SOCIAL MODELING IN ASSESSEMNT OF A STATE’S PROPENSITY FOR NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

This paper presents an approach for assessing a State’s propensity for nuclear weapons proliferation using social modeling. We supported this modeling by first reviewing primarily literature by social scientists on factors related to the propensity of a State to proliferate and by leveraging existing relevant data compiled by social scientists. We performed a number of validation tests on our model including one that incorporates use of benchmark data defining the proliferation status of countries in the years between 1945 and 2000. We exercise the Bayesian Network (BN) model against a number of country cases representing different perceived levels of proliferation risk. We also describe how the BN model could be further refined to be a proliferation assessment tool for decision making.