For half a century, the world’s nuclear powers relied on an intricate and complex series of treaties that slowly and steadily reduced the number of nuclear weapons on the planet. Those treaties are gone now, and it doesn’t appear that they’ll be coming back anytime soon. As a stopgap measure, researchers and scientists are suggesting a bold and weird path forward: using a system of satellites and artificial intelligence to monitor the world’s nukes.

“To be clear, this is plan B,” Matt Korda, an associate director at the Federation of American Scientists, tells WIRED. Korda has written a report at FAS that outlines a possible future for arms control in a world where all the old treaties have died. In Inspections Without Inspectors, Korda and coauthor Igor Morić describe a new way to monitor the world’s nuclear weapons they call “cooperative technical means.” In short, satellites and other remote sensing technology would do the work that scientists and inspectors once did on the ground.

Korda says AI could help this process. “Something that artificial intelligence is good at is pattern recognition,” he says. “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.”

New START, an Obama-era treaty that limited the amount of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia deployed, expired last week, on February 5. (Don't worry, the countries reportedly still plan to maintain the status quo—for now.) Both countries are spending billions to build new and different kinds of nuclear weapons. China is building new intercontinental ballistic missile silos. As America withdraws from the world stage, its nuclear vouchsafes mean less, and countries like South Korea are eyeing the bomb. Trust bet...