Network Analysis and Nuclear Weapons
With the new Iranian Nuclear deal, the question of how to properly discover secret nuclear weaponry is very prevalent. There are many detectors, seismic station, listening stations for atmospheric infrasound, and satellites that can spot nuclear weapon tests and sites. However, it is always better to stop a country from building nuclear weapons before they begin building it; since after, there is not much the US, or any other country, can really do to stop it from producing war as former head of the Iran team in the pentagon Ian Goldenberg claims.
Therefore, it is becoming more and more relevant for there to be a tool that would be able to find illegal nuclear weapons before they are built. A new way to do this is through network analysis. This kind of analysis was used after 9/11 in order to fight terrorism. After 9/11, when the government was showered with emails and phone logs, the way it was determined who was dangerous was through creating a network and analyzing it. This is now being used on the topic of nuclear warfare.
The way the system works is that it creates a network of contacts who through some sort of evidence have been determined as potential dangers. Then, by analyzing the network it scores each person, and determines who’s removal would be make everyone else worse off. It ranks each person by “centrality” (a person’s importance), “between-ness”(their access to others, or how many people they are connected to) and “degree” (the number of people they interact with). Through research it has been determined that a person with high between-ness and low degree tends to be a central figure, and therefore most important. This person’s absence would break the network, and therefore would ruin the entire plan. Thomas Reed suggests that the assassination by Israeli Mossad of Iranian Nuclear Scientists was due to network analysis.
This relates to our course because it shows how networks, scoring people based on their importance, centrality, amount of ties, and strength of ties connect to the real world. This process is being used today in order to determine potential dangers. Additionally, it shows how networks can be used to find key figures, and figures that if removed would break the network. These figures tend to have many weak ties, as shown by the article. This also illuminates what was said in class about how weak ties transmit important information.