Innovative Methods To Predict Future Nuclear Security Threats As The Basis For Regulatory Development

Responsible use of nuclear material includes ensuring that safeguards, security, and safety measures are implemented to protect people and the environment from its potential harmful effects. Effective security measures require implementation of measures to protect against people who might attempt to use the material for malevolent purposes. Evaluating threats involves identifying the types of individuals or groups of individuals who may attempt to commit a malevolent act, and then using that as the basis for developing a regulatory nuclear security framework. Predicting potential threats is difficult. Historical human events can be a poor indicator of future events. A lack of past events also may not indicate the possibility of future events. Limited resources make it impossible to protect against all possible threats, and regulatory developers must decide which threats to protect against. Expending limited resources to defend against potential threats, then failing to protect against unanticipated threats, is a failure of the regulatory framework. Two methods commonly advocated to address this issue are scenario planning and a probabilistic approach. Scenario planning involves evaluating the range of potential threats and identifying the most plausible threats and scenarios. The strengths of this method are that it stimulates creative thinking about innovative ways human threats may attempt a malevolent act and effective measures to protect against those threats. The weakness of this method is that there could be infinite possible scenarios, requiring down selecting those scenarios considered most plausible, allowing the potential for bias to influence the selection. The second method is a probabilistic approach, where prior data and future indicators are used to predict the likelihood of occurrence of a specific threat to quantify its risk. Because each method has strengths and weaknesses, this paper proposes combining the strengths of the two methods to provide decision makers with both a range of potential future threats with methods to continuously evaluate which threats are more likely to emerge. If successful, this proposed method will support better allocation of limited resources to reduce overall security risk.