> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.gdeltcloud.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Atlas CNP
> Comprehensive National Power — a composite measure of the capability a state can actually bring to bear, in the tradition of CINC and the Chinese CNP literature, built from our own asset, compute, filings, and macro data.
**Planned.** CNP is designed but not built. This page states the intent and the influences so you can see where Atlas is going. Nothing here is available on the API yet.
## What it is
**Atlas CNP** measures *capability* — how much power a state can actually bring to bear — as distinct from how tense it is ([GPR](/features/atlas-gpr)) or what condition it is in ([Posture](/features/atlas-posture)).
Where Posture asks whether a state is functioning, CNP asks how much it can do. A country can be well-governed and stable while being strategically minor, or badly governed and unstable while being globally consequential. Those are different measurements, and conflating them produces a ranking that is useless for both purposes.
## Why you should care
**Capability determines who matters.** Most geopolitical monitoring implicitly weights by media attention, which tracks English-language news interest far better than it tracks strategic weight. A capability index is the honest weighting for "should I care about this actor."
**The inputs are unusually well-suited to our stack.** Comprehensive national power has historically been hard to compute because it spans domains that live in different datasets — energy, industry, compute, finance, trade, military. GDELT Cloud already carries most of those in one place: energy and heavy-industry assets, AI compute, corporate filings, macro series, and government awards. CNP is the composite those primitives were always pointed at.
## What it is useful for
* **Weighting.** A defensible answer to "how much should this country's movement move my world view."
* **Strategic-competition analysis.** Tracking capability trajectories rather than event counts.
* **Supply-chain and industrial-base assessment.** Physical capacity by sector, joined to the assets that constitute it.
* **Counterparty and sovereign context.** Capability as a slow-moving input beside condition and tension.
## Design intent
CNP is expected to be a transparent composite over capability domains rather than a learned score, consistent with the rest of Atlas:
| Domain | Candidate inputs | Where it comes from |
| ------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- |
| **Economic** | Output, trade position, financial depth | Macro series, corporate filings |
| **Industrial** | Steel, cement, chemicals capacity | Global Energy Monitor heavy-industry trackers |
| **Energy** | Generation capacity, fuel infrastructure | Global Energy Monitor energy trackers |
| **Technological** | AI compute, frontier model development, chips | Epoch AI datasets |
| **Military** | Expenditure and burden | Public annual indicators |
| **Demographic & human capital** | Population, education, development | World Bank WDI |
The same principles apply as elsewhere in Atlas: fixed published weights, absolute anchors rather than a zero-sum rank, decomposable sub-scores, and null rather than a fabricated zero where a domain cannot be measured.
## Influences and references
The canonical quantitative national-power measure: six components across demographic, industrial, and military dimensions, expressed as a share of the world total. The direct methodological ancestor — though its world-share construction is exactly the zero-sum design Atlas avoids elsewhere, a tension we will have to resolve explicitly.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and CICIR traditions of computing an explicit multi-domain national power score, and a significant influence on how strategic competition is discussed. RAND's *Measuring National Power in the Postindustrial Age* is a useful English-language treatment.
A modern, well-documented multi-domain power index with published weights and a public methodology — the closest contemporary analogue to what Atlas CNP intends to be.
## Status
Not started. CNP is listed as **SOON** in the product surface and is sequenced after Posture reaches general availability, since it depends on the same structural-indicator infrastructure.