United CBRN Technical director David Crouch is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services institute (RUSI) and is part of the project Anthracite team.
Project Anthracite builds on a feasibility study published by RUSI and Dstl in March 2022, which concluded that open source tools could help to understand North Korea’s chemical industry, allowing hypotheses about chemical weapons production to be developed and refined.
Following the identification of all sites of potential relevance in North Korea – from chemical facilities to research centres and alleged dual-use sites – we are profiling these sites, seeking to understand their role in North Korea’s chemical industry and identifying any potential links to chemical weapons production.
The project team is conducting detailed satellite imagery analysis to understand more about site features. Parallel analysis of open-source data seeks to identify patterns of activity. Site profiles investigate chemical processes on-site, as well. As we gradually analyse more installations, we will build up a comprehensive picture of North Korea’s industrial chemical capability.
As Project Anthracite progresses, we will produce an interactive map based on our database showing alleged links to chemical weapons production in North Korea.
The latest publications from project Anthracite can be found below:
