Nuclear security

HOW TO DETECT NUCLEAR WARHEADS WITHOUT REVEALING THEIR SECRETS

Nuclear arms control is a high-stakes game of trust and secrets. In order for arms control to work, a government agreeing to limitations needs to know that when they give up a nuclear warhead, a rival nation will too.

Yet even when giving up nuclear warheads, a country doesn’t want to reveal everything about that weapon. Instead the government wants to preserve some secrecy about how, exactly, their apocalypse bomb works. Hence the desire for a tool that can prove something is a nuclear warhead, without exposing any of its inner workings.

A “zero knowledge proof” could be such a solution. The term comes to use from the world of cryptography, and was devised by MIT researchers in the 1980s.