 Let's let's let's get started here. I want to welcome everyone to another one of our Wednesday lunchtime seminar series with the new voices in global security. My name is Dr. Amanda Chisholm and I'm a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies and I'm also the chair of this new voices series. Today I'm very pleased to have Dr. Lyndon Burford speak on his recent authored report and broader research on blockchain technology and nuclear disarmament. The title of Dr. Burford's presentation is Trust the Machine Blockchain and Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control Verification and this paper considers blockchain is best known as the technology that underpins bitcoin but it also has a vast array of existing and potential uses in areas such as finance, communications, security, trade, manufacturing, medicine and transport. At its core blockchain is a peer-to-peer networking technology that allows participants to transact or transact and store encrypted data in a highly tamper resistant way by giving participants very high confidence in the veracity of the shared data. Blockchain creates a technical foundation for cooperation amongst parties that otherwise have no basis for trusting each other without the need for a central authority or intermediary and this has led to its nickname of the trust machine. So for several years researchers have been exploring the potential for blockchain to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of international safeguards to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. In this talk Lyndon will explore the flip side of that coin. He asks can blockchain help streamline and strengthen multilateral processes to verify the dismantlement of existing nuclear arsenals and he will answer that question in this presentation. So Dr. Lyndon Burford is a post-doctoral research associate in the Center of Science and Security Studies here at King's College London where he studies the theories technologies and policies of nuclear deterrence arms control and disarmament. His PhD looked at the relationship between national identity and nuclear disarmament policy in Canada and New Zealand. In 2015 he was an advisor to the New Zealand government delegation at the review conference of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and in 2011 he won the Miccavanni Prize from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies for his essay on user pays model for nuclear risk reduction. Dr. Burford is joined here by Mr. William Albert who will also act as his discussion. Mr. Albert has served as the director of NATO's arms control disarmament and WMD non-proliferation center since 2017. Prior to that he served as the head of the NATO arms control and coordination section starting in 2012. William has worked on arms control non-proliferation and safeguard issues since 1994. In the 1990s he worked for the IAEA safeguards and on improving the security of Russian nuclear weapons related facilities as part of the Nun Lugar program. He then joined the defense threat reduction agency in 2000 working on strategic planning arms control and small arms light weapons. He then served as the DOD treaty manager for arms control before moving to the State Department to support the 2010 NPT review conference. He returned to the Pentagon in 2011 to direct European arms control policy and work on chemical biological defense and global WMD non-proliferation. In his spare time which actually doesn't sound like a lot, William has also managed to publish. Some of his publications include the NPT and the origins of NATO's nuclear sharing arrangements, substantial combat forces in the context of NATO-Russian relations, and a joint collaboration paper with NATO defense college with Regan Nakasun correspondence and its influence on the IAEA and F treaty which is forthcoming. I want to thank you both very much for sharing your insights and expertise on this fascinating and timely topic. I've asked Lyndon to speak for about 20 minutes and then William, the floor is yours to discuss, offer some reflections before we open up the space to you, the wider audience for questions. As usual, can you please raise your Zoom hand if you want to ask a question live or place a question in the chat box and I'll read it out loud for Lyndon to respond to. So without further ado, Lyndon, I'm handing the floor over to you. Great. Thank you so much, Amanda. Excuse me. Okay, so I hope you all have my slide up there. Yeah, you've got that up, Amanda. Grand, so yeah, first of all, thanks very much all for joining and a big thank you to Amanda for putting together this series, for inviting me to speak, and to the King's team for supporting that. And also William, thanks very much. It's fantastic to have you here. This report is actually, William and I have been discussing this topic of blockchain and arms control verification for like a year and a half and so it's pretty exciting to have finally published the paper and I'm just very grateful to have William's expert input to feedback on it here today. So thanks both. So as Amanda said, today I'm going to be sharing the findings of this report on blockchain and nuclear assignment and arms control verification, but just to put that in context, this is part of a broader project that I've been working on here at the Center for Science and Security Studies for the last couple of years, led by Dr Heather Williams. And that project has been looking at ways to bring together a diverse range of stakeholders in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, so nuclear weapon states, non nuclear weapon states, civil society, and look for opportunities to build cooperation and ultimately to build trust in the other stakeholders and in the treaty regime as a whole. So that's just a broader piece of context for the paper. So what I'm going to talk about today, I'll present this paper in sort of three sections. So in the first section, I'll introduce the context in a specific policy problem that I'm looking to address. And in that regard, I would say that this is a more technical and conceptual paper. So it's not political. I don't get into the politics of disarmament and arms control, which of course are critical issues in their own right. In the second section, I will talk about specifically what blockchain is and why I think it matters in this context. And I'd flag at the outset that this is really building on some fantastic research that's being done in the safeguard space. So in terms of IAEA safeguards to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, there's some great research on the application of blockchain in that field coming out of the Stanley Center, the Stimson Center, Civic Northwest National Laboratory in the United States. And great to see Cindy on the call as well from Stimson. Cindy has been very helpful and very generous in feeding back on an earlier draft of this as well. And equally in Australia, the University of