Arms Control

As the United States and the former Soviet Union reach agreement on several arms control treaties, the ability of the United States to develop new technologies to verify treaty compliance will be critical. This report examines (1) how the executive branch decides what research is needed to provide on-site inspectors with monitoring instruments; (2) if mechanisms exist to coordinate research and development being done by the Departments of Defense and Energy and other agencies on verification tools for existing and future treaties; and (3) how much it will cost to monitor various treaties. GAO concludes that stronger interagency coordination is needed. A major improvement to the current process would be the identification of national verification requirements and an interagency plan that prioritizes funding on the basis of established requirements.

GAO found that: (1) although legislation mandated that the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) was mandated by legislation to coordinate arms control research, and the interagency Verification Technology Working Group was created to provide Congress with assurance that arms control research was being coordinated, neither agency identified research requirements or evaluated whether planned or ongoing research projects should be started or continued based on anticipated treaty verification requirements; (2) the Departments of Defense and Energy develop and prioritize research projects independent of each other based on their assessment of what technologies may be used to verify treaties under negotiation or likely to be negotiated; (3) neither ACDA nor the Verification Technology Working Group have the authority to define requirements or the required funding to direct interagency verification research; (4) since neither ACDA nor the Verification Technology Working Group controls research funding, options available to strengthen the coordination process include designating a lead agency with approval authority over research programs, designating ACDA to be the lead agency for policy and another agency to provide technical evaluation of research, and strengthening the existing Verification Technology Working Group; (5) both one-time and annual recurring costs to implement and monitor the five arms control treaties and the bilateral chemical weapons agreement will be substantial; and (6) in March 1991, the Department of Defense estimated the fiscal years 1991 to 1993 funding requirements to be about $1.4 billion for the five treaties.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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