The new geospatial tools: global transparency enhancing safeguards verification
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
This paper focuses on the importance and potential role of the new, freely available, geospatial tools for enhancing IAEA safeguards and how, together with commercial satellite imagery, they can be used to promote 'all-source synergy'. As additional 'open sources', these new geospatial tools have heralded a new era of 'global transparency' and they can be used to substantially augment existing information-driven safeguards gathering techniques, procedures, and analyses in the remote detection of undeclared facilities, as well as support ongoing monitoring and verification of various treaty (e.g., NPT, FMCT) relevant activities and programs. As an illustration of how these new geospatial tools may be applied, an original exemplar case study provides how it is possible to derive value-added follow-up information on some recent public media reporting of a former clandestine underground plutonium production complex (now being converted to a 'Tourist Attraction' given the site's abandonment by China in the early 1980s). That open source media reporting, when combined with subsequent commentary found in various Internet-based Blogs and Wikis, led to independent verification of the reporting with additional ground truth via 'crowdsourcing' (tourist photos as found on 'social networking' venues like Google Earth's Panoramio layer and Twitter). Confirmation of the precise geospatial location of the site (along with a more complete facility characterization incorporating 3-D Modeling and visualization) was only made possible following the acquisition of higher resolution commercial satellite imagery that could be correlated with the reporting, ground photos, and an interior diagram, through original imagery analysis of the overhead imagery.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1033580
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-10-06288; LA-UR-10-6288; TRN: US1200582
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Symposium on International Safeguards: Preparing for Future Verification Challenges ; November 1, 2010 ; Vienna, Austria
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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