TOWARDS A GLOBAL COMPOSITE ADVERSARY FORCE

Although protection of nuclear facilities against sabotage and nuclear materials against theft are viewed today as national responsibilities, security failures could have global consequences. The international community has an obligation to use all available means to ensure that national physical protection programs are effective. International Physical Protection Advisory Service (IPPAS) missions are largely paperwork reviews and do not provide the rigorous inspections needed to verify the adequacy of facility security in the states that request them. Full compliance with standards on paper is not sufficient to prove that security plans will work in practice. For this reason, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission both require force- on-force (FOF) inspections at facilities that are high-value targets for theft or radiological sabotage. FOF inspections test facility protection against attacks by adversaries with design-basis threat (DBT) characteristics. FOF inspections routinely uncover vulnerabilities that require prompt correction. U.S. agencies utilize a “composite adversary force” (CAF), composed of individuals with security expertise and tactical skills, as the mock attacking force in FOF inspections. This paper proposes the creation of a global FOF testing program under the auspices of the IAEA. Ideally, any sensitive civil nuclear facility in the world should be ready at all times for a short- notice FOF inspection conducted by such an international team, similar to short-notice safeguards inspections. However, under the current weak international regime, the best that likely could be achieved is inclusion of such a program in IPPAS missions. The U.S. could be the first volunteer as a challenge to other countries. In addition, the mixed-oxide fuel facility at the Savannah River Site, which may never be operated, could serve as an international training facility. The paper will discuss the many implementation challenges of such a program. Even domestic FOF programs face difficulties in ensuring that the tests are fair, consistent and based on realistic external and internal threats. An international component would introduce many other challenges, including the development of protocols for selecting and training CAF members and for sharing classified domestic threat information.