AI Is Here to Replace Nuclear Treaties. Scared Yet?

For half a century, the world's nuclear powers relied on an intricate and complex series of treaties that slowly and steadily reduced the number nuclear weapons on the planet. Those treaties are gone now, and it doesn't look like they'll be coming back anytime soon. As a stopgap measure, researchers and scientists suggest a bold and strange way forward: using a system of satellites and artificial intelligence to control the nukes of the world.

“To be clear, this is plan B,” Matt Korda, an associate director at the Federation of American Scientists, tells WIRED. Korda has written a report at FAS that outlines a possible future for arms control in a world where all the old treaties have died. In Inspections Without inspectorsKorda and coauthor Igor Morić describe a new way to control the world's nuclear weapons that they call “cooperative technical means.” In short, satellites and other remote sensing technology would do the work that scientists and inspectors once did on the ground.

Korda says AI could help this process. “Something artificial intelligence is good at is pattern recognition,” he says. “If you had a large enough and well-curated data set, you could, in theory, train a model that could both identify minute changes in certain locations, but also potentially identify individual weapon systems.”

New START, an Obama-era treaty that limited the amount of nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia, expired last week, on February 5th. (Don't worry, the countries after all still planning to maintain the status quo—for now.) Both countries are spending billions to build new and different types of nuclear weapons. China is building new intercontinental ballistic missile silos. If America withdraws from the world stageits nuclear vouchsafes mean less, and countries like South Korea see the bomb. Trust between nations is at an all-time low.

In this environment, Korda and Morić's pitch is to use existing infrastructure to negotiate and enforce new treaties. No country wants “on-site inspectors roaming their territory,” says Korda. So, failing that, the world's nuclear powers can use satellites and other remote sensors to remotely monitor the world's nuclear weapons. AI and machine learning systems would then take that data, sort it and turn it around for human review.

It's an incomplete proposal, but it's better than the literal de nada the world has now.

For decades, the US and Russia have worked to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world. In 1985 there were more than 60,000 cores. That number is down to around 12,000. Eliminating roughly 50,000 nuclear weapons took decades of dedicated work by politicians, diplomats and scientists. The death of New START represents the refutation of those decades of work. These on-site inspections fostered trust between Russia and the US and laid the groundwork for reducing tensions during the Cold War. That era is now over, replaced by an era of acrimony and a renewed nuclear arms race.

“The idea we had in this paper was, what if there was some sort of middle ground between having no arms control and just spying, and having arms control with intrusive site inspections that might no longer be politically viable?” says Korda. “What can we do remotely if the countries work together to facilitate a remote verification regime?”

Korda and Morić's proposal is to use the web of existing satellites to monitor intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos, mobile missile launchers and plutonium pit production sites. One major obstacle is that a proper implementation of a remotely enforced treaty regime requires a certain level of cooperation. The nuclear powers would still have to agree to participate.