Did You Know: Nuclear Threat Initiative

by Hannah Septoff

Thirty-two nations in this world possess materials capable of fueling atomic bombs. Most citizens do not usually partake in discussions about a country’s nuclear weaponry supply and the security they maintain. Recently, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private advocacy group in Washington, released a list ranking each country based on its nuclear precautions, from best to worst. The minds behind this endeavor hope to spur debate on upholding and advancing security as well as strengthen defenses against atomic terrorism.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative was a result of President Obama’s 2010 security summit meeting in Washington whose objective was to inform nations of their responsibility in guarding atomic materials and ensuring they would not be susceptible to theft or underground sales. The investigation focuses on precautions only for the two most common fuels of nuclear arms, plutonium and highly enriched uranium, and does not examine any other highly radioactive materials.

“There was no spying,” said Leo Abruzzese, director of global forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit who says the data was taken from public information.

The statistics revealed and the figures shown are not meant to “congratulat[e] some and chastis[e] others,” Sam Nunn, a founder of the Threat Initiative and the former Democratic senator from Georgia said. The purpose of this project is solely the intention of offering “a resource for improvement.”

The study based each country’s overall score on 18 different categories, including quantities of nuclear materials, physical protections, material production, sites and transportation, political stability, and corruption. Furthermore, countries also ranked within each category to provide an even more in-depth analysis of the factors contributing to each overall score. Taken as a whole, the report elicits some surprising results with Australia ranked number one with an overall score of 94. The United States tied for thirteenth with Belgium with a score of 78 out of a 100, which evaluators deemed a fairly good ranking considering the size of the nation’s nuclear complex. North Korea trailed last with only 37 points and with ten factors that were below average.

The rest of the countries’ descriptions in the Nuclear Threat Initiative study may be found at www.ntiindex.org. This website provides the first-of-its-kind public baseline assessment of the status of security for nuclear materials worldwide. “We’ll never get this job done if we continue to operate behind closed doors,” said Deepti Choubey, senior director for nuclear security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Hopefully people will heed his warning.