The 2020 NTI Nuclear Security Index: Losing Focus In A Disordered World

The NTI Index is a globally recognized assessment and tracking of nuclear security conditions in countries around the world. It promotes actions to strengthen nuclear security and build confidence, and it highlights progress and trends over time. Published biennially since 2012, the NTI Index includes two theft rankings and one sabotage ranking: - A ranking of 22 countries with 1 kilogram or more of weapons-usable nuclear materials—highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium—to assess actions to secure materials against theft; - A ranking of 153 countries and Taiwan with less than 1 kilogram of or no weapons-usable nuclear materials to assess actions to support global nuclear security efforts; - A ranking of 46 countries and Taiwan with or without weapons-usable nuclear materials, but which have nuclear facilities such as nuclear power reactors and research reactors, to assess actions to protect nuclear facilities against sabotage.The 2020 NTI Nuclear Security Index finds that progress on protecting nuclear materials against theft and nuclear facilities against acts of sabotage has slowed significantly over the past two years, despite ongoing, major security gaps. The decline in the rate of improvement to national regulatory structures and the global nuclear security architecture reverses a trend of substantial improvements between 2012 and 2018. The decline suggests that without the driving force of the Nuclear Security Summits, which ended in 2016, or similar high-level international events, attention to nuclear security has waned—and it has done so at a time when terrorist capabilities and growing cyber threats contribute to a more complicated and unpredictable environment.In addition, for the first time, NTI released a separate Radioactive Source Security Assessment in conjunction with the NTI Index. The first-of-its-kind assessment, which does not rank or score countries, evaluates national policies, commitments, and actions taken in 175 countries and Taiwan to prevent the theft of radioactive sources that could be used to build dirty bombs. The key finding: the international architecture for radiological security is extremely weak, and thousands of radioactive sources remain vulnerable to theft from hospitals, university labs, and industrial sites where they are used for a variety of purposes.