Verifying Nuclear Disarmament: The Inspector's Agenda

In the past year, support for moving toward eventual nuclear disarmament has gathered force. In early 2007, an op-ed by four influential U.S. policy shapers, two Republicans and two Democrats, called on the nuclear-weapon states to "turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise."1

Reaching this goal will require overcoming many political, diplomatic, and technical obstacles. In a June 2007 keynote address to the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, former British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett embraced the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and sought to help with this task by offering her country as a "disarmament laboratory."2 What …