New South Wales. So I'm building on that and I'm saying how can that research inform what we do in the area of arms control and disarmament. And then third, I'll look at some specific applications of blockchain in potential applications of blockchain in disarmament and arms control and talk about why I think it would be a useful field to explore more. So for those of you who are busy and don't have a lot of time, I won't leave you hanging. I'm going to give you my bottom line up front. And that is that in this report, what I argue is that blockchain offers significant opportunities to increase practical cooperation to reduce nuclear risks through disarmament and arms control. And in particular, by strengthening and increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the management of data in disarmament and arms control processes. So I argue that blockchain can can increase the efficiency and effectively those effectiveness of those processes, but also that it can enable new types of verification data and process and ultimately that it can help to increase trust in verification data and trust in the process of disarmament verification overall. And as a result that it can help to build trust and cooperation among NPT parties and non-members. So turning to this question of the context and policy problem that I'm addressing here. So the broader context is the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty signed in 1968, entered into force in 1970, also known as the NPT. So the NPT is the political and legal foundation of a global regime that seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and also work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons and to share the benefits of the peaceful uses of nuclear technology. So the context that I'm writing this paper in is that we appear to have a stall. So the disarmament progress that we saw at the end of the Cold War has come to an end. Reductions and weapon numbers have been very significant, but those reductions have now all but stopped. And in fact what we see is that the nine nuclear arms states are all either modernizing the nuclear arsenals, increasing the size of the nuclear arsenals or extending the life of the nuclear arsenals for up to 50 more years. Now in that context there is a growing consensus among experts. It's not unanimous, but there is what I would argue is a growing consensus that the risks around nuclear weapons are rising. And when I say risks arising, what I mean is that the risk of the use of nuclear weapons is increasing. And I would argue that the use of nuclear weapons would be I have presented you on awesome. Thanks for that, Amanda. Does that change things? Okay, Zoom. Awesome. Love you. So that the use of nuclear weapons is the most likely cause or trigger of a nuclear war, which of course would be devastating for all of humanity and we would like to avoid. And so as a result, all countries have a shared interest in reducing that risk. So just to give you one example of that, the UK House of Lords produced a report in 2019 and I'm going to quote the very first sentence from the summary of that report and I quote, the risk of the use of nuclear weapons has increased in the context of rising interstate competition, a more multipolar world and the development of new capabilities and technologies in quote. So in that context, I would say that all states share an interest in preventing the use of nuclear weapons or reducing nuclear risks. And one way that they can do that is through cooperative arms control and disarmament. So at the same time, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty actually makes all members responsible for nuclear disarmament. But of course, non nuclear weapons states that are members of that treaty cannot undertake tangible disarmament. So how can they fulfill those obligations to support disarmament? And so one way that countries have been looking to try and do this is through verifying the dismantlement of nuclear warheads. So the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification and the Quad Initiative are two examples of that. So I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation. But just to say those initiatives are already looking at ways that countries, nuclear armed states and non nuclear armed states can collaborate to verify the dismantlement of nuclear warheads, which has not been achieved before. And the question that I'm addressing in this paper is, so that process generates an enormous amount of data verification inspections, declarations from nuclear armed states, environmental monitoring. And so the question is, what do we do with that data? How do we use that data with maximum transparency to increase trust in the process? At the same time as protecting the integrity and the secrecy around that data so that non nuclear weapons states are not getting access to proliferation sensitive information. Now what I argue in this paper is that the attributes of blockchain correspond very closely to those challenges. And therefore, I think that the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification, the Quad and other measures should incorporate blockchain into their research programs. So ultimately the aim of this paper is to seek to encourage cooperation amongst NPT states and even non members to reduce nuclear risks and to build trust. What I aim to do is to flip the script in terms of that we hear a lot of bad news about how new technologies are increasing risks, increasing the potential for conflict, etc. And so what I've done here is said, okay, well, where is an example of a technology that might do the opposite that might enable us to increase cooperation to reduce risks. So turning to this more technical question of what is blockchain. So ultimately, blockchain is a data management tool, enables high security collective management of data, which enables a network of authorized participants to transact and store data in a highly secure way that enables them to maintain very high confidence in the integrity of that data. So to do that, blockchain creates a permanent encrypted record of data transactions. It does this without a central authority. So it uses effectively peer to peer technology. So there's no one centralized storehouse of the data. It's spread across the network. And I'll come back to the relevance of that point in the context of Disarmament a little later. Blockchain creates a shared data ledger. And so that is effectively what is called the blockchain. The blockchain is the shared ledger. And finally, experts often describe one of the attributes of a blockchain as being practically immutable. What that means is that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to tamper with a blockchain in secret. So if you are one of the most powerful countries in the world and you dedicate an enormous amount of computing power and money and time, you might be able to alter the blockchain. But it's extremely likely