The post September 11th world has shown the U.S. that it is a country with many enemies and enemies who are much more capable than perhaps previously believed. This threat is magnified by the fact that many of our adversaries are not sovereign nations that can be dealt with diplomatically or even with open force. Security for our nation against terrorist tactics can be achieved with proper tools and staying one step ahead of our enemies. Enemies whose design is to cripple the American economy, lower moral, and otherwise terrorize and destroy her populace. Enemies whose goals might be efficiently met with a nuclear attack against America. Since the wide spread availability of nuclear weapons would essentially give anyone the potential to kill on a mass scale, halting the spread of nuclear weapons is the greatest priority for our nation.

This project is intended to be a means to further the aims of nonproliferation. The project's objectives are to: 1. predict the most likely pathway an organization will take to acquire a nuclear weapon, 2. provide a tool to analyze the effect different evidence about an organization and its activities will have on our understanding of their paths, and 3. ascertain the seriousness of the threat any particular organization poses.

Project Updates:

The student conducting this work graduated in August 2008 and is currently employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A new student will take over this work in the future and continue progress on this subtask. No change from last quarter.

The student conducting this work graduated in August 2008 and is currently employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A new student will take over this work in the future and continue progress on this subtask.

The student conducting this work graduated in August 2008 and is currently employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. During this quarter progress was made on documentation of the existing method developed in previous quarters. A new student will take over this work in the future and continue progress on this subtask.

A network of desired detail has been made that includes Uranium enrichment, spent fuel reprocessing and weaponization sections. Relationships between various nodes in the network have been developed. The model now incorporates both how an organization-of-interest's motivation affects intentions as well as how those intentions affect the priors as desired. Limited resources of the organization-of-interest have been developed and incorporated into the model. The model has been tested and results in predictions that agree with intuition for simple scenarios. Future work will expand the detail and scope of the network and to incorporate more resources of an organization-of-interest into the model.

A complete proliferation pathways model has been completed which include state and non-state actors and makes use of the motivation and intents of those actors. The model now incorporates both how an organization-of-interest's motivation affects intentions as well as how those intentions affect the probabilities within the network (specifically through the priors in the Bayesian analysis). A network of desired detail has been made that includes Uranium enrichment, spent fuel reprocessing, and weaponization sections. Work is still being done perfecting the relationships between various nodes in the network. The method of applying an organization-of-interest's intentions into the priors is easily adaptable to resources. A future step of discretizing resources in a similar manner as motivations and intentions will allow for the network to include these factors in its pathway analysis.

A list of motivations and intents for both State and Non-State actors has been developed. We have a fairly complete network modeled for the implosion technical capabilities. We are using the implosion capability segment to refine the processes that incorporate motivational data into intentions data and measures how that affects the network. The model for how an organization-of-interest's motivation affects intentions is complete and working as desired. A model for how an organization-of-interest's intentions affect priors is still in development. We are working with Professor Daly, a newly hired terrorism expert at the Bush School, to drive the list of motivations to completeness.