fifth Column, co-founder of Geopolitics Alert, and co-hosts a podcast about geopolitics.