News Flash: Developing Design Basis Threat (DBT) Documents

Significant effort is expended by any State, agency, or facility to develop a design basis threat (DBT) as a foundation for establishing a comprehensive protection system for nuclear or non-nuclear assets. After all the inputs from the various sources of information (e.g., crime statistics, intelligence, political or ideological activism, sociological trends, etc.) are acquired, the remaining challenge is to encapsulate all that data into a single, inclusive document. Because of the classified nature of a completed DBT, templates and examples of such documents cannot be readily shared. This paper explores using the standard, global journalism methodology of the inverted pyramid for news reporting as a template for DBT document development.