The IAEA's Department of Safeguards has embarked on an evolutionary process to more fully develop and apply the State-level concept for safeguards implementation. In an attempt to direct safeguards to areas of greatest proliferation risk, this concept makes use of all safeguards-relevant information available in order to focus and prioritize its safeguards activities for a State. A key component is the development of a State-level Approach which consists of analyzing acquisition paths, establishing and prioritizing technical objectives, and identifying applicable safeguards measures. The methodology to accomplish this is based on a three-step-approach: network modeling, network analysis, and strategic assessment. The network modeling step assesses and formalizes the State's nuclear capabilities as well as other state-specific factors concerning relevant proliferation scenarios. The network analysis step gives a ranking of all plausible acquisition paths including a visualization of the paths. Finally, the strategic assessment evaluates the State's proliferation and compliance options as well as the IAEA's set of technical objectives and subsequent safeguards measures. In this paper, a hypothetical State model was developed in order to test the methodology's performance. Therefore, an Excel spreadsheet with all necessary state-level factors has been created. Afterwards, a Python software module based on graph theoretical algorithms was applied to produce a comprehensive list of ranked acquisition paths including their visualization. The following step of the strategic evaluation is mainly based on the concept of the Nash equilibrium resulting in a stable combination of the State's and the IAEA's strategies. This formal and automatic procedure offers the advantage of gaining results in a comprehensive and non-discriminative manner.
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