Proceedings of the Symposium on the Non-Proliferation Experiment: Results and Implications for Test Ban Treaties, Rockville, Maryland, April 19-21, 1994

To address a critical verification issue for the current Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and for a possible future Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Department of Energy sought to measure certain differences between an underground nuclear test and a chemical test in the same geology, so that other explosions could be identified. This was done in a field experiment code-named the NonProliferation Experiment (NPE).This comprehensive experiment was designed to determine the signatures of chemical explosions for a broad range of phenomena for comparison with those of previous nuclear tests. If significant differences can be measured, then these measures can be used to discriminate between the two types of explosions. In addition, when these differences are understood, large chemical explosions can be used to seismically calibrate regions to discriminate earthquakes from explosions. Toward this end, on-site and off-site measurements of transient phenomena were made, and on-site measurements of residual effects are in progress.Perhaps the most striking result was that the source function for the chemical explosion was identical to that of a nuclear one of about twice the yield. These proceedings provide more detailed results of the experiment