Decentralized security
Can social verification help to make nuclear disarmament possible and profitable?
Amid a new, multipolar nuclear arms race and war in Ukraine, experts warn the likelihood of nuclear war is increasing. To help prevent war and foster climate cooperation, new disarmament agreements are needed, like those signed by the superpowers during the Cold War, despite their bitter enmity. New ‘social verification’ mechanisms could help make disarmament possible, in part by making it profitable.
Nuclear-armed states use verification to overcome their mutual distrust, using ‘national technical means’ like satellite imaging to check that adversaries are keeping their disarmament commitments. So far, only Russia/USSR and the USA have used nuclear disarmament verification, and only to monitor the destruction of nuclear bombers and missiles, not actual warheads. For disarmament to proceed in an increasingly multipolar world, verification capacity needs to expand dramatically; as UN experts have concluded, “verification is essential at all stages of the nuclear disarmament process.”
States are slowly building verification capacity, but institutional support and expertise has atrophied since the Cold War. Given the multitude of challenges and constraints facing governments, efforts to expand verification capacity are more likely to succeed if they leverage public and private resources. With the growing wealth, monitoring capacity, and agency of the private sector, ‘transnational technical means’ could feasibly bolster verification. This raises two key questions: 1) what private sector resources could help to expand verification capabilities? And 2) how can we make it profitable in financial, political, and security terms to support verified disarmament processes, and highly unprofitable to resist?
On the first question, nuclear analysts have long proposed ‘social verification’, with private citizens helping verify disarmament agreements. Revolutions in remote sensing and ICT are rapidly turning this from an aspiration into a concrete technical and policy puzzle. And these technologies are relevant to other big-picture challenges, like climate change, so there may be scope to address the nuclear and climate threats simultaneously. Imagine a global network of monitoring devices, privately owned but certified by international agencies, which monitor temperature, pressure, particulate and isotopic matter in the air and water, and other signals relevant to climate change mitigation and nuclear disarmament. ‘Citizen scientists’ could maintain the devices, with the resulting data being hashed at source and added to a dedicated, public blockchain, using post-quantum encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure data integrity and user privacy. The result would be a shared, trusted record of hyper-local environmental data from around the world, greatly expanding the contextual signals available to help build confidence and trust among governments, and thus increasing the scope to negotiate verified climate cooperation and disarmament agreements.
On the second question, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future explores how to create positive incentives for climate cooperation. It proposes a ‘carbon coin’, a new currency backed by a coalition of governments at a guaranteed minimum value, issued to reward climate change mitigation efforts. Could the same be done for disarmament, with citizen scientists being rewarded with ‘verification coin’ in return for maintaining certified monitoring devices? If financial incentives existed to maintain a global monitoring network, verified disarmament could become both possible and profitable.