Advancing Technological Capabilities to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism
Joel Rynes
Assistant Director, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office
The Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) is solely focused on preventing nuclear terrorism through nuclear detection and technical nuclear forensics. DNDO’s Transformational and Applied Research (TAR) Directorate has the mission to develop breakthrough technologies that will have a dramatic impact on capabilities to detect nuclear and radiological threats through an aggressive and expedited research and development (R&D) program.
To this end, TAR has developed and implemented a technology roadmap. Our current roadmap will guide our R&D efforts through 2021. TAR’s technological challenges, and the focus of the roadmap, are defined as the Grand Challenges. This talk will provide an overview of DNDO and its approach to solve the technical grand challenges derived from gaps in the Global Nuclear Detection Architecture (GNDA) and Technical Nuclear Forensics (TNF). The talk will emphasize emerging technologies to solve these problems as well as remaining technological needs.