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In its simplest conception, Cloud Gap was an attempt to see if inspectors could find evidence of an arms control violation in a given area. The project, started in 1963 and run out of a small office near the White House, included field exercises at U.S. military bases, where a red team playing the role of the Soviets would hide objects associated with a clandestine nuclear test, and a competing team would try to find them.

It was a kind of spy world treasure hunt.

The test, of course, presupposed an arms control agreement that allowed for reasonably open, on-site inspections, something the Soviet Union resisted during the Cold War and North Korea would likely resist today.

But the program, jointly run by the Defense Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, drew mostly ridicule among Washington’s nuclear experts. Robert Frosch, then a senior official in charge of nuclear monitoring research at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, mocked the entire approach…….

Frosch’s concerns appear to have been at least partially borne out. A report written after one Cloud Gap exercise in 1967 reached the conclusion that inspectors would have difficulties distinguishing between the debris from real weapons and decoys. …….

While Cloud Gap’s existence was known, its findings were kept secret for decades. Many of the records were released just a few years ago in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Aftergood.

Former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who served in a senior position at the Pentagon during the time Cloud Gap was conducted, believes that the central difficulty of verification remains unchanged, even as the methods for on-site inspections have improved.

“The question was always when (and especially how and whether) access would be allowed,” he wrote in an email. “That is still the question.”  http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/10/what-a-secret-cold-war-game-nuclear-hide-and-seek-north-korean-verification/