International partners meet to discuss nuclear disarmament verification

The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and representatives from 20 countries recently gathered for the fourth plenary meeting of the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV) in Abu Dhabi to discuss technical challenges involved with nuclear verification.

The meeting focuses on three main working groups of the IPNDV including monitoring and verification objectives, on-site inspections, and technical challenges and solutions.

NTI said the participants wanted to ensure that the meeting was a results-driven initiative to develop tools to advance nuclear disarmament verification. Since the first phase of the initiative, which began in March 2015, the IPNDV has hosted four plenary meetings to bring partners together to discuss working papers and reports, the initiation of a mapping exercise on verification capacity in all member states, and publishing a monitoring and verification resource collection hosted on NTI’s website.

The resource collection is a first-of-its-kind library of reports and studies on the aspects of disarmament verifications by governments, national laboratories, international organizations and independent institutions.

Frank Rose of the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance for the U.S. State Department said the initiative had already increased technical understanding among participating states.