A Socio-Computational Approach to Predicting Bioweapon Proliferation

Predicting countries that will seek bioweapons (BW) enables the international community to act early in order to prevent these countries from acquiring such weapons. Unfortunately, the literature on countries’ BW programs mainly consists of case studies that focus on one or a few countries. Although case studies are valuable, they are typically not predictive. Moreover, case studies require substantial effort and expertise, and are thus unfeasible for all countries. In this paper, we develop a computational methodology that predicts countries that will seek BW. Our methodology consists of a sociocultural model and indicators that computationally capture expert opinions about why and how countries acquire BW. Our methodology systematically examines all countries in the world and can be used by non-BW experts based on publicly available data. We validate our methodology by examining the methodology’s ability to predict historical BW proliferators.