Examination of State-level Nuclear Security Evaluation Methods

With no truly global regime formed yet for nuclear security, state-level evaluation of nuclear security takes on central importance for measuring the level and progress of international effort to secure and control all nuclear materials. There have been studies to represent state-level nuclear security with a quantitative metric. Prime examples include the Nuclear Materials Security Index (NMSI) by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the State Level Risk Metric by Texas A&M University (TAMU). The NMSI by NTI ranks countries in nuclear security status by covering various indicators that reflect a state’s international status and societal conditions, with the goal of guiding government policies to set priorities for nuclear security risk reduction measures. The State Level Risk Metric by TAMU provides a state’s risk profile by considering threat, vulnerability and consequence space of nuclear security risk so as to assist national decision-makers in optimizing resource allocation for nuclear security risk minimization. While these studies are quite comprehensive in the scope of indicators and the coverage of nations, they are in need of further development in different perspectives. The former one is mainly focusing on the global norms, policy, and regulation aspects, and the latter one’s focus is majorly on the measurement of risk against physical protection of the sites and materials requiring the use of sensitive data. This study aims to fill the gap of the current models by adjusting or relocating the indicators in a new category, “Risk Measures”, which will assess the potential of nuclear terrorism with various indicators from the current indices. With the newly category of risk measuring indicators, the evaluation method might have more specific picture of how the actual potential of nuclear terrorism would be quantified, pursuing realistic grasp of each country’s risk affair conditions based on open source data.