Open source information, here defined as "publicly available information that anyone can lawfully obtain by request, purchase, or observation" is playing an increasing role in treaty monitoring, compliance verification and control. The increasing availability of data from a growing number of sources on a vast range of topics has the potential to provide cues about complex programmes subject to international treaties such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
This report suggests a system’s thinking view of open source analysis in support to nonproliferation analysis, identifying the possible dimensions (hard/soft/context) involved and discussing different types of scenarios an open source analyst might face.
Modelling a nuclear engineering programme by explicitly acknowledging the peculiarities of its hard and soft layers allows the analyst to consider which are the types of insights that each layer can provide and which is the the best tool/technique to investigate them.
Once a particular analysis is set, the analyst might face different types of analysis scenarios, according to the type of the problem to be tackled and the type of data at his disposal. An open source analyst in support of non-proliferation will also have to handle many different forms of uncertainties, whose proper understanding is critical for the analyst to perform dependable assessments and for the decision maker to take properly informed decisions.
A system’s thinking approach to open source analysis has the potential to integrate synergically with the other tools available in the international treaty monitoring toolkit, helping in increasing the international community’s confidence in its ability to detect an undeclared proliferation programme.JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit
