Monitoring the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty

On September 1996, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), prohibiting nuclear explosions worldwide, in all environments. The treaty calls for a global verification system, including a network of 321 monitoring stations distributed around the globe, a data communications network, an international data center (IDC), and on-site inspections to verify compliance. Successful monitoring of a CTBT requires that we detect and identify all nuclear explosions. Since many events of concern will be too small to be detected teleseismically, this capability requires the use of regional-distance seismograms. The complexity of regional seismograms presents many technical challenges for a monitoring program. This issue focuses on problems associated with regional wave propagation through complex media. It includes papers that investigate regional variations of elastic and anelastic properties of Eurasia, the blockage of regional phases by sedimentary basins, methods for modeling regional wave propagation and for calibrating seismic wave paths in order to extract amplitude variations and source parameters. These papers illustrate the research and development necessary for acquiring an understanding of regional wave propagation which in turn provides the foundation for operational tools used to monitor a CTBT.