Additive Manufacturing: A New Piece in the Proliferation Puzzle?

Often the spread of weapons occurs in pieces. There is no shipping manifest declaring the contents of a container to be chemical weapons or components of a clandestine/covert nuclear weapons program. To address this fact, the international community has established numerous committees and organizations over the decades that control the trade of sensitive equipment and material used in weapons programs, technology that can often be used for perfectly legitimate purposes as well. Due to this, many international organizations dedicated to controlling proliferation maintain “dual-use” lists, schedules of items that can be used for both civilian and military functions. It could be said that battling proliferation is similar to putting together a puzzle where components and items represent individual pieces. One such organization that maintains a “dual-use” Annex is the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a collection of states that supply nuclear technology. (Nuclear Suppliers Group 2013) While the Annex has been revised to reflect updates in technology, additive manufacturing (AM) is still a process in a relatively nascent phase, commercially speaking, and, as such, remains comparatively unstudied as a manner of potential proliferation. Upon a cursory glance, Section 2.C. Materials of the NSG’s dual-use list Annex appears to lend itself to the methods of AM as it concerns materials of potential dual-use. This leads us to the following question: Does commercially available additive manufacturing technology provide an alternative route to the acquisition and/or construction of material listed in Section 2.C. Materials of the NSG’s dual-use list? This paper surveys the commercially available industrial systems from leading AM vendors and finds that a significant number of systems exist that may allow a potential proliferator to bypass current export controls. Furthermore, there are numerous drivers that are pushing AM capabilities further into sensitive areas that could be exploited by would-be proliferators.