The Upper port Wide Angle Viewing System (UWAVS) is diagnostic system that provides visible light and InfraRed images of the divertor area in the ITER tokamak. The main functions of the UWAVS are to provide divertor wall and plasma luminance and temperature distributions at high spatial resolution (3–5 mm) and frame rates (500–1000 Hz) for machine protection as well as to enable species influx monitoring (Be, C, O, Ne, Kr, Ar) to the divertor. In addition the UWAVS supports visual inspection as well as various other measurements. For this purpose an optical system is designed to image the divertor area onto four different cameras in the port cell area. Altogether five of these systems are foreseen to provide sufficient coverage of the divertor area (150m2). Each of these systems is equipped with active alignment to compensate for vessel motion, internal transmission monitoring sources to assess mirror reflectivity degradation, as well as calibration sources in the port cell to monitor the camera pixel response, all to guarantee the overall systems performance during operation and over lifetime. All these aspects are combined into an optical design targeting diffraction limited imaging, taking in account the complexities of the harsh ITER environment. This design and its performance are supported by manufacturability analysis, tolerancing analysis and alignment strategy and Structural Thermal Optical Performance (STOP) analysis. The latter is an TNO in-house developed method that provides a direct and reproducible link between the structural thermal analysis for a combined load case comprising nuclear heating, cooling water pressure and temperature, gravity and mounting stresses (in Ansys) and the associated changes of the optical performance, including imaging quality and alignment (in Zemax OpticStudio).