February 2021
Essay: The Next 50 Years of Missile Proliferation by Tianran Xu, Melissa Hanham
Since WWII, missile tech has rapidly advanced. Nazi Germany's V-2 carried a 1-ton warhead 320km. In 15 years, the Soviet Union improved this to 5.5 tons over 8,000 km with the R-7. By 1966, China tested a DF-2A with a 12-kiloton nuclear warhead. Today, nuclear missile tech continues to advance rapidly.
November 2020
ONN's Nuclear Risk Reduction Approach for the Korean Peninsula by Open Nuclear Network
This paper examines the complex entanglement surrounding the Korean Peninsula's nuclear crisis and identifies possible triggers and pathways towards conflict escalation. It serves both as a guide to establishing a general operational concept and as an action plan outline for ONN’s analysts and its Engagement Network to reduce the risk that nuclear weapons may be used in response to error, uncertainty and misdirection during times of crisis.
October 2020
Viewbook of DPRK Missiles by Open Nuclear Network
This is a viewbook prepared in anticipation of a military parade likely to be held on or around 10 October 2020 by the DPRK in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Workers' Party of Korea.
August 2020
A Tale of Two Missiles: Analysis of KCNA Reports on DPRK's KN-23 and KN-24 Short-Range Ballistic Missiles by Tianran Xu, Jaewoo Shin
Since May 2019, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) [1] has repeatedly tested two new solid-fuel short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) with largely overlapping performance. Unlike liquid SRBMs, such as the SCUD-B/C [2], the KN-23 and KN-24 [3] missile systems have different designs, means of transportation and launch methods. However, they have some overlapping performance and utility.
August 2020
Nuclear (e)motives: The KCNA's English Language Output and Sentiment Patterns Regarding the Topic of Nuclear Weapons by Clayton Besaw
In an age of ever proliferating data and diverging geo-political interests, government statements have become increasingly important source material for understanding the potential communicative logic of political leaders.
July 2020
Electoral Victory Forecasting: a Structural Model for Global Election Predictions by Matthew Frank
The field of election forecasting has become immensely popular in recent years, becoming so ubiquitous that some studies have argued election forecasts themselves can influence voters’ perceptions and behavior in elections.
June 2020
Pyongyang's Bomb Is Not As Advanced As You May Think, But It Can Get Scarier by Tianran Xu
A few hours before the sixth nuclear test of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on 3 September 2017, its state media showed the world an image of a purported thermonuclear bomb small enough to be mounted on the lightweight Hwasong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM.) However, Pyongyang may be exaggerating its technical advancement. This means capping DPRK’s nuclear and ICBM tests is of paramount importance to the US, which already sees a missile capable of delivering a fission device to the US mainland intolerable.
May 2020
Unpacking Russian Presidential Speech Patterns with Machine Learning by Clayton Besaw
Natural language processing and topic modeling specifically have proliferated in accessibility over the past decade. Topic modeling algorithms such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are now considered a type of "work-horse" tool for uncovering patterns (topics) in large sets of text data.
May 2020
Ethics in the Age of OSINT Innocence by Melissa Hanham, Jaewoo Shin
Increased availability and lower cost of satellite imagery has made it accessible to civil society in recent years. While universities, think tanks, and nongovernmental organizations are racing ahead to incorporate this form of open-source intelligence (OSINT) into their regular research work, there are a number of unexamined areas that our team at the Open Nuclear Network (ONN) wanted to explore.
July 2019
The Gray Spectrum: Ethical Decision Making with Geospatial and Open Source Analysis by Stanley Center for Peace and Security, Open Nuclear Network
Geospatial and open source analysts face decisions in their work that can directly or indirectly cause harm to individuals, organizations, institutions, and society. Though analysts may try to do the right thing, such ethically informed decisions can be complex.
