_{North Korean missiles truck}

And there is no shortage of problems. From China’s power projection in Asia, to Russia’s thinly-veiled nuclear threats over what is perceived as western interference in Moscow’s affairs in Ukraine, there is a range of issues vying for priority on the international security agenda.

What, then, does this mean for disarmament? Is this, as The Economist claims, an idea ‘whose time has gone’?

• North Korea ‘offers to discuss nuclear disarmament’
• Hassan Rouhani says Iran wants global ‘nuclear disarmament’

In 2007, a letter calling for global nuclear disarmament published in the Wall Street Journal by four former US statesmen reinvigorated the debate on disarmament and led to the emergence of the high-profile ‘Global Zero’ movement the following year.

The initiative had a range of high profile backers including former US president Jimmy Carter and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and it sought to give new momentum to disarmament activism.

This was followed, in 2009, by Mr Obama’s famous Prague speech in which he stated unequivocally that the United States would take ‘concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons’. Indeed, Obama’s apparent commitment to disarmament was a factor behind the Nobel Prize Committee’s decision to award him the Peace Prize later that year. The salience of disarmament in the political sphere gave new hope to disarmament advocates.

Yet the enthusiasm of recent years has waned and the prospect of achieving a significant breakthrough in disarmament is as remote as ever. The number of strategic warheads deployed by the US and Russia increased last year, Pakistan has the fastest growing nuclear weapons programme in the world, and India’s indigenously developed ballistic missile submarine is due to be deployed this year.

This is the part of the context that frames the forthcoming Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.

So amid all this pessimism, is there any cause for optimism?

While recent geopolitical developments appear to have diluted hope for disarmament, there have been some positive developments. Over the past few years, for example, the number of international initiatives and projects seeking to develop the technical capacity to verify nuclear disarmament have multiplied.

Somewhat paradoxically, these efforts are acknowledged and funded by nuclear states, among others, even as they continue to modernise and upgrade their arsenals.

Work on verification does not attract the media attention that proliferation does. It is a complex and lengthy process, and there are no immediate answers. Yet it holds great value, contributing to the development of an architecture that will provide the technical means to support disarmament, should the political context ever reach that point.

Any future disarmament process will require a robust verification regime to ensure that those who agree to disarm live up to their commitments. At present, however, 100 per cent verification is technically impossible given the secrecy surrounding nuclear warheads because of security and non-proliferation concerns. Consequently, this is an area where much work must be done to prepare the technical ground if the possibility of disarmament is ever to become a political reality. This work is already under way.

Last year, the US government awarded a multi-million dollar grant to a consortium of US universities to conduct research and development into new nuclear arms control verification technologies. Washington is also funding a new international partnership for nuclear disarmament verification, an initiative launched in December 2014 with the aim of increasing cooperation and understanding around the technical obstacles to disarmament.

China has also invested in the field. In its 2014 national report ahead of the NPT Review Conference, China reported research on a range of verification technologies, from the authentication of nuclear warheads and components to dismantlement monitoring tools.

In Europe, the UK and Norway have, since 2007, been collaborating on a range of projects exploring the practical and technical challenges associated with verification of nuclear warhead dismantlement. And these initiatives often produce surprising results.

At King’s College London, for example, we have been conducting research into the role of human factors such as trust in the verification process. Verification is often considered as a data-driven and dispassionate process. In theory, the work of inspectors is grounded in evidence and there should be a direct and exclusive relationship between evidence and conclusions. In this context, human factors are static variables that sit outside the verification equation.

Yet the evidence indicates that this view of verification is flawed and does not fully account for the complexity of the dynamics of verification. Our research demonstrates the need for trust to be considered an integral part of the verification process. Trust is an unavoidable interactional variable, that is to say a moderating condition for a causal relationship. It has a subtle but powerful influence on perceptions, usually despite considerable efforts by inspectors to base their judgments purely on evidence.

This has significant implications, not least for the training of inspectors as part of any disarmament regime. Ignoring the influence of trust could potentially distort the interpretation of verification outcomes.

This is just one area of activity, but it gives a flavour of the complexities involved in arms control and disarmament research. Clearly, these developments, on their own, will not deliver a world free of nuclear weapons. Indeed cynics will likely view the resources invested in these practical initiatives by nuclear powers as nothing more than an attempt to give credence to false claims of progress towards disarmament.

Yet this view is reductive.

These practical initiatives that often go unacknowledged are the ones that will provide the foundations upon which any future disarmament process will rest.

Moreover, the value of verification technologies being explored across the world is not limited to disarmament. Many of these tools have broader arms control applications and they should be supported and encouraged.

Ultimately, while the current geopolitical climate has undermined the political momentum that disarmament has gathered in recent years, this should not detract from the expanding research and development agenda in the field.

Disarmament is a broad sphere of activity and progress is being made, even if it is out of the limelight.

telegraph.co