The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been exporting weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to the volatile Middle East and Africa. It is expecting that military illicit activities would isolate DPRK economically, as it has been placed on multiple sanctions lists, including UN sanctions, multilateral export control regime sanctions, and country-specific sanctions. However, DPRK funds its WMD programs through various sanctions evasion activities. DPRK’s primary sanctions evasion activities include obtaining foreign currency, acquiring dualuse or restricted technology, smuggling, and money laundering, which are global in scope. This study analyzes the sanctions evasion activities used by DPRK to acquire economic, material, and technological resources for its WMD program and devises ways to disrupt these evasions effectively. First, the international community should strengthen export controls by encouraging states with weak export control regimes to join international organizations and conventions to limit DPRK arms and technology exports. Second, states should improve their intelligence gathering and analysis capabilities by sharing information on DPRK’s evasion activities and working together. This will help identify and counter DPRK’s evasion techniques and networks. Third, the international community should strengthen cooperation on DPRK’s evasion efforts. This can be done by strengthening cooperation with states and entities that enforce international sanctions and by working with relevant agencies such as customs, immigration, and police to track and interdict the movement of funds and assets used for evasion. Fourth, publicize DPRK’s illicit activities and apply diplomatic pressure. Diplomatic pressure can lead to more states and entities to enforce sanctions. In conclusion, these strategies are expected to deter DPRK’s illicit activities; but to sanction DPRK effectively, it is essential to continue to adjust and refine the strategies in response to DPRK’s evolving sanctions evasion efforts. The results of this research are expected to prevent WMD proliferation through DPRK by blocking or reducing the risk of sanctions evasion.

This study examined the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)’s illegal trade in UNsanctioned items as revealed in the UN panel of experts report in order to estimate the types of illegal trade in nuclear items, one of the UN-sanctioned prohibited items, and to find efficient ways to block it. Also, The research revealed that DPRK secretly imports UN-sanctioned prohibited items without going through customs through maritime transshipment, conceals or disguises them through identity laundering by falsifying documents at customs clearance, and makes various attempts to escape the international community’s surveillance, such as using a combination of methods such as Re-Flagged and Double-Flagged for identity laundering, and concealing them without operating the Automatic Identification System (AIS) at sea. The DPRK’s Illicit trade cases have been divided into two types of transactions: those that violate customs clearance procedures by providing false information to customs through disguise or concealment, and those that do not go through normal customs procedures, such as smuggling. To block customs violations, technical measures such as increasing the number of inspections of container ships or improving the accuracy of inspections are required, while to block smuggling, since it does not go through physical inspections, there are ways to monitor it through satellite images or strengthen border enforcement such as airport bays and land routes. As a result, DPRK’s nuclear items are designated as sanctioned items under UN resolutions, and it is assumed that DPRK and its networks will attempt to trade illegally through a combination of customs clearance violations and non-customs clearance violations, depending on the circumstances. Furthermore, since DPRK is subject to extensive sanctions from the international community, including the UN, in connection with its nuclear weapons program, illegal trade continues, and efforts should be made to block illegal trade through physical inspection at customs clearance.

Selecting an appropriate antigen with optimal immunogenicity and physicochemical properties is a pivotal factor to develop a protein based subunit vaccine. Despite rapid progress in modern molecular cloning and recombinant protein technology, there remains a huge challenge for purifying and using protein antigens rich in hydrophobic domains, such as membrane associated proteins. To overcome current limitations using hydrophobic proteins as vaccine antigens, we adopted in silico analyses which included bioinformatic prediction and sequence-based protein 3D structure modeling, to develop a novel periodontitis subunit vaccine against the outer membrane protein FomA of Fusobacterium nucleatum. To generate an optimal antigen candidate, we predicted hydrophilicity and B cell epitope parameter by querying to web-based databases, and designed a truncated FomA (tFomA) candidate with better solubility and preserved B cell epitopes. The truncated recombinant protein was engineered to expose epitopes on the surface through simulating amino acid sequence-based 3D folding in aqueous environment. The recombinant tFomA was further expressed and purified, and its immunological properties were evaluated. In the mice intranasal vaccination study, tFomA significantly induced antigen-specific IgG and sIgA responses in both systemic and oral-mucosal compartments, respectively. Our results testify that intelligent in silico designing of antigens provide amenable vaccine epitopes from hard-to-manufacture hydrophobic domain rich microbial antigens.

This paper describes an alignment algorithm that estimates the initial heading angle of AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) for starting navigation in a sea area. In the basic dead reckoning system, the initial orientation of the vehicle is very important. In particular, the initial heading value is an essential factor in determining the performance of the entire navigation system. However, the heading angle of AUVs cannot be measured accurately because the DCS (Digital Compass) corrupted by surrounding magnetic field in pointing true north direction of the absolute global coordinate system (not the same to magnetic north direction). Therefore, we constructed an experimental constraint and designed an algorithm based on extended Kalman filter using only inertial navigation sensors and a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver basically. The value of sensor covariance was selected by comparing the navigation results with the reference data. The proposed filter estimates the initial heading angle of AUVs for navigation in a sea area and reflects sampling characteristics of each sensor. Finally, we verify the performance of the filter through experiments.

This paper describes a study on posture control of the multi-legged biomimetic underwater robot (CALEB10). Because the underwater environment has a feature that all degrees of freedom are coupled to each other, we designed the posture control algorithm by separating each degree of freedom. Not only should the research on posture control of underwater robots be a precedent study for position control, but it is also necessary to compensate disturbance in each direction. In the research on the yaw directional posture control, we made the drag force generated by the stroke of the left leg and the right leg occur asymmetrically, in order that a rotational moment is generated along the yaw direction. In the composite swimming controller in which the controllers in each direction are combined, we designed the algorithm to determine the control weights in each direction according to the error angle along the yaw direction. The performance of the proposed posture control method is verified by a dynamical simulator and underwater experiments.

The CALEB10 is a multi-legged biomimetic underwater robot. In the last research, we developed a swimming pattern named ESPG (Extended Swimming Pattern Generator) by observing diving beetle’s swimming actions and experimented with a positive buoyancy state in which CALEB10 floats on the water. In this paper, however, we have experimented with CALEB10 in a neutral buoyancy state where it is completely immersed in water for pitch motion control experiment. And we found that CALEB10 was unstably swimming in the pitch direction in the neutral buoyancy state and analyzed that the reason was due to the weight proportion of the legs. In this paper, we propose a pitch motion control method to mimic the pitch motion of diving beetles and to solve the problem of CALEB10 unstably swimming in the pitch direction. To control the pitch motion, we use the method of controlling additional joints while swimming with the ESPG. The method of obtaining propulsive force by the motion of the leg has a problem of giving propulsive force in the reverse direction when swimming in the surge direction, but this new control method has an advantage that a propulsive moment generated by a swimming action only on a target pitch value. To demonstrate validity this new control method, we designed a dynamics-based simulator environment. And the control performance to the target pitch value was verified through simulation and underwater experiments.