4
CONCLUSION
The committee was asked by Congress to review U.S. capabilities for detection, verification, and monitoring of nuclear weapons and fissile material and make recommendations for improving these capabilities. The committee addressed this task in two phases, producing an interim report and a final report that together address the full U.S. monitoring, detection, and verification (MDV) mission space. The final report reassessed and confirmed the 16 recommendations issued in the committee’s interim report and also offers new recommendations.
Ultimately, the committee found that while U.S. MDV capabilities are significant, the attention and focus given to this mission across the U.S. government is insufficient given the critical importance of MDV for national security. Robust MDV capabilities are essential to provide decision makers with key information regarding nuclear threats, whether early-stage proliferation activities or arsenal advancements. Despite this, the committee saw a lack of focus on the sustainment of core MDV capabilities that support nonproliferation, arms control, and deterrence. The MDV operational enterprise is currently resource and capability limited, and unable to meet all mission requirements. Due to these limitations, MDV for urgent, near-term threats has been prioritized at the expense of longer term, over-the-horizon threats, which risks leaving the United States vulnerable to rapidly evolving or surprise nuclear threats in the future.
The MDV mission is distributed across many U.S. government departments and agencies, and no one organization is responsible for coordinating the enterprise as a whole. This distributed structure is not in of itself problematic, but requires integrated planning and close coordination to ensure that mission needs are being met in an efficient and effective manner. The committee learned about multiple interagency coordination mechanisms that currently exist across the MDV enterprise, but found these mechanisms to fall short of the committee’s first recommendation in the interim report, reaffirmed in the final report, that the National Security Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy should ensure that there is an enduring, interagency planning process with a consistent periodicity to characterize potential future MDV challenges based on the evolving threat space and needs.
The committee was largely impressed by the high-quality on-going MDV research and development (R&D). R&D providers at the DOE national laboratories and sites are deeply committed to this mission and seeking to address future capability needs insofar as those needs are defined. While there are several areas in which R&D efforts should be strengthened or expanded to address important capability needs (as outlined in the committee’s findings and recommendations), the overall MDV R&D portfolio is robust and appropriately spans the proliferation timeline. The committee notes that consistent focus on addressing both horizontal
and vertical proliferation challenges within this portfolio is critical to ensure that key capabilities and skills are maintained. In addition, there are opportunities for increased focus on systems integration/engineering and CONOPS throughout all topic areas.
While impressive, the committee also assessed that much of the current MDV R&D portfolio is evolutionary versus revolutionary in nature, and that the MDV R&D community is just beginning to pursue some more revolutionary approaches to MDV like multi-INT fusion. Such revolutionary thinking may entail the exploitation of additional data streams (which may require increasing comfort with un-curated data), advancements in data analytics, and developing transformative MDV technologies. To bolster innovation, the insular MDV R&D enterprise would benefit from embracing outside ideas from organizations like IARPA and DARPA as well as from the commercial sector. The MDV enterprise must also ensure that these new technologies developed by the R&D community are operationalized and then sustained.
