Exploratory Workshop on Auditing Risk Reduction

Over recent years, the dramatic deterioration of security relationships between potential nuclear adversaries has led to a proliferation of recommendations on nuclear risk reduction. Risk reduction is now a prominent area of work in multilateral fora and bilateral discussions. Expert communities have responded, developing thorough frameworks for analysis on the subject and raising attention on the value of risk reduction measures in practice.  

This ground-clearing work has nearly exhausted its potential. The next step will be to identify concrete new proposals and to generate diplomatic processes to implement them. But for these efforts to have real-world impact, officials will need to be persuaded that potential measures are worth the political capital they cost to achieve. To make this case, we propose an audit of past measures to judge how well they have performed against key indicators of risk.   

This workshop will focus on two categories of risk reduction measures: (1) nuclear risk reduction centers and (2) non-attack agreements. It will bring together a select group of practitioners, academics, and experts to explore how to best evaluate the efficacy of those measures for reducing specific nuclear risks.