START developing tools to identify potential CBRN threats

Written by Gwyn Winfield. Published on 16 June 2020.

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) is creating a process to identify potential CBRN threats from non-state actors.

Advancing U.S. CWMD/CWMT Capabilities in Support of the SIGMA+ Program through Development of Anticipatory Human Social Systems Models and Adversary Weapon Selection Decision Processes, the project will support DARPA's SIGMA+ Program and run from March 2020 to March 2022. 

“This project expands upon previous work in which we sought to understand the behaviors of violent non-state actors in terms of their motivation to conduct a CBRN attack,” START Assistant Research Scientist Thomas Guarrieri said. “Now, we’re trying to automate a process by which we can quickly identify threats from adversaries who might conduct CBRN attacks, given what we know about the motivations of CBRN adversaries.”

This research effort will provide the U.S. government first of-its-kind adversary social systems models in support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s SIGMA+ Program. Results of this research effort, in addition to contributing to the success of the SIGMA+ Program, will also contribute greatly to the advancement of the U.S. government’s overall capability to defend against weapons of mass destruction/weapons of mass terror (WMD/WMT) threats. The research will result in several products that will become integral components of the SIGMA+ system, including an Adversary Weapon Selection Dataset (AWSD), an Adversary Automated Template Generation Tool (AATG Tool) and a Geospatial Risk Mapping Tool.

For more information on this project, and the other work START are doing click here 

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