The "Breakout" Problem and Verification

Although in the abstract a breakout event might seem cataclysmic, in reality its impact would depend on the particular circumstances: whether the violator then threatened to use such weapon (or weapons) to coerce a neighbour or the international community generally; the state of readiness and deliverability of the purported weapons; the relative conventional military strengths of the violator and the rest of the international community combined; the willingness of the international community to respond; and the existence of defences against whatever delivery system the violator might try to use.

Potential responses to such an event include not only sanctions against a violator — political, economic, and military — but guaranteed mutual assistance in the case of threatened or actual nuclear attack. Missile defences against nuclear attack by ballistic missile and aircraft could decrease the threat for states most concerned about breakout. (In a nuclear weapons free world ballistic missile defences would not be destabilizing.) Perhaps most important would be the residual ability of states to quickly reconstitute a nuclear device or arsenal in order to deter the violator. For the former nuclear weapon states, depending on how long a nuclear weapons free world had existed, this might amount to only a month or two. The threat could then be countered, albeit at the risk of re-igniting a nuclear arms race. An alternative suggested by some observers is a small deterrent arsenal under international control, although this would raise command and control difficulties and be incompatible with total nuclear disarmament.

Since the achievement of nuclear disarmament would require consensus among the great powers that their relationships had improved so much as to obviate the need for nuclear weapons, the main threat to a nuclear weapons free world would be a "rogue state" which had not previously produced nuclear weapons. In considering such a case, one has to ask what might be the motivation for acquiring an illicit nuclear arsenal. If it were to be used for political purposes, presumably blackmail, the existence of the arsenal would have to be revealed, or at least hinted at, thereby alerting the international community to a major violation of the treaty. A "demonstration shot" would have the same effect (and, humiliatingly, might fail). The possibility of an illicit nuclear weapon being used to alter the course of a major conventional war would be presaged by the outbreak of such a war: efforts would have to be made to prevent any nuclear-capable state being backed into such a corner.

The most worrying scenario would be a "bolt-from-the-blue" pre-emptive strike by the proverbial madman — a nuclear Hitler. Such a "rogue state" would already be subject to intensified scrutiny by the verification system, including on-site inspections when suspicions were aroused. Any weapon(s) produced would be untested, could not be deployed until the last minute, and could probably not be delivered by conventional means. Overt training for use would have been impossible. Such a scenario is, of course, possible today and in some respects is more likely today, given the weakness of existing verification regimes. In the current nuclearised world, such an attack is deterred by the certainty of nuclear counterattack. In a nuclear weapons free world it would have to be deterred by devastating and increasingly accurate and powerful conventional attack, the credibility of which would be enhanced by mutual guarantees by the great powers to come to any state’s assistance were it to be threatened or attacked by nuclear weapons.

These hypothetical scenarios notwithstanding, what is clear is that neither the technology of verification nor the broader verification and compliance system can solve the breakout problem alone. Verification can never provide complete assurance that a small clandestine nuclear arsenal or hidden cache of plutonium will be discovered. What verification can do is to significantly, albeit unquantifiably, reduce the likelihood of breakout occurring through a mix of deterrence and enhanced warning time throughearly detection.

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