Verification of the Outer Space Treaty with active interrogation
Abstract
We present an analysis of active interrogation in space with the goal to verify the absence of nuclear weapons hidden in a large constellation of satellites. We propose a 16 MeV photon beam generated by advanced laser wakefield accelerators and the detection of fission neutrons using segmented organic scintillators. We use Starlink as a real-world example for the constellation and solve the inspector routing problem against this set of 7,852 satellites over a 5-year mission period. We perform detailed simulation of the nuclear and orbit physics: signal generation and detection with GEANT4 against an orbit-resolved neutron and gamma background, routes flown with Orekit including the effects from the Earth's oblateness, and detection decided by a likelihood ratio test. We identify different encounter types and fleet designs based on a range of inspector platforms. The radiation dose to target satellites from the beam can be kept to about 1% or less of the 5-year space environment dose. We find that a small number of inspection platforms, 20-70 depending on the accelerator assumptions, can serve inspections to the full constellation with a detection probability of 90% against a single deployed warhead. A 10% random sample of the whole fleet can be inspected by 2-20 platforms providing a 37% detection probability against 5 deployed warheads.
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BibTeX
@misc{huber2026verification,
title = {{Verification of the Outer Space Treaty with active interrogation}},
author = {Patrick Huber},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.04016},
eprint = {2610.04016},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04016},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Verification of the Outer Space Treaty with active interrogation
AU - Patrick Huber
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.04016
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04016
AB - We present an analysis of active interrogation in space with the goal to verify the absence of nuclear weapons hidden in a large constellation of satellites. We propose a 16 MeV photon beam generated by advanced laser wakefield accelerators and the detection of fission neutrons using segmented organic scintillators. We use Starlink as a real-world example for the constellation and solve the inspector routing problem against this set of 7,852 satellites over a 5-year mission period. We perform detailed simulation of the nuclear and orbit physics: signal generation and detection with GEANT4 against an orbit-resolved neutron and gamma background, routes flown with Orekit including the effects from the Earth's oblateness, and detection decided by a likelihood ratio test. We identify different encounter types and fleet designs based on a range of inspector platforms. The radiation dose to target satellites from the beam can be kept to about 1% or less of the 5-year space environment dose. We find that a small number of inspection platforms, 20-70 depending on the accelerator assumptions, can serve inspections to the full constellation with a detection probability of 90% against a single deployed warhead. A 10% random sample of the whole fleet can be inspected by 2-20 platforms providing a 37% detection probability against 5 deployed warheads.
ER -