Description
The Cold War and Post-Cold War era witnessed one of the largest technological expansions for military and conflict management: satellites. Whilst the military use of satellites has received notable attention in terms of application for strategic and tactical operations, such as campaigns in Iraq and the War on Terror, the use of satellites for tracking, monitoring, and verifying nuclear weapons programs across the globe has received much less. This is surprising if one considers the impact that satellite intelligence had for the negotiation of strategic arms limitations. Whilst efforts in the late 1950s and early 1960s failed due to unreliable verification tools, the revolution in national satellite capabilities mean that by the 1970s the verification of arms control agreements became possible through the euphemism “National Technical Means” (NTM). The promise of mutually assured surveillance through intelligence satellites had the unforeseen effect of drawing the Cold War superpowers into a stabilising security arrangement. Intelligence satellites as NTM, have since been incorporated into the START treaties and for reinforcement of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Recent negotiation and compliance issues show that the twenty-first century has made monitoring tasks more difficult and of high demand. In that context, the 1990s witnessed a new means of satellite verification: commercial satellite imagery – a sub-component of open-source intelligence. Indeed, commercial satellite imagery is extensively used for the verification tasks of the IAEA – a specialised agency of the United Nations. The challenge is how to make sense of the military-commercial relationship and the related political sensitives. It illuminates the debates between the risks of adversaries exploiting such commercial imagery and on the security benefits this form of unclassified intelligence provides. Making sense of the security implications of satellites as an evolving tool for verification and arms control addresses pertinent questions for international security: whether commercial satellite imagery will have a stabilising effect for nuclear tensions; the potential to integrate military-commercial satellite intelligence into an effective security regime; and the utility of satellite technology for preventing a devastating nuclear war.
