The 32 nations with materials that can fuel atom bombs are typically mum on security, which looks to the public like a closed world of barbed wire and armed guards. Behind the scenes, atomic insiders have long told horror stories of risky practices and security flaws that might let the crucial ingredients for nuclear weapons fall into the wrong hands.
Now, for the first time publicly, experts have surveyed the precautions each country has in place and ranked the nations from best to worst. The study is full of surprises and potential embarrassments: for instance, Australia takes first place in nuclear security and Japan comes in at No. 23, behind nations like Kazakhstan and South Africa.
The United States? It tied for 13th place with Belgium. Last place goes to North Korea, a police state that the report finds to be seriously deficient on issues of atomic security.
The edgy ranking is a joint endeavor of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private group in Washington, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, a company in London that does risk analyses. Their goals are to incite debate on how to promote security and to encourage governments to strengthen safeguards against atomic terrorism.
“We’ll never get this job done if we continue to operate behind close doors,” Deepti Choubey, senior director for nuclear security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said Tuesday in an interview.
The team offered to brief the 32 countries on the security findings, and says that 28 took them up on it. A slim majority — 17 nations — went further to discuss the analyses and offer feedback. No country, the evaluators say, was told of its security ranking.
The analysis was unveiled Wednesday morning at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.
Sam Nunn, the former Democratic senator from Georgia and a founder of the threat initiative, said the study “is not about congratulating some and chastising others.” Rather, Mr. Nunn said, its analyses and recommendations are meant to offer “a resource for improvement.”
The stark political and financial challenges facing many governments mean that nuclear security often gets a low priority and little analysis. “We hope,” Mr. Nunn said, that the new study “can serve as a solid foundation to help inform that urgent and ongoing work.”
All countries, he added in a foreword to the report, “can and must do more to strengthen security around the world’s most dangerous materials.”
Funders of the threat initiative and the study include the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The global assessment is an outgrowth of President Obama’s effort to get nations to take more responsibility in locking up bomb materials that are vulnerable to theft and covert sale. In 2010, he held a security summit in Washington that drew attention to the danger. Experts warned that terrorists could buy or steal the makings for nuclear arms from the world’s secretive maze of atomic storage and production sites, which are said to number in the thousands.
A second summit is scheduled for March. It is to be held in Seoul, South Korea, and the new report is seen as helping set the agenda for that gathering of world leaders. A focus is expected to be North Korea.
The new analysis centers on security precautions for the two main fuels of nuclear arms — plutonium and highly enriched uranium. It did not try to assess protections for highly radioactive materials that a terrorist might try to scatter with conventional explosives in a so-called dirty bomb.
In interviews, the nuclear analysts said they worked from public information that was often poorly known — for instance, general procedures for training guards and protecting sensitive sites.
“There was no spying,” said Leo Abruzzese, director of global forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “It was pieced together.”
For each country, the study looked at a total of 18 factors involved in nuclear security. They included known quantities of materials, physical protections, accounting methods and transportation security as well as such larger societal factors as political stability and corruption.
The 122-page report is titled the “Nuclear Materials Security Index” and its accompanying Web site is www.ntiindex.org. Australia came out on top, the report says, because it has reduced its holdings of weapon-useable materials to “a small amount” and did well on the overall indicators. It received 94 out of 100 possible points.
Among the nine countries known to possess nuclear arms, Britain came out on top with a score of 79. The report credits its high status to concrete security measures as well as “its commitment to and follow-through on international obligations.”
The United States scored 78 — a fairly good ranking, the evaluators said, considering its possession of a sprawling nuclear complex that dates to the earliest days of the atomic era.
Japan received a score of 68 because of its vast stores of plutonium, its relatively poor measures with security personnel and its lack of an independent regulatory agency.
A surprise nation on the list is Iran. It claims no ambitions for making bomb fuel even while global leaders worry that its growing atomic program seeks just that capability. The study team said that Iran was included in the analysis because of its possession of highly enriched uranium for a research reactor in Tehran.
Iran received an overall score of 46, its standing undercut by what the report judged to be corruption, political instability, and poor procedures for nuclear control and accounting. Of 32 nations, it ranked 30th.
Pakistan, with a security score of 41 and a nuclear complex that is undergoing rapid growth, ranked 31st.
North Korea came in last with a score of 37. The report cited a total of 10 indicators that came in below the global average, including site and transportation security as well as political stability.
The report said that nearly a quarter of the nations with materials that can fuel atom bombs scored poorly on social factors because of “very high levels of corruption.” And it warned that several of those “also scored poorly on the prospect of political instability over the next two years.”
That bleak combination, the study concluded, “significantly increases the risk that nuclear materials might be stolen, with help from corrupt insiders or in the midst of government distraction or political chaos.”
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