Evaluating compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 1540 on nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction

On April 28, 2004, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1540. It requires countries to develop and enforce legal and regulatory measures against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and their means of delivery, with a focus on the spread to nonstate actors. To date, compliance with UNSCR 1540 has been challenging. Data included in the UNSCR 1540 Committee 2016 report indicate that approximately 35 countries, or 18% of the UN member states, have implemented 70% of the Resolution's requirements. This article uses a multimethod approach to evaluate compliance with UNSCR 1540, including key-word analysis of existing literature to identify compliance factors and a quantitative evaluation method, based on weighting and scoring of these factors by the authors. The model was vetted by a panel of experts and tested on a sample of 12 countries showing that the compliance scores derived from the model correspond to the experts' wholistic judgments about compliance and agreement with the scores of more complex models.