Quantifying the Cultural Dimension of State-level Nuclear Security

摘要

With no truly global regime formed yet for nuclear security, state-level evaluation of nuclear security takes on central importance for measuring the level and progress of international effort to secure and control all nuclear materials. There have been studies to represent state-level nuclear security with a quantitative metric. Prime examples include the Nuclear Materials Security Index (NMSI) by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the State Level Risk Metric by Texas A&M University (TAMU). The NMSI by NTI ranks countries in nuclear security status by covering various indicators that reflect a state's international status and societal conditions, with the goal of guiding government policies to set priorities for nuclear security risk reduction measures. The State Level Risk Metric by TAMU provides a state's risk profile by considering threat, vulnerability and consequence space of nuclear security risk so as to assist national decision-makers in optimizing resource allocation for nuclear security risk minimization. While these studies are quite comprehensive in the scope of indicators and the coverage of nations, they do not fully capture the cultural aspects. This study is an initial attempt to fill this gap by exploring ways to refine the indicators for nuclear security culture with two large-scale cross-national survey data on national culture - Geert Hofstede's Culture's Consequences study and the GLOBE research.