By Matthew Gault
Publication Date: 2026-02-09 11:30:00
For half In the 19th century, the world’s nuclear powers relied on a series of intricate and complex treaties that slowly and steadily reduced the number of nuclear weapons on the planet. Those contracts are now gone, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be coming back any time soon. As a stopgap, researchers and scientists are proposing a bold and strange path: using a system of satellites and artificial intelligence to monitor the world’s nuclear weapons.
“To be clear, this is Plan B,” Matt Korda, deputy director of the Federation of American Scientists, tells WIRED. Korda wrote a report at FAS that outlines a possible future for arms control in a world in which all old treaties are dead. In Inspections without inspectorsKorda and co-author Igor Morić describe a new method for monitoring the world’s nuclear weapons, which they call “cooperative technical means.” In short, satellites and other remote sensing technologies would do the work that scientists and inspectors do…
