The History Of Guns, Gates, And Guards In Nuclear Security

The concept of guns, gates, and guards has been the cornerstone of physical protection for many hundreds of years. The birth of the atomic age, along with the development of the field of systems engineering, led to a revolutionary approach to physical protection. This new approach treated a physical protection system as a complex system comprised of people and technology, and used systems engineering principles to build a framework to design and evaluate these systems. Though this framework was developed nearly fifty years ago, its core principles and concepts are just as relevant and useful today as when they were first developed, and provide a proven framework to design and evaluate physical protection systems to combat today’s new and emerging threats. This paper chronicles the history of the development of this framework, and makes a case for its continued relevance today.