ABSTRACT
Verification is the process of determining the degree to which parties are complying with the provisions of an agreement. Three reasons are often given for verification: to build confidence between parties by verifying treaty compliance, to deter cheating by raising the costs and lowering the benefits of cheating, and to detect militarily significant cheating early enough to protect national security. Verifying numerical limits on objects that cannot be adequately counted with national technical means requires a considerable amount of cooperation between the monitored and the monitoring parties. The chapter explores various options for verifiably limiting the strategic nuclear arsenals of the superpowers in the context of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). The START agreement can be expected to require similar exchanges of data on all limited weapon systems. In the START talks, the United States and the Soviet Union have agreed on several aspects of mobile-missile verification.
