How We Do It

The mission of the National Counterproliferation Center is to help lead the Intelligence Community in developing integrated strategies and actions both to counter current weapons of mass destruction threats and to anticipate and counter future WMD proliferation.

  • Implementing Counterproliferation Strategies. NCPC has developed Intelligence Community strategies to strengthen, integrate, and focus efforts to address current and looming WMD proliferation issues. These include the National Intelligence Strategy for Counterproliferation, National Strategy for Strategic Interdiction, National Intelligence Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, and U.S. Integrated Uranium Enrichment Strategy.
  • Emphasizing Motivations, Intentions, and Disincentives. NCPC is leading the Intelligence Community to move beyond its traditional approach of treating WMD proliferation as primarily a technical problem, promoting multi-disciplinary efforts to address both technical issues and non-technical drivers, including political, economic, and security issues that can help the U.S. Government understand and counter WMD proliferation.
  • Ensuring Action and Results. By consistently evaluating the Intelligence Community’s performance, NCPC is able to refocus efforts, emphasizing what is working and eliminating what is not. Evaluations have included the Intelligence Community’s performance against all five national counterproliferation objectives – dissuade interest in WMD; prevent the acquisition of WMD, expertise and materials; end or roll back programs; deter use of WMD; and manage the consequences of WMD use – with a heavy emphasis on Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan.
  • Looking “Over-the-Horizon.” Working closely with senior policymakers, NCPC is leading the Intelligence Community in developing collection and analytic strategies for potential over-the-horizon WMD threats, positioning the Intelligence Community to warn of such threats and provide the insights needed to counter them early.
  • Focusing on the WMD and Terrorism Nexus. Terrorists’ acquisition of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear capabilities is the highest priority national security threat facing the US today and for the foreseeable future. Countering this threat requires that the Intelligence Community leverage the strengths of work done on both the counterterrorism and counterproliferation missions. Accordingly, NCPC works closely with the National Counterterrorism Center in developing and assessing taskings and ensuring counterproliferation community plans and activities are in place to address nexus of WMD and terrorism.
  • Working to Close Gaps. NCPC is leading and evaluating the Intelligence Community’s work to eliminate critical intelligence gaps on the U.S. Government’s highest priority WMD proliferation concerns.
  • Enabling Real Information Sharing. NCPC’s “Responsibility-to-Provide” Initiative is ensuring WMD analysts and collectors are receiving access to the full set of technical and non-technical information needed to understand and counter WMD proliferation.
  • Involving Outside Experts. NCPC collaborates with experts in and outside of government to advance the counterproliferation mission. Creating and sustaining the Biological Sciences Experts Group to tap the expertise of our nation’s scientific talent in academia and industry to address bio-threats is one example.
  • Developing Our Nation’s Newest Counterproliferation Tools. NCPC’s Research, Development & Integration Fund is geared to ensure the Intelligence Community can explore innovative technologies and methodologies to tackle our hardest problems. By providing “seed money” to creative, multi-agency solutions to WMD intelligence challenges, NCPC is promoting new ways to solve hard problems.