how nuclear inspectors can inspect other countries nuclear weapon inventories and uranium refining abilities in a way that can be trusted and not just staged by the inspected country
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So it’s a big issue and over the years a lot of tools and techniques were developed to make the detection of “cheating” better. These include not only the “open” tools used by inspectors, but also more “clandestine” tools used by intelligence agencies (like getting people to spy for you, and hacking, and even murder and sabotage at times).
In terms of the “open” tools, the absolutely best ones these days are:
a) Very good aerial intelligence (satellite photos) that let you track, week to week and year to year, activity on the ground. So you can see if some big hole is being dug and whether there is a lot of activity (from cars) at a given site and so on. Trained analysts can do a LOT with this kind of information; it is useful for detecting things that don’t mesh up with official accounts, or looking for suspicious facilities.
b) Inspectors (and spies) can take soil and water samples from places of interest. If you are enriching uranium, for example, it is basically impossible to not have microscopic amounts escaping from your facility. For decades it has been possible to look at these microscopic samples and see what levels of enrichment are present there. If a state tells you they are only enriching to 4% and you find 60% enrichment in the soil around the enrichment building, you know they are lying.
c) For states in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA has the right to put cameras inside their facilities, and other “monitors” of that sort. You can sometimes see them in photos of Iran’s centrifuge facilities, for example — they are blue and high up on the wall. Trained analysts can look at footage of people doing stuff and see when it looks different from what they are supposed to be doing (like moving materials places they aren’t supposed to be). Now, this requires both the state to be a member of the treaty and to declare the facility to the IAEA. So you still need a) and b) above to make sure that you’ve identified all of the right facilities. And you need them to be a member of the NPT in the first place.
Israel (not an NPT member) famously hid the secret parts of its nuclear facility from US visitors by literally bricking up the door to the elevator when they came to visit in the 1960s. But this was the sort of formative experience that led to the development of the above techniques.
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