Seminar on disarmament in Oslo

23 June 2014, by Peter Sahling

Photo: ZNF

The annual seminar on disarmament verification took place from the 15^th to the 20^th of July in Oslo. Students of the ZNF participated on a simulated verification exercise in cooperation with the UK-Norway-initiative, and the King’s College in London. Following the devised verification scenario, the students had to verify that no illegal operations took place during a camera surveillance blackout due to an emergency in the installation in which nuclear weapon components were stored, and that all components were in their intended locations. In addition to physical verification, the students also conducted negotiations with the installation operators, which were portrayed by the British and the Norwegian experts, in order to obtain access rights. Furthermore, the students tried to reconstruct the actual events based on these conversations. A methodological background was provided by a lecture from a detective of Scotland Yard, and from a former inspector in the UNSCOM-mission to Iraq. The seminar was embedded in a seminar at the King’s College on confidence building processes used by inspectors during verification measures.