RISK ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT OF STATE NUCLEAR SECURITY MEASURES

States now face a threat environment that necessitates a new approach to nuclear security and risk management. The global spread of nuclear technology and infrastructure will greatly increase the number of locations accessible to terrorist organizations. As a result, an increasing number of States will face difficult decisions on how to allocate resources to best manage the risk posed by nuclear terrorism. It is insufficient to know how each individual facility may be improved when managing the risk to the State across the entire infrastructure. In order to most effectively manage their limited resources States must know how improvements at individual facilities improve the overall risk faced by the State as a whole. In this paper, we present a methodology for determining the State-level risk of nuclear terrorism. There are certain steps that must be achieved in order for an adversary to successfully acquire and use a nuclear weapon from a nuclear weapon state, a radiological dispersal device (RDD), or an improvised nuclear device (IND), or to sabotage a facility. The locations within the State where these steps could be accomplished depend on the types of materials present, the types of nuclear facilities in the State and the adversary’s capabilities. A network of all possible pathways can therefore be constructed and analyzed. The possibility for adversary success along each individual pathway is determined using attributes such as the safeguards systems, the physical security systems or the resources required by the terrorist organization. Risk for each pathway is then determined using this success probability as well as the consequence of a successfully completed threat. Combining the risk of each individual pathway yields the total risk to the State. This allows for various modifications at individual facilities to be compared based on how effectively they reduce total risk. This information can be utilized by the State as an unbiased way to optimize the allocation of resources so that the overall risk can be minimized.