that if you do, every other member of the network will immediately be notified of that change. So it's very hard to cheat the process. And of course, that's critical for increasing trust in a Disarmament verification context, where there's always concern that other parties might be trying to cheat the process, for example, to make a declaration and then divert material or to make a declaration and then change it subsequently. And blockchain makes that practically impossible. So to just touch on a few reasons, a few of the ways that blockchain does these things. So blockchain is actually a combination of existing technologies of varying degrees of maturity. So one of those, as I mentioned, is to distribute it to storage. So there's no centralized authority. And of course, what that does is it reduces single points of failure. So unlike Amazon Web Services or Google, where you have a central storehouse that can alter the data secretly, there is none of that in a blockchain. And so that reduces technical vulnerabilities to power failures or anything like that. But it also reduces vulnerabilities to insider threats or to adversary attacks, because there's no central point to attack. You have to attack the entire blockchain at once. And so in order to effectively change data on a blockchain in secret, you'd have to hack every single node on the network at the same time and simultaneously change every copy of the blockchain spread across that network simultaneously. So another technology that blockchain incorporates is public key cryptography. Now again, this is a decades old technology. It's relatively mature, although it's still very much developing. And I'm not going to go too much into the technical detail of this, but essentially what public key cryptography enables is for the users of a network to very strictly control who has access to what types of data and to what types of function on the network. So that enables them to verify that only authenticated users are on the network and only authenticated users are able to add data to the network, helping therefore to add confidence to the data on a blockchain. Third blockchain uses consensus mechanisms. So these are a specialist algorithm that replaces the role of a central authority. So whereas previously you would have a central authority that takes all the incoming information and reconciles it to create a new updated ledger, the consensus mechanism does that instead of very quickly and efficiently enables the network to come to agreement about the new state of the data ledger each time you add data to it. And then finally the process of hashing. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about this specific process because this is critical to that attribute of blockchain, which is the immutability, it's practical immutability. So what is hashing? So a hashing algorithm is a specialist algorithm that is what's called, excuse me, what it does, what it does enables you to encrypt data in a form that is impossible to reverse. So you run data through a hashing algorithm and at the other side you get a short string of numbers and letters that is unique, that is irreplicable and also cannot be reverse engineered. So you can't start with a hash of data and then reverse engineer the underlying data or at least it's extremely, extremely difficult to do so. So a hash represents the data on a blockchain but it doesn't reveal the underlying data. A hashing algorithm is also deterministic and what that means is if you take the same data and run it through the algorithm you get the precise same hash out the other end every single time and that enables countries in a disarmament context to test that what countries are presenting as a true and accurate record of their declaration etc is exactly that because run it through the algorithm now you get a certain hash, run it through the same algorithm in five years time you're going to get the exact same hash. So any changes to data change the hash so you can see if data has been changed and hashing critically creates an interlocking interdependency between blocks of data on a blockchain so I'm just going to talk through that very briefly. So let's say we start with two transactions in a disarmament process so these might be declarations of stockpile size for example from nuclear weapons states so two different states have made these declarations they've encrypted that data so they are the only ones using their public key cryptography they've encrypted it so they are the only ones that can see the underlying data. So we take that encrypted data and we run it through a hashing algorithm and we get a hash for each algorithm so that's just a short string of numbers and letters it's very quick and easy to identify and very quick and easy to verify. So we take those two hashes and we hash them together so now we've got one hash that represents the data from both of these encrypted declarations we take that hash of both transactions three and four and we add it to a block on the blockchain let's say block two so in block two we've got this single hash that represents transactions three and four and then we also add to block two a timestamp so we know exactly when the block was created and we add the hash of block one so we've taken all of the information from the previous block we've hashed it and then we've added that hash to block two so now there's an interdependency between block two and block one and of course in block one you've got all of the same things all over again you've got a timestamp you've got a hash of the transactions that were stored in block one and you've got the hash from the preceding block hash zero so you see how this interdependency is created and then so now we've got block two which is the green box and so we take block two and we hash all of that data together again and we create a hash for block two we add the hash for block two into block three we add a timestamp and a set of new transactions and so on and so on and so on now what this does is it creates what I call a cascading interdependency between these blocks so if you change even a single point of data even a single bit in any one of these transactions along the way you immediately create a cascading flow of changes across every single hash and therefore across every single block and so what that means is that the network is able to verify if anyone has tried to change data even if you can't see what the underlying data is and that of course means that while the nuclear weapon states can see the underlying data of their verification declarations non-nuclear weapon states who don't have access to the underlying data but do have the hashes they will immediately be notified if anyone tries to change that data and so it gives all of the stakeholders in the blockchain the ability to maintain very high confidence in that data so look I'm going to end my power point there so that we we don't have death by power point but I'm just going