Nuclear Issues

"...[I]t's unclear who — if anyone — would buy North Korean nuclear technology. However, the nightmare scenario of North Korea selling it to the highest bidder merits consideration."

Cathryn Cluver Ashbrook, Executive Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project, discusses the importance of the final wording of the G-20 communique, particularly with respect to the climate change and energy policy dossiers, noting different approaches to achieve transatlantic compromise. She underlines the importance of high-level meetings such as the G-20 to address critical global challenges, including multilateral responses to North Korea’s provocations and the ongoing conflict in Syria.

"Every president stocks the White House with people who can advise him on the economy, national defense, and foreign relations. And nearly all presidents in modern times have understood that science and technology are so central to all of those top-tier issues — and practically every other issue on the nation’s agenda — that science and technology advice in the White House is no less essential."

Situated in a difficult neighborhood, New Delhi has laid strong emphasis on both nuclear safety and security for a couple of decades now. Almost three decades of state-sponsored terrorism and insurgencies of varying scale and proportion within India have meant that security of nuclear materials and installations has been a great worry to India’s security and atomic energy establishments. India’s concerns even predate the Western focus on WMD terrorism, which gained prominence only after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.  Unfortunately, India’s excessive caution and secrecy in the nuclear arena has led the world to assume that India does not pay much attention to this issue or that it has inadequate security, which is far from the truth.

In prisons as in nuclear facilities, employees are tasked with guarding something highly dangerous in high-stress environments. Both face high costs in the event of failure, and both are especially vulnerable to complacency and insider threats. Given these parallels, two inmates’ dramatic break-out from a New York prison in early June offers nuclear security practitioners valuable insights into how to avert an equally dramatic (and potentially much more consequential) breech.

Are nuclear sites secure?  There are some who might assume the answer is yes and that we should not worry about the possibility of nuclear bomb material being stolen. Yet, recent history has repeatedly demonstrated that high security facilities thought to be secure were actually vulnerable. Two such incidents last month illustrated this idea.

In thinking about how nuclear security and safeguards can fail, it is useful to keep in mind why security usually fails in general.  Most security managers and organizations have a good understanding of the assets they are trying to protect, the resources available to them to protect those assets, and the consequences should security fail (though this is sometimes greatly underestimated).  They often have a reasonably accurate understanding of the threats they face—who might attack, why, how, when, and with what goals and resources.  What is often lacking is a good understanding of the vulnerabilities—the weaknesses in the security that can be exploited by the threats—and how those vulnerabilities can be mitigated or eliminated.