AI and weapons of mass destruction

BERLIN – New technologies have radically changed the arms control landscape and pose some serious challenges, but also some opportunities, in curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, officials from the five largest disarmament agencies neighboring the United Nations said.

Speaking on October 25 on the sidelines of a meeting of the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, the UN’s top disarmament body, representatives discussed how the advent of artificial intelligence, affordable drones, new reactor technology and other technologies has impacted their mission to control the spread of dangerous weapons and materials.

For example, the advent of widely available large language models such as ChatGPT could make it easier for terrorists or rogue states to access instructions for creating chemical weaponsThis was stated by Hong Li of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Based in The Hague, Netherlands, the OPCW implements the nearly universally ratified Chemical Weapons Convention and oversees the destruction of all declared chemical weapons stockpiles in 193 countries – efforts for which it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. Only three UN countries – Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan – have not signed the convention.

Monitoring changes in delivery systems is “critically important,” Lee said. Inexpensive drones, especially those designed for agriculture with liquid tanks and sprayers attached, “can easily be adapted to deliver chemical weapons, which poses new challenges for us,” he added.

To keep up with the times, OPCW officials have created a temporary working group on artificial intelligence, which will begin work in 2025 for a period of two years. It will systematically evaluate the impact of this new technology on the world of chemical weapons, and also consider how the organization can use it to achieve its goals of creating a world free of chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency, headquartered in Vienna, is tasked with monitoring nuclear facilities around the world to ensure that no fissile material is diverted for use in atomic bombs through a system collectively called safeguards.

To stay ahead of the curve, the agency has a dedicated technology foresight team, said Tracy Brown, the agency’s public affairs and public information officer. Its members monitor new developments in the nuclear field, developing new tools and techniques to uncover illicit nuclear weapons efforts.

In the last decade alone, the amount of nuclear material under agency safeguards has increased by 25%, Brown said. Given limited resources, this requires more efficient management of inspectors’ time.

Machine learning has helped in this process, Brown said, making possible “more efficient and effective video surveillance” of nuclear facilities. Computer systems can flag relevant events (such as the unexpected removal of a container of radioactive material) and sound an alarm, alerting people to manually review the case.

The agency has also trained its own artificial intelligence models to search public information for material relevant to detecting illicit nuclear activity, Brown said. Open source data streams include news reports, scientific articles, satellite imagery, and signals received by remote sensors, and would be time-consuming to manually analyze.

Similarly, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, based at UN headquarters in Vienna, is using the power of machine learning to train its computer systems to use data from a global monitoring network to detect nuclear tests faster and more accurately. a program called NET-VISA. The CTBTO system, consisting of 306 stations around the world, played a critical role in detecting and confirming North Korean nuclear tests starting in 2006, and in debunking rumors of possible Iranian testing when earthquakes were recorded in the center of the country earlier this month.

NET-VISA will also be available to treaty states to enhance their national capabilities, said Jose Rosenberg, senior liaison officer at the organization.

“We live in an era of accelerated technological change,” said Izumi Nakamitsu, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs who heads the organization’s Office of Disarmament Affairs. “This is also a time of heightened danger due to the tense and changing security environment.”

The convergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence and 3D printing of biotechnology and nanotechnology could lower the barriers for terrorists or rogue states to gain access to weapons of mass destruction, she said.

“We need to adapt the existing non-proliferation and disarmament regime to the ever-changing security landscape.”