to finish now with some discussion of how I think this applies in the context of nuclear summits specifically so I'm going to look at some specific use cases for this am I still sharing my screen where is my zoom no I'm not okay great so so turning to the specific issue of how this applies to blockchain so as I said there's been a lot of research done in nuclear safeguards so in the report I look at examples from the United States Australia and Finland where public private partnerships have have actually built blockchain prototypes to test how they would help to strengthen the integrity and confidence in IAEA safeguards and all three of those public private partnerships that involve various research centers and government corporation concluded that blockchain does have the ability to add value here and in particular that this hashing process adds unique value over and above other digital digital tools for managing data for example other forms of distributed ledger technology so taking that research and pulling it across into the context of disarmament verification in the report I argue that blockchain could increase the efficiency and effectiveness of disarmament verification for example in increasing confidence in the data reducing costs and strengthening the ability to rapidly detect any attempts to cheat the process for example by diverting nuclear materials out of the process so I also argue that in addition to the ability to strengthen existing practices there are areas in which blockchain can add new possibilities for verification data and processes so I'm very quickly just going to run through a few of those so the first of these is the idea of a cryptographic escrow so this is work that was done by Sebastian Philippe Alexander Glaser and Edward Felton and so they argue that it would be possible to for nuclear weapons states to make declarations upfront so for example arsenal sizes or material holdings related to nuclear weapons but using the hashing process and the encryption process they make the declarations upfront but they don't reveal the underlying data and then as the process progresses and they gain confidence in the good faith efforts of their negotiating partners they're able to progressively reveal that data over time now of course that is not a process that's unique to blockchain but where blockchain is unique is that because of the hashing process as that data is revealed over time the rest of the participants in the process and indeed the third party observers can verify with a very high level of confidence that the data that is being revealed over time is a precise match for the original data that was declared and hashed onto the blockchain the second use case that I flag in this paper is the idea of a private internet of things made up of remote sensors to gather compliance and verification data for example at remote facilities so this would be for example a set of environmental monitors so either location data um sorry location data um environmental monitoring for particulate matter um things like that so these sensors are getting smaller cheaper more reliable and having a longer battery life and so to give you an example of how this would work you could take a set of location sensors attach them to treaty accountable items such as warheads or weapon parts and stored at a remote facility those sensors would be progressively or sorry regularly logging data on a blockchain and then using a thing called a smart contract so a smart contract is an algorithm that's that's encoded into a blockchain and a smart contract is encoded to automatically perform a pre-agreed function if a certain set of criteria are met so for example if those location sensors were found to have moved outside of a pre-agreed set of physical boundaries so for example if that nuclear weapon state moved that weapon component outside of a pre-agreed set of boundaries that sensor would be automatically encoded to flag to the entire network and so the entire network would immediately be notified and that would enable that would enable inspectors to to go in and inspect and restore confidence in the process so in that sense the IoT the private IoT would increase efficiency reduce costs and enable the inspectors to really target their inspection activities where they're most useful and then finally the the third case that I talked about which I mentioned before is that bringing in non-nuclear weapon states as third party observers so this is blockchain as an international confidence building measure because it's possible to share encrypted data and hashed data with non-nuclear weapon states those non-nuclear weapon states then become stakeholders in verifying the ongoing integrity of that data and so without having to see the underlying data they can make sure that all parties to the agreement are fulfilling their obligations in good faith and are not trying to cheat the process so to sum all of that up I'll go back to where I started and that is to say that in this report I argue that blockchain offers significant opportunities for practical cooperation among nuclear arm states and non-nuclear arm states to strengthen the the management of data relating to verification processes particularly to some arms control processes but this technology could be applied more broadly to other weapons types they offer the opportunity to strengthen existing practices to increase efficiency effectiveness of those practices but they also sorry blockchain also offers the ability to enable new types of verification data and processes and adds unique value in the hashing process in creating the practical immutable sorry a practically immutable and permanent data record so I recommend that states that are involved in things like the international partnership for nuclear disarmament verification or the quad initiative should take up this question and add blockchain to their research program so thank you very much for your time and attention here and I'm going to hand over now to William and very much look forward to hearing William's comments on this paper and to any questions that you and the audience might have so thanks very much thanks for the great presentation and I think this is really important I mean I were kicking this idea around at Isidarco almost two years ago now wow time does fly when you're having a pandemic for me the question is how can this contribute especially on nuclear weapons disarmament one of the biggest challenges we have in nuclear weapons disarmament is the very definition of a warhead when is a warhead in a way I think the blockchain technology provides us with an opportunity to address those problems very very clearly I'll have a couple questions for you specifically but but what I want to get at is I think you outline your paper very well how you can build trust in a process that tracks an initial declaration that tracks components in that declaration without giving away design information for warheads