The Cooperative Monitoring Center (CMC) at Sandia National Laboratories leverages the Labs’ cutting-edge scientific and engineering expertise to inform cooperative engagements that strengthen international security. The CMC’s Technology Training and Demonstration Area (TTD) is an openly shared space used to demonstrate technologies, concepts, and approaches that may be cooperatively applied to meet global security challenges.
TTD stations provide visitors hands-on examples of scientific and engineered measures focused on two major global security themes: 1) technical support for treaty verification and 2) securing chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) materials. These challenges are addressed across several global security domains:
Physical Protection Systems (PPS) Design – This TTD station provides a thorough overview of Sandia’s comprehensive PPS design methodology and details how physical protection systems and their components are designed, deployed, and evaluated.
Border Risk Management – Sandia has a long history helping to improve international border security and risk management practices around the world. This TTD station illustrates how Sandia’s core competencies in systems analysis and systems engineering are an ideal fit for understanding and addressing the security challenges in this complex domain.
Radiological Security – Sandia’s deep expertise in the field of PPS plays a critical role in developing engineered measures and building capacity to secure peacefully-employed radiological materials and their associated facilities across the public and private sector against theft or sabotage. This TTD station details these efforts and the unique considerations that drive them.
Chem/Bio Risk Management and Global Health Security – This TTD station demonstrates Sandia-developed tools and approaches for mitigating risks involving chemical and biological materials. Visitors receive hands-on training and insight on risk management and security practices for safe and secure handling, transportation, and storage of chemical or biological materials.
Nonproliferation – Global norms, treaties, and agreements afford countries the right to pursue nuclear power for peaceful purposes. To help ensure that nuclear materials are employed peacefully, Sandia plays an active role developing engineered measures that help countries maintain accountability of special nuclear materials subject to monitoring under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). This TTD station presents working physical examples of engineered safeguards measures as they apply to containment and surveillance of special nuclear materials and explains analytical approaches in a nuclear safeguards context. It also describes Sandia’s contributions toward developing and maintaining systems that provide safe, secure, and sustainable nuclear energy.
Technical Support for Arms Control Verification – Sandia’s primary mission to ensure a safe, secure, and reliable U.S. nuclear arsenal also extends to the development and maintenance of technical options for verifying compliance with nuclear arms control treaties and agreements. This TTD station demonstrates current arms control monitoring, detection, and verification technologies—as well as measures under development to address potential future arms control verification challenges.
Regional Security – Confronting global security challenges requires a contextual understanding of the policy decisions that shape technical requirements. Sandia’s CMC conducts regional dialogues and engages experts on these issues through its Visiting Research Scholars program to enhance its understanding of the global security implications of regional concerns tied to climate change, water security, and food security.