Difficulty of Warhead Detection Is Disputed

Existing technology can allow the United States and Russia to verify whether cruise missiles carried aboard seagoing vessels contain nuclear warheads, according to a journal article published Thursday by UC San Diego Prof. Sally K. Ride and two other professors.

That technology discredits the “myth” that verification techniques would be so intrusive that neither side would allow inspectors to board its warships, according to the article by Ride, Harvey Mudd College physicist John S. Townsend and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist George N. Lewis.

Arms negotiators increasingly are concerned about the ability to verify what types of sea-launched cruise missiles are being carried by warships and submarines.

“People worry that, especially with ships, you’d have to go all over the place to find cruise missiles,” Townsend said Friday during a telephone interview. “It’s just not true, as far as we can tell.”

Cruise missiles are “so large that the only place you’re going to find them” is in or near their massive launchers, said Townsend, who inspected several classes of American warships that carry cruise missiles. “It’s just not physically feasible to move them about below decks.”

Conventional wisdom has suggested that any scheme for checking on sea-launched cruise missiles would only succeed if inspectors were given freedom to search entire ships.

But, after touring various classes of U.S. ships, Townsend believes inspectors would be able to verify the existence of almost all cruise missiles simply by standing on deck near the missile launchers. The researchers believe that cruise missiles on submarines could be inspected during brief examinations of the launch areas.

“It’s as if our ships were designed to make verification easy,” Townsend said.

In the scheme described in the journal article, the U.S and Russia initially would inspect each other’s sea-launched cruise missiles at special facilities on land. Each missile would be scanned by high-energy rays to determine if it carried a conventional or nuclear warhead, then marked with a special “fingerprint.”

Because warheads of existing cruise missiles cannot be easily exchanged, those “fingerprints” could quickly be examined during subsequent on-board inspections to determine if tampering had taken place, Townsend said.

Unless an acceptable inspection method is developed, verification of sea-launched cruise missiles “could become a stumbling block in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks,” Townsend said. “We think verification of cruise missile systems can be done just as well as other weapons systems.”