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AFTER THE LEGALIZATION of monitoring using national intelligence capabilities through the bilateral U.S.-Soviet SALT agreements, verification by NTM became the principal enabler and precondition of almost all subsequent arms control treaties, including some multilateral accords. If a particular limitation on armaments of the United States and the Soviet Union was considered a desirable constraint, one that would add to U.S. security, it was considered acceptable 90 7 “National Technical Means” Goes Multilateral to pursue only if it was verifiable by NTM. Of necessity that meant that the agreements of the 1970s had to focus on limiting relatively large observable items, such as missile launchers. With the advent of treaty provisions such as the limitation on telemetry encryption in the late 1970s and the addition in the late 1980s of on-site inspections and cooperative measures, it became possible to negotiate more qualitative limits on strategic nuclear forces, such as the number of missile warheads, missile throw weight, and other system characteristics that went beyond monitoring the levels of large force components . Roughly at this same time NTM also became a significant factor in conventional forces and nuclear-testing multilateral arms control negotiations (see Appendix B for details). Seabed Treaty As mentioned earlier, the Seabed Arms Control Treaty of 1971 was perhaps the first multilateral arms control treaty to explicitly refer to verificationbynationalmeans.However,adistinctionneedstobedrawn between “national means of verification” and “national technical means of verification” established under the SALT I agreements. The former is an old term used as early as the nuclear test ban negotiations of 1958–62. At that time it primarily referred to the use of monitoring systems located in third countries, such as seismic detection systems located in say, Norway, that could monitor underground nuclear explosions in the Soviet Union. There were also signal detection systems located in third countries that monitored communications— at least to some degree—in the Soviet Union as well as the People’s Republicof China. Theseunspecifiedsystemswererecognizedaslegitimate verification systems, inter alia in a speech by the Soviet ambassador to the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (a predecessor of the present-day Conference on Disarmament) in 1962.1 The United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union had just completed over three years of negotiations on a nuclear test ban without result because of the impasse over verification. The Eighteen Nation DisarNATIONAL TECHNICAL MEANS GOES MULTILATERAL 91 mament Committee was created in March 1962, but the impasse continued , thereby leading to President Kennedy’s proposal in June 1963 for the limited test ban treaty, which, as discussed in chapter 2, bypassed the problem of the verification of underground tests. “National technical means of verification,” in contrast, was invented during the SALT process in the early 1970s and was initially designed to refer to monitoring by space-based reconnaissance systems. Once accepted, these space-based systems, along with other intelligence capabilities, opened the door to much more comprehensive arms control agreements since they allowed the negotiating parties to see into one another’s territory and detect critical military activity. The reference in the Seabed Treaty was not intended to be specific, however; rather it simply meant that a party could initially verify the treaty by whatever legal national means available to it. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Probably the first real multilateral use of U.S. NTM was the gradual practice by which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) began to utilize information obtained by the United States in its eªorts to monitor peaceful nuclear activities under the NPT. For example, U.S. reconnaissance satellites detected, in 1992, two suspicious wastestorage sites near the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, North Korea. This reactor had been briefly shut down in 1988, long enough to extract spent fuel rods su‹cient to reprocess enough plutonium for one to two nuclear weapons. Upon receipt of the satellite photographs of these two sites, the IAEA staª asked North Korea for permission to inspect them. Upon refusal by North Korea, the IAEA staª referred the matter to the agency’s board of governors, and the pictures (slightlyreducedinresolution)weremadeavailabletotheboard.2 Because of the continuing refusal of North Korea to allow IAEA staª to inspect pursuant to the NPT Safeguards Agreement between North Korea and the IAEA, the IAEA board referred the case to the UN Secu92 NATIONAL TECHNICAL MEANS GOES MULTILATERAL rity Council for consideration of sanctions. Before the Security Council could act...

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