Trade analysis and open source information monitoring for nonproliferation

With the Additional Protocol (AP) in force, the IAEA has strengthened tools to verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities. The new state level approach being proposed by IAEA envisions an objective based and information driven safeguards approach further utilizing relevant information to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of safeguards. To this goal the IAEA makes extensive use of open source information. Here open source is broadly defined and any information that is neither classified nor proprietary. It includes, but is not limited to: media sources, government and non-governmental reports and analyses, commercial data, and scientific/technical literature. New sources taken into account include trade-related information. JRC has surveyed and catalogued open sources on import-export customs trade data and developed tools for their use in safeguards. Tests on the use of these data by the IAEA suggest safeguards relevance along the following lines: support the IAEA State evaluation process and improve understanding of a State’s nuclear programme. Verify import and export declarations made by States under Additional Protocols (APs) and Identifying indicators of activities to be safeguarded or to be declared under APs. In the field of open source monitoring, JRC is developing and operating a “Nuclear Security Media Monitor” (NSMM), which is a web-based multilingual news aggregation system that automatically collects news articles from pre-defined web sites. NSMM is a domain specific version of the general Europe Media Monitor (EMM) and monitors – additionally to the 2500 general web news sources targeted by EMM- more than 150 nuclear specific sites (including NGOs, academic, (inter-)governmental and scientific/technical sites). Filters remove articles not relevant to the nuclear domain and group them into various areas of interest, e.g. related to different steps of the nuclear fuel cycle or to relevant countries. NSMM has been established in a joint project with IAEA with the aim to streamline IAEA’s acquisition and analysis of open source information and develop the current information collection/newsletter production process to a more efficient system. The paper will illustrate what are the sources of trade data relevant for nonproliferation and the possible uses to inform verification activities and will present the main aspects of the NSMM also by illustrating some of the uses done internally at JRC.

VERSINO Cristina;  WOLFART Erik;  RENDA Guido;  JANSSENS Willem; 

COJAZZI Giacomo; 

2014-12-09

INMM

JRC89862

http://www.inmm.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Information_Analysis_Technologies&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=4919,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC89862,