Identifying Signatures of Illicit Nuclear Trafficking

Since the discovery of the A.Q. Khan network, disrupting the trafficking of strategic nuclear goods has been at the forefront of nonproliferation efforts. As a result, international export controls have developed, traditionally relying on qualitative analysis to detect proliferation. With billions of shipping containers moving between ports, datasets for international export controls have become too large and too diverse for human cognition alone. By applying a quantitative approach and enhancing the understanding of procurement networks, analysts in international export controls can make more efficient and effective determinations concerning shipments or commodities of proliferation concern. Using a PNNL-developed algorithm we show how we identified and characterized procurement networks using non-sensitive examples, detail how our algorithm compares to human analysis, and discuss other potential application areas and future work.