Combating nuclear smuggling? Exploring drivers and challenges to detecting nuclear and radiological materials at maritime facilities

International concern over nuclear terrorism has grown during the past few decades. This has driven a broad spectrum of efforts to strengthen nuclear security globally, including the widespread adoption of radiation-detection technology for border monitoring. Detection systems are now deployed at strategic locations for the purported purpose of detecting and deterring the smuggling of nuclear and radioactive materials. However, despite considerable investment in this area, few studies have examined how these programs are implemented or the operational challenges they face on a day-to-day basis. This article seeks to address this with a focus on radiation-detection efforts at maritime facilities. Utilizing practitioner interviews and a survey, this article identifies the factors that influence the planning and use of these systems in this fast-moving environment. The results clearly demonstrate that the implementation of these systems varies significantly across different national and organizational contexts, resulting in a fragmented global nuclear-detection architecture, which arguably undermines efforts to detect trafficked nuclear-threat materials. Greater consideration should therefore be given to developing international standards and guidance, designing and adopting tools to support key parts of the alarm assessment process, and broader sharing of good practice.     

India’s nuclear counter-revolution: nuclear learning and the future of deterrence

ABSTRACT

The India–Pakistan near war of February–March 2019 highlights India’s ongoing evolution in strategic thought and practice since its emergence in 1998 as an overt nuclear-weapon possessor. These changes, involving an increasing willingness to engage in the intentional escalation of conflict with a nuclear-armed rival willing to be the first to use nuclear weapons, challenge certain academic assumptions about the behavior of nuclear-weapon states. In particular, they undermine the expectations of the nuclear-revolution theory—which anticipates nuclear and conventional restraint among nuclear-armed rivals through fear of mutual assured destruction—and the model of nuclear learning which underpins this theory, in which new nuclear-weapon states gradually absorb this restraint through policy-maker learning. This article explores how India’s learning pathway since 1998 has deviated from these expectations. India is instead pursuing its own “revolution,” in the direction of creating capabilities for flexible response and escalation dominance. It concludes by illuminating the similarities between Indian strategic behavior and contemporary practices of other nuclear-armed states, and suggests that New Delhi’s emerging de facto nuclear doctrine and posture is part of a broader empirical challenge to our current conceptions of the nuclear revolution and of nuclear learning.     

弹道目标跟踪滤波方法研究

主要对弹道目标的跟踪滤波方法进行了综述,对扩展卡尔曼滤波（extended Kalman filter,EKF）、转换测量卡尔曼滤波（conversion measurement Kalman filter, CMKF）、基于弹道运动方程的扩展卡尔曼滤波（ballistic extended Kalman filter, BEKF）、基于弹道运动方程的无敏卡尔曼滤波（ballistic unscented Kalman filter, BUKF）4种滤波算法的关键点、优缺点进行了剖析。进一步利用仿真的弹道数据对4种滤波方法的效能进行了验证,对比了不同滤波器的滤波精度和再入目标的跟踪性能,分析了质阻比对滤波性能的影响,提出了选择和设计目标跟踪滤波方法时需要考虑的几个问题,为雷达滤波方法的选择和设计提供参考和依据。     

基于MVEKF的单站无源定位跟踪方法研究

单站无源定位是电子战中的一项重要技术。采用基于到达方向(DOA)和到达时间差(TOA)测量信息,可以实现固定观测站对运动辐射源的无源定位和跟踪。讨论了扩展卡尔曼滤波(EKF)及其改进形式修正协方差的扩展卡尔曼滤波(MVEKF)2种算法的原理,指出了应用场合和适用条件,并运用EKF和MVEKF对无源定位进行滤波估计。通过仿真,说明了2种算法的有效性,并验证了MVEKF对定位性能的改善。     

NUCLEAR POWER IN THE MIDDLE EAST:

With the exception of Iran, no Middle Eastern state has an operating nuclear power reactor. Several states, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt are considering constructing such reactors; some have even taken steps towards commencing nuclear power projects. There exist, however, considerable economic, technical, safety, and security challenges to achieving these goals, many of which are acute in the Middle East region. Regional and international cooperation on nuclear technology could not only help regional states meet their energy objectives, but it could also help to build trust among states as a basic step towards a future Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction-Free Zone.     

THE HARD CASES

Many countries received Soviet-origin highly enriched uranium (HEU) for civilian nuclear research purposes. Because of inadequate nuclear security at a number of the research sites, U.S. policy has sought to remove or otherwise safely dispose of their HEU stocks as quickly as possible. Although the pace of HEU disposition has accelerated significantly in recent years, several sites have posed formidable technical, economic, and political challenges. This article identifies the major obstacles to HEU removal at two key installations—Kharkiv in Ukraine, and Sosny in Belarus—and recommends a strategy for overcoming these impediments. Key components for a successful disposition strategy include: treating these cases with the urgency they deserve, expanding potential compensation packages, explicitly addressing the institutional and political issues involved, engaging high-level political leaders, working with third parties, and promoting these efforts as part of a nondiscriminatory initiative to phase out HEU in the civilian nuclear sector globally.     

Pickands型推广估计量的渐近正态性

极值指数在许多实际领域广泛应用:如组合投资、风险值的计算、预报地震等, 估计极值指数γ以及它的性质的研究近年来成为极值统计理论的基本问题。主要研究极值指数γ的一个估计量:Pickands型推广估计量的渐近正态性质。首先研究由Pickands型推广估计量构成的一随机过程,得到了该过程的渐近分布;然后利用研究结果证明了Pickands 型推广估计量的渐近正态性,得到其渐近方差;最后对提出的Pickands型推广估计的平滑估计量进行了相应研究。     

Minimum deterrence and missile defenses: what's new,what's true,what's arguable

Minimum deterrence is a compromise, or halfway house, between nuclear abolition or nearly zero and assured destruction, the dominant paradigm for strategic nuclear arms control during and after the cold war. Minimum deterrence as applied to the current relationship between the United States and Russia would require downsizing the numbers of operationally deployed long-range nuclear weapons to 1000, or fewer, on each side. More drastic bilateral Russian–American reductions would require the cooperation of other nuclear weapons states in making proportional reductions in their own arsenals. In addition, US plans for European-based and global missile defenses cause considerable angst in Russia and threaten to derail the Obama “reset” in Russian–American relations, despite the uncertainties about current and plausible future performances of missile defense technologies.     

Iran's nuclear programme: civil and/or military goals?

The ultimate goal of Iran's nuclear programme remains uncertain. While the nuclear reactor of Bushehr has finally been connected to the power grid, the nuclear fuel enrichment activities and their location cause concern to the international community. Thirty years of nuclear investments demonstrate a negative cost–benefit analysis: technical constraints and economic and infrastructural requirements constitute a burden on the implementation of a nuclear programme. This article analyses the economic, legal, technical and political aspects of the Iranian programme in order to uncover its civil and/or military finality.