Adversarial Motivation and Intent to Acquire, Proliferate, and Potentially Use WMD

As pointed by the 2008 report by the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Proliferation and Terrorism, the greatest WMD threat faced by the world today is WMD use by non-state actors and networks, such as international terrorist networks and their supporters.  Indeed, a number of international terrorist organizations, such as al Qa'ida, have repeatedly stated their intention to obtain and employ such weapons.  Terrorist networks seeking to acquire WMD, regardless of the type of WMD sought, would need to reach out beyond their existing network structures to either governments of individuals who possess the requisite technical -- and perhaps also logistical -- knowledge and skills required to plan and execute a WMD attack.  The resultant anticipated changes in the nature and quantity of contacts and communications within the network and with external actors that such an intent to acquire WMD would entail can be studied effectively by means of the relational network science approach that is one element of this research proposal.

The long-range goals of the proposed research is to develop novel network science results to improve the understanding, detection, influence, and mitigation of the adversarial motivation and intent to acquire, proliferate, and potentially use weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  Ultimately, we want to be able to develop a WMD extreme event system that identifies all potential WMD events in an event horizon, and continuously updates and refines the WMD event Horizon as new information arrives so that the event can be prevented as early as possible, and an effective response can be generated in time.