The world's nuclear safety net just vanished. New START, the last major arms control treaty between the US and Russia, expired on February 5, leaving the planet without formal oversight of thousands of nuclear weapons for the first time in half a century. Now researchers at the Federation of American Scientists are pitching an untested plan B: let AI-powered satellite systems do the work that human inspectors once did on the ground. It's a controversial gamble that could either prevent a spiraling arms race or introduce catastrophic new vulnerabilities into the most dangerous game on Earth.
The era of trust-but-verify just ended with a whimper. When the New START treaty expired last week, it took with it the last formal mechanism for preventing runaway nuclear proliferation between the world's two largest nuclear powers. For the first time since the height of the Cold War, there's no enforceable limit on how many warheads the US and Russia can deploy.
Into this vacuum steps an unlikely solution: artificial intelligence trained to spot missile silos from space. Matt Korda, associate director at the Federation of American Scientists, isn't mincing words about what this represents. "To be clear, this is plan B," he told WIRED. But when plan A - decades of painstaking diplomatic agreements - lies in ruins, plan B starts looking pretty appealing.
Korda and coauthor Igor Morić laid out their vision in a report called Inspections Without Inspectors, proposing what they call "cooperative technical means." The concept is straightforward: use existing satellite infrastructure to monitor ICBM silos, mobile rocket launchers, and plutonium production facilities. Feed that imagery to AI systems trained on pattern recognition. Let machine learning models flag suspicious changes. Then hand everything to human reviewers for final verification.
"Something that artificial intelligence is good at is pattern recognition," Korda explains. "If you had a large enough and well-curated dataset, you could, in theory, train a model that's able to identify both minute changes at particular locations but also potentially identify individual weapon systems."
