Future nuclear arms reduction efforts will require technologies to verifythat warheads slated for dismantlement are authentic without revealing anysensitive weapons design information to international inspectors. Despiteseveral decades of research, no technology has met these requirementssimultaneously. Recent work by Kemp, Danagoulian, Macdonald, and Vavrek (2016)has produced a novel physical cryptographic verification protocol thatapproaches this treaty verification problem by exploiting the isotope-specificnature of nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) measurements to verify theauthenticity of a warhead. To protect sensitive information, the NRF signalfrom the warhead is convoluted with that of an encryption foil that containskey warhead isotopes in amounts unknown to the inspector. The convolutedspectrum from a candidate warhead is statistically compared against that froman authenticated template warhead to determine whether the candidate itself isauthentic. Here we report on recent proof-of-concept warhead verificationexperiments conducted at MIT. Using high-purity germanium (HPGe) detectors, wemeasured NRF spectra from the interrogation of proxy 'genuine' and 'hoax'objects by a 2.52 MeV endpoint bremsstrahlung beam. The observed differences inNRF intensities near 2.2 MeV indicate that the physical cryptographic protocolcan distinguish between proxy genuine and hoax objects with high confidence inrealistic measurement times.
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