you know when a nation makes a declaration on warheads you're talking about warheads that are made into delivery systems ones that are added forward facilities ones that are in central storage ones that are in the hedge and ones that are in the disarmament queue so I think it's really clear that blockchain could do very well to trace warheads through that type of system without giving away location information which would be very important to the to the possessor states but would be able to to trace when they go into the disarmament queue the thing that I'm really interested in is how we go from the disarmament queue into the actual disposition of the material in the end so can blockchain help me to trace significant quantities for instance I define sq of he were plutonium as it enters a warhead or as it leaves a warhead can it trace it all through the process to being burned in a reactor because for me that would be fascinating again I think it's clear that this can really help and especially the idea with escrows this can really help in terms of tracking a warhead from an active deployment arsenal to a hedge to a disarmament queue but the thing that we're really afraid of is that you know there's thousands of warheads or hundreds of warheads in a disarmament queue or a hedge queue that suddenly jump back into your active arsenal or things that you say that you've destroyed that you haven't really destroyed that the plutonium is just being refurbished into new pits for warheads so your initial declaration is going to be important tracking the components then can you track the explosive the high explosive element of the warhead can you track the physics package can you track the warhead casing you know all the different elements that go into making a warhead and then be able to have confidence that they're being destroyed and again blockchain provides I think with the opportunity to ensure that the design information is not given away at all and I know you said that in the report you talk about how Australia and the United States looked at cheating and spoofing and hacking and I think it's pretty clear that that's handleable so a couple of the questions then for you is there a possibility for information loss in other words not hacking per se but is there a possibility of you giving away information through blockchain that you wouldn't want the other side in analyzing all the data that you're giving in blockchain is able to see things that they're not supposed to see not even necessarily design information but by carefully examining the transactions can they decide something about the locations of facilities can they can they figure other things out that's one question I have another question is if materials declared inoperable so if you say that you know you have a significant quantity of plutonium or he for warhead and that you've now blended that down is there the possibility of cheating and re-entering that is new material does that matter as much you know in other words can you take it out of the blockchain and then re-enter it disguising its origins the third I would question I would have is have you thought about how this interacts specifically with inspections because I think one way to vastly increase your confidence you have all this distributed ledger information you have all this to me that then helps me in verification because it tells me specifically where I need to look to see if there's cheating and by having greater confidence in all of the data finding single points of discrepancies can or non-discrepancies can give me greater faith in the whole set of information so in a way I think this could really bolster physical verification and regular material control and accounting as it exists in safeguards or in warhead dismountsmen and that brings me to my fourth point component tracking and safeguards so for me the worry isn't necessarily getting account on warheads in the active stockpile because I think that's pretty clear that the fear is that someone's going to flood their active stockpile with unaccounted for warheads and so so one way to contribute to confidence that this can work in nuclear disarmament verification would actually be non-nuclear weapon states using this more integrated in their national safeguard system for material if it is shown for instance by a non-nuclear weapon state that uses nuclear material in reactors if this gives me confidence that it is bolstering and increasing material control and accounting of their material from cradle to grave from from fuel fabrication to reactor use to final disposition then I would have a lot more faith that it would actually bolster arms control because then I would have faith that we could go from warheads to electricity with great faith so the non-nuclear weapon states actually I think would have a huge role here in demonstrating the efficacy of this for systems tracking of material and then just finally on your internet of the things because what I see in the end is you would have two internets of the things that intersect one on warheads and the other on the material derived from that warheads and the material that could be used in those warheads and if you had full faith in those two IOTs and in any potential interaction between the material tracking and the warhead tracking then you would have much better faith that you could actually trace whether a nation is moving towards disarmament cheating or building up their arsenals so all in all I think this is an amazing effort I think this has a huge potential to contribute to nuclear disarmament verification and specifically that there's a strong role that the non-nuclear weapon states and track 1.5 and track 2 can contribute we at NATO have this thing called the science and technology organization and I'm definitely going to throw all this at them because they have thousands of scientists and they want to engage nuclear disarmament verification and honestly I think Lyndon this is one of the most exciting ideas I've heard in nuclear disarmament verification in a long time thank you fantastic thank you so much William it's very encouraging and thank you very much for your expert feedback and for those questions so yeah you've raised some great some great points there and some great questions so let me just try and run through those as as clearly and rapidly as I can so on your first point about our nuclear materials tracking so HAU and plutonium as I mentioned there's a lot of research has been going into that specific question so how can blockchain increase the strengthen and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of nuclear materials and nuclear material control and accounting and so the three examples of that that I look at in the report in the United States with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Australia cooperation with the University of New South Wales and also in the States sorry in Finland and cooperation with the Stimson Center all three