Transactional Intel: Using Banks to Stop Nuclear Proliferation
This story first appeared in UAlbany's 2026 research magazine.
In a world in which we increasingly look to technology to solve intractable problems, Professor Bryan Early’s work is a reminder that thoughtful public policy remains one of the most powerful levers we have.
Early is a political scientist in UAlbany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy who for years has worked to help foreign governments, companies and other institutions keep potentially dangerous technologies out of the hands of people who might use them to do harm.
“We try to keep the world’s deadliest weapons away from the world’s most dangerous actors,” is the understated way Early describes the mission of the Rockefeller-based Project on International Security, Commerce and Economic Statecraft (PISCES), which he founded in 2012.
“There are a lot of technical aspects to what we do that do not have technology-based solutions. And this is where you really need a policy intervention from the government to play a role in helping regulate how certain technologies and products are shared internationally, to make sure that they end up being used for civilian purposes and not misused to build weapons,” he said.
Traditionally, that has meant a focus on things like strategic trade controls on sensitive technologies, such as the components needed for nuclear enrichment that could be used for legitimate energy production or to build bombs. Those controls require companies to seek permission to sell certain technologies to certain buyers.
We try to keep the world’s deadliest weapons away from the world’s most dangerous actors.
Or it could mean forbidding trade with certain governments or institutions entirely through economic sanctions.
Early’s latest work explores how to exploit the leverage created by the global financial system’s reliance on the U.S. dollar to help police markets for transactions that might signal someone is trying to evade sanctions and export controls to build a weapon of mass destruction or its delivery systems. The fact that a limited number of major banks are involved in many international transactions provides an opportunity to look for patterns that could sound alarms.
It’s a similar approach to the way financial institutions have been enlisted by governments to help stop money laundering, drug and human trafficking and to combat terrorism after Sept. 11, and it’s the subject of Early’s next book project, Banks and the Bomb: Understanding Proliferation Financing Controls.
Written with colleague Togzhan Kassenova, a senior fellow with PISCES, the book explores both the promise and challenges of using the global financial system to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction including the difficulty inherent in distinguishing truly suspicious transactions from the flood of false alarms.
“You want to have layered defenses,” Early said. “You want to have export controls, you want to have sanctions, and this new frontier that we’re studying proliferation financing controls is about adding an additional layer to these defenses by involving financial institutions in providing oversight and scrutiny of the transactions they facilitate.”
Banks can play an important role in flagging complex transactions that government regulators might otherwise miss if they have access to the information needed to assess whether the steps they are taking are effective.
Currently, banks that flag suspicious activity almost never learn whether their suspicions were correct, making it difficult to improve the system in the way one might train a machine learning algorithm to get better at recognizing pictures of dogs or trees.
“We don’t know for sure if they’re working, but they sure seem really, really inefficient,” Early said of existing methods. The goal: “How can we develop an approach that helps you waste less time and helps you focus more on the cases that are really potentially dangerous?”