INSPECTION GAMES IN ARMS-CONTROL

An inspection game is a mathematical model of a situation in which an inspector verifies the adherence of an inspectee to some legal obligat ion, such as an arms control treaty, where the inspectee may have an i nterest in violating that obligation. The mathematical analysis seeks to determine an optimal inspection scheme, ideally one which will indu ce legal behavior, under the assumption that the potential illegal act ion is carried out strategically; thus a non-cooperative game with two players, inspector and inspectee, is defined. Three phases of develop ment in the application of such models to arms control and disarmament may be identified. In the first of these, roughly from 1961 through 1 968, studies that focused on inspecting a nuclear test ban treaty emph asized game theory, with less consideration given to statistical aspec ts associated with data acquisition and measurement uncertainty. The s econd phase, from 1968 to about 1985, involves work stimulated by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Here, the ve rification principle of material accountancy came to the fore, along w ith the need to include the formalism of statistical decision theory w ithin the inspection models. The third phase, 1985 to the present, has been dominated by challenges posed by such far-reaching verification agreements as the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Agreement (INF), t he Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) and the Chemical Weap ons Convention (CWC), as well as perceived failures of the NPT system in Iraq and North Korea. In this connection, the interface between the political and technical aspects of verification is being examined fro m the game-theoretic viewpoint.