of those projects have actually built prototypes of various kinds to test this exact question that you raise on not just how do we look at warheads or warhead parts or in the active stock pile etc but how do we deal with materials and making sure that we have full confidence that they're not being diverted from from the supply chain and all three of those prototypes that were built and the tests that were done reached basically the same conclusion which was that yes blockchain has excellent potential to add confidence to those process particularly because what it does is at present the nuclear materials and accounting and control reporting is hierarchical so nuclear operators report up to a national regulator and that national regulator reports up to the IAEA that process takes time it's cumbersome data can get lost along the way what this does is it enables a network approach whereby the operator reports to the national regulator and that is logged on a blockchain and then the IAEA could for example have direct access to the blockchain so they can just sit over it and watch everything that's happening in near enough to real time and so what that enables is with the IAEA as the central sort of authority that's tracking these things worldwide it can much more quickly and efficiently detect attempts to divert nuclear material now in terms of how that works the other thing you raised is the idea of non-nuclear weapons states using blockchain to track their own national nuclear material accounting and control and how that would add confidence to nuclear weapons states in terms of being willing to reduce numbers in their stockpile etc there was a I'm sorry I don't recall off hand if it was a separate Cindy will be able to answer if it was a separate conference or if it was at the IAEA safeguards conference but a session was held looking at the potential to do that so the potential to apply blockchain to safeguards and a variety of IAEA member states and the conclusion of that was that there's no legal barrier to doing that so that's a political decision so it would it would simply be a matter of adjusting the way that those countries interact with the IAEA and so that is already something that countries could be looking into indeed other countries like Argentina are already looking into that process and exploring how they can use blockchain to increase their work in safeguards in terms of your comment around sorry I'm just going back to my notes here yes okay so you also raised a great question which is is it even though data on a blockchain is encrypted and hashed etc there is of course metadata so where that data is coming from the locations the amounts of data the regularity of that data and so yes indeed and so the team of researchers at the University of New South Wales working with the Australian federal authorities when they built their prototype blockchain to test this process they said yes it increases efficiency yes it increases potentially would increase confidence in safeguards however there is a risk and that risk is exactly the point you've raised which is it may be that malicious actors will be able over time to look at this metadata coming into the blockchain and say oh here's that same shipment that happened two weeks ago and we can correlate that with we can correlate that with a political statement that was made by country x about when they got rid of a certain number of weapons and we can determine that such and such a facility is actually the critical one and we're going to go and attack that facility using cyber means so yes that is a risk and it's an open question and it's something that would need a lot more research before it would be able to apply this to something as sensitive as a nuclear warhead component etc but equally to nuclear materials which is the context in which that risk was flagged by those researchers at the University of New South Wales to your question around complementarity with on-site inspections so yes there's certainly is a potential for complementarity there as I think I flagged at the start of the presentation I certainly hope I did the blockchain is a data management tool so blockchain does not solve the problem of needing on-site inspections it does not solve the problem of how to ensure the correctness or completeness of declarations that the countries make now as I said the the great thing about that is that initiatives such as the international partnership for nuclear disarmament verification and the Quad initiative of Norway, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom have already for several years been doing excellent work looking at precisely those questions so when a country at the start of a verification or disarmament verification process declares you know say we've got 50 warheads at facility X how on earth do we know that they're telling the truth and so that's something that blockchain can't solve over time as you said having a massive data in which we have confidence can add data sorry can add confidence to our ability to verify subsequent declarations but at that upfront point those are problems that are not you know blockchain is not designed to solve those problems it's a complement to the existing human level processes in place finally to your to your point around internet of things I mean I think your suggestion is excellent I think that you know you could build an IoT a private encrypted IoT with restricted participation to track materials and that could do its own job of increasing confidence in the management of nuclear materials around the world and a separate private IoT to track warheads warhead components delivery vehicles etc which of course would have a lot more sensitivity around it and therefore would need to solve some of those underlying risk issues earlier so I think as far as possible I've covered off all of those things and I'll turn back over to Amanda at this point great gosh this is so fascinating I'm learning so much I have to admit I know zero block about blockchain entering in this but now I know quite a bit more so thank you and William for amazing discussion and feedback we do have some more questions for you a linden that came in the chat box I'm also going to abuse my position a chair to sneak in one of my questions as well too I guess for me and some of these questions point to it too for me I wonder I know your report you said it's not a political report or there's you're taking the politics out of it and I know you've talked a lot about you know this is a blockchain as a technology that offers more of the technology as opposed to the politics though you know some of the political of how to increase confidence in this technology and what not have been discussed between you and William I do wonder coming from my critical security studies background right if you could reflect on what else might be the politics that are involved in this because we you know critical security studies will tell us that