November 14, 2025
The Program on Science & Global Security (SGS) together with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington DC released the report Inspections Without Inspectors: A Path Forward for Nuclear Arms Control Verification with Cooperative Technical Means offering a path for agreed monitoring of strategic nuclear weapons after the expiration of the New START treaty in February 2026. The report is by Igor Morić, an Associate Research Scholar at SGS, and Matt Korda, associate director of the FAS Nuclear Information Project.
The 2010 New START treaty is the only agreement setting verifiable limits on deployment of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons. It includes obligations on information sharing about each country’s nuclear arsenal, allowing short notice on-site inspections, and enabling the use of national intelligence satellites and related capabilities. There have been no onsite inspections for the past five years, however, and in 2023 Russia and the United States suspended their compliance with the treaty verification rules but continued to obey the arsenal limits.
This report outlines a verification framework for a possible follow-on to New START avoiding on-site inspections and based only on remote sensing, together with a level of agreed transparency that allows for immediate detection of changes in nuclear posture or a significant build-up above agreed limits. To do this it proposes leveraging the capabilities of current advanced commercial Earth-observation satellites. This builds on earlier work by Morić on modelling Earth-observation satellite constellations and the implications of global transparency on nuclear stability.
Agreement on a set of cooperative measures to expose nuclear weapon systems for satellite verification would make possible remote monitoring and counting of nuclear delivery vehicles (missile, bombers, and submarines) and nuclear warheads. Novel multi-band high-resolution Earth observation capabilities may allow verification options beyond those present in New START, such as addressing non-strategic and non-deployed warheads by ensuring such weapons are not moved from their storage locations.
The proposed measures could help fill the information gap and prevent worst case assumptions about unrestrained nuclear buildups until political conditions allow resumption of on-site inspections and other more intrusive verification measures to support more sweeping arms control agreements.