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The panel of experts set up to monitor the implementation of UN sanctions on Iran has released its annual report. The report highlights Iran’s continued non-compliance with its international obligations and its continued defiance of UN Security Council orders to suspend the country’s controversial nuclear and missile programme and to halt procurement of sensitive technologies that could support these programmes.

International export controls have become almost ubiquitous in the international system, with the majority of states adopting controls to prevent the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and more conventional military capabilities. A constant challenge to the effectiveness of export controls has been that of intangible technologies. As far back as World War 1 there were concerns that transmission of data over the telegraph could result in the loss of military secrets. The advent of the internet saw these fears expanded, with digitalisation of component design becoming commonplace. In parallel, two further trends in manufacturing have been observable. First, manufacturing capability has become increasingly dispersed and simplified with the availability of automated manufacturing equipment, such as Computer-Numerically Controlled (CNC) machine tools[1]. This trend has not lessened the expertise required to manufacture an item. Instead, the expertise required to design a component continues to be heavily centralised, requiring years of engineering training, thus leading to the second tend.  The second trend is for ‘knowledge’ to be packaged up into Computer Aided Manufacture (CAM) files which can be dispatched electronically to the CNC machine anywhere in the world for machine operators to run.

Recent advances in additive manufacturing (more commonly referred to as 3D printing technology) bring this discussion to the fore. Designs now exist for guns designed by specialists but which can be printed by anyone with a suitable printer simply by downloading the CAM files[2].