data alongside these different technologies are never neutral so I don't know if you've considered anything around that what what might critical security could study questions to this help us think more about blockchain that might be a mean question I apologize in advance for that linden another question comes from a bream who talks as two points of the question just asking a very practical question of what will be the cost of this process and then I'm wondering in addition to that is who's who's going to bear the cost of this right is this individual states that bear the cost of this because that you know there there's gross inequalities around defense budgets and whatnot so that's one question another question is from Emmanuel thanking you for a very interesting publication and presentation and asking you if you have plans to present your work at the IP and dv or do you have any sense that they have interest on their side to integrate this sort of technology or research of this on this within their own work Cindy has a few comments that she's made about I guess the conference that you're referring to if it's the conference was a member state acceptability one done outside of the IAEA but in Vienna um I don't know if Cindy if you want to zoom in right now and just maybe clarify because there was a little bit of a conversation happening there in action sure no problem and first of all linden it's great to see you and congratulations on getting the paper done uh it's it's always nice to see it published and just the slap the report is coming out today um so big news there yes finally a little three months behind but it'll be there um so just on the on the conferences we have done a one on member state acceptability where we brought in regulators and of course the the agency but that was a Chatham house outside of the agency and then there was the emerging tech workshop which Chris had just reiterated to in the chat that and that was held in January this year the one on member state acceptability was June 2019 but if I could just make a comment uh linden and and and also to to william's question on the verification aspect so how to get the digital and the physical to to link up and uh with slavka with the prototype that we developed uh there is a verification click or button if you will nothing in blockchain in any way takes away from the physical inspection onsite inspection that has to happen when it comes to safeguards and so there you actually get that that link that happens when inspectors go on site they can actually verify that what is on the shared ledger is indeed what they see on site physically and then they will click and verify that and if not then of course you could reject and then there would have to be a process so everything is the entire history of how material moves through the supply chain is tracked uh from mine to the deep geological repository uh so that is uh one of the benefits of dlt overall and I don't want to take away from linden's thunder so just thanks I wanted to be here for you today linden I'm up you can see the sun's coming in it's great yeah fantastic thank you so much sardine I wouldn't say yeah thanks it's I'm sure it's a disgusting time of day to be up and and on a zoom call there so so thanks very much and thanks for clarifying that and actually you've you've just clarified a point that I I perhaps didn't make clear enough previously which is that the the finish uh prototype that you built uh that you you know in collaboration with the finish um government uh does exactly that it's it's a cradle to grave tracking process it's the first complete nuclear material fuel cycle um blockchain prototype so congratulations on that work and and just yeah that your work has been such a help for me and you've been such a help so thanks very much um so Amanda if maybe I could just go back to some of those questions that you flagged well I'm just conscious of the time I think I'm just going to finish the other questions and then you can just pick and choose which ones you want to respond to you right sure thank prioritizing mine of course okay so um of course so you know the the remaining questions were more around um more technical questions around how blockchain works so one from Raphael asks if an upgrade of the blockchain software is wished to be made by one user I imagine a vote has to be made on the upgrade as many cryptocurrencies require to how much if any voting power is given to each user um and then another one from Marina who says hi Lyndon congrats on the great report and presentation given that the privacy security of this blockchain will be critical how do we contend with the fact that when it came out bitcoin was thought to be completely anonymous this is something that has come up in my own maria's marina's research on cryptocurrencies that purport to be private shield those are the all the questions put back at you Lyndon okay and we've got about 10 minutes till we wrap is that right okay cool I hope to be able to race through those in 10 minutes cool so thanks very much everyone for some great questions um Amanda of course prioritizing your your questions so critical secure studies and data management so here's an interesting point um my overarching impression of critical security studies and please feel free to jump in and correct me is that a lot of critical scholars tend towards a more human security approach than a traditional real estate based approach it's not to say that they are mutually interdependent sorry not say that they mutually independent but that there is a lot of focus on the human body the human experience etc in the critical studies approach and as a result the focus on data management and privacy is around rights issues around privacy who owns the data who has access to it how does it affect human rights how does it affect you know responsibility of the state in relation to the individual etc so what's interesting about this process is what I'm actually proposing here what blockchain does is it makes the enactment of responsibilities automated so it automates the enactment of responsibilities so once an agreement is logged in a blockchain it happens whether you like it or not once you've signed off on that blockchain if certain criteria are meet and smart contracts are activated then you get the result that you agreed on previously so what it does is it means that there is more clarity and predictability for all actors you can't just go changing the situation so to look at the example and this is a roundabout way of coming to you to to respond to a question if you look at the example of a cryptocurrency like blockchain the the United States can say year after year after year we couldn't possibly print more money because it would cause inflation and we don't want that and then COVID comes along and it just says right we're printing money we're printing money from now until the cows come home right so there's no ability for individual citizens to trust in the amount of monetary supply because the government can come along at any moment and just say right print three trillion dollars and you have no ability to control that relationship with a blockchain that just simply doesn't exist because in order to add data to the blockchain to make changes to the blockchain to do whatever you want you have to go via the consensus mechanism and so if you jump on there with consensus mechanism and say right the United States would like to go back to transaction number four and we're actually removing all of that data the rest of the network just says we'll know and the United States is not able to make that change because they don't have consensus with the network so what you're doing is you're creating predictability and stability and confidence that no one actor can just jump in and change whatever they like because there is no overarching power to do it that power is distributed across the network it belongs to the entire network and so in that sense I think it empowers individuals because you're flattening the the hierarchy but secondly and specifically in the context of nuclear disarmament it's actually an inverted problem there which is that it's not so much about the rights of individuals and how are we going to protect human rights and etc it's that states may well be politically very cautious about committing agreements to a blockchain that they can't then undo later so if they make commitments on a blockchain that say when x happens we will transparently reveal why um two years down the track when x happens that government might be sitting there going no no no no no we don't we don't want to reveal why and it's like well it's in the blockchain you can't change it so in that regard politically speaking that is one area where there may be some hesitancy among states because they're committing to that absolute you know it's an absolute commitment you can't undo it on that basis i'm now going to jump ahead to the last question because the two interact which is sorry this the second last question around a software upgrade so all of these things are written into a blockchain so you agree in advance what it's going to look like um the question of how you then change the protocol the protocol is the the overarching network algorithm that controls all the activity on the network the question of how you then change the agreements or add new agreements requires you to rewrite the network protocol um just to say yes that's a very complex process the question of who would have what voting rights would be written into the protocol initially and so again that's an automated process once that's written into the protocol initially when you come to the point where you want to change the protocol the different network nodes which are operated by different countries in this vision would have voting rights as apportioned by by the network protocol in terms of the cost of the process i would argue that blockchain would enable a reduction in the costs of verification processes precisely because you don't have to fund a centralized authority that then has to have physical premises staff staff time etc so there are upfront costs in building the blockchain and verifying the code and checking um that it works the way it's supposed to and only works the way it's supposed to that's all expense of computing work that involves cryptography experts and and coders but once you've done that you don't then have to stand up an organization that's going to have permanent staff and and ongoing costs because it's all written into the blockchain in terms of who's going to bear the cost that's a political decision that would be negotiated in the development before you even get to the blockchain stage that would be negotiated in the disarmament uh negotiation phase uh but suffice to say uh the cost of disarmament are a lot less than the cost of maintaining nuclear weapons um finally uh sorry not finally but um Manuel's question about ip and dv i would love to present this to ip and dv uh i haven't yet had the chance to interact with any policymakers that are currently engaged in ip and dv but i would certainly hope to in future and so uh yeah i'd be honored and delighted if if uh that were a possibility but nothing to report there at this point uh finally i'm just in costs yeah so the final question around uh anonymity um thanks very much for that marina so yes this goes to the issue of the metadata so for example uh in the you know the the original example of a blockchain bitcoin there was this idea that it is anonymous but in fact there are ways that you can get around that so you can track uh ip addresses to see where certain transactions were initiated from etc etc and so even though you can't see who those actors are in bitcoin you can see that wallet a transferred amount x to wallet b uh and if you know the ip address of wallet a or wallet b or other types of metadata over time it may be able you may be able to infer who those people are or where they are physically etc uh i certainly don't have the level of technical expertise to comment on how we can get around those challenges or how we can ensure the necessary levels of security for that data and the anonymity that is required or is or in fact the transparency that is required to make sure that we know who's submitting data to the blockchain extremely technical issues so i am going to kick that one to touch as we say on the rugby world and say these are all questions that are absolutely valid and important to to clarify over time but it's still very much early days for this and this this research paper is very much a conceptual one about what blockchain makes possible conceptually so i think i hope i've covered off all of the questions there and again just want to thank you amanda thank you very much william for your fantastic feedback and for all of your help in developing this over yeah last 18 months or so um thanks to cindy and and also i should have said also uh to grant who also very kindly read an earlier version of this paper and thanks very much everyone for for attending and for your questions that's great linden and true to uh military or security precision you ended bang on time so um that's fantastic and you did kind of my closing job for me so i think the last people i want to thank is the audience for coming and listening and engaging so and of course echoing to to william um and linden to you both for you know uh coming here mid your busy day and cindy for waking up ridiculously early apparently um so yeah um stay tuned please come to uh next week's uh seminar if you're interested we're talking about media or women in the media um and how we encourage female academic experts to engage more with the media and the challenges and opportunities if you're interested next wednesday same time bring a cuppa otherwise thank you very much for coming and um hopefully i can see you soon take care thanks very much