INMM Proceedings, July 13-17, 2003, Phoenix, AZ

THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF AMBIGUOUS SAFEGUARDS TERMINOLOGY Roger G. Johnston Vulnerability Assessment Team Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, New Mexico, 87545, USA 505/667-7414 and Morten Bremer Maerli Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI ) Oslo, Norway 22/05-65-03 ABSTRACT The terms disgruntled, transparency, verification, and safeguards are often used in ambiguous, inappropriate, misleading, and unhelpful ways. Although use of these terms in a nuclear context is likely to continue, recognizing their limitations and problems can help to minimize potential negative consequences. INTRODUCTION Nonproliferation, arms control, and nuclear safeguards are important, complex activities that require careful, rigorous thinking and analysis, as well as unambiguous communication. It is particularly essential to avoid confusion in the international arena, where political, national, linguistic, and cultural differences already complicate matters. (There are, however, occasionally situations where deliberate ambiguity is desirable [1].) Words carry enormous power and can bias how people think about things. We believe this is happening with four different terms commonly used in the field of nuclear safeguards. These words are disgruntled, transparency, verification, and safeguards. We find that these words are often used in misleading, inconsistent, ambiguous, and inexact ways. The inappropriate use of these terms can, we believe, contribute to sloppy thinking, focusing on the wrong factors, and overlooking critical issues. Moreover, the poor use of these terms is decidedly unhelpful for recognizing serious nuclear security risks, or for rigorously and comprehensively discussing nonproliferation, arms control, and nuclear safeguards issues. DISGRUNTLED The word disgruntled is frequently appliedwe believe often misappliedto Russian nuclear workers [2,3], where displaced might be a better term. Disgruntled does not mean finding ones self in a bad situation. Rather, its origin is from the word grunting, and is defined in Websters New Universal Unabridged Dictionary as meaning to be peevishly discontented or disappointed, displeased or sulky. (Being peevish is defined as being fretful, petulant, querulous, and apt to mutter or complain.) Thus, the word disgruntled refers to an emotional state, not necessarily a negative situation that a person might find herself in.

It is clear that Russian nuclear workers have, in recent years, been in very dire straits in terms of morale, employment, career opportunities, prestige, receiving a living wage, and being paid regularly [2-4]. This does not, however, automatically mean they are disgruntled. Indeed, other than occasional strikes related to non-payment of wages [3,4], reports of widespread disgruntlement are lacking, even as it is clear that Russian nuclear workers face severe problems. Use of the word disgruntled to refer to displaced/unemployed/underemployed Russian nuclear workers seems to be jumping to a conclusion that has not been well documented. Inappropriately applying the label disgruntled may have the negative consequence of making us underestimate the considerable (and too often overlooked) insider security risks associated with truly disgruntled nuclear workers in other countries, including the United States. How can it be that nuclear workers in other countries, even though they are generally far better off, can be more disgruntled than their unfortunate Russian counterparts? There is a significant amount of management research showing that, in general, employees perceptions of unfair treatment or exploitation (whatever the reality) is highly correlated with organizational conflict, workplace aggression, workplace violence (including homicides), employee theft, espionage, and sabotage [5]. Moreover, it is well documented that some individuals perceive hostile intent on the part of others even when this intent is lacking and this can lead to aggrievement and retaliation [5]. Disgruntlement is fundamentally about expectations and about perceptions of being treated equitably. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russians have come to expect economic turmoil and personal hardship. Russian society as a whole has enormous problems. Nuclear workers have certainly not been singled out for misery, and there would seem to be no a priori reason why nuclear workers should feel less fairly treated than other Russian government workers. Paradoxically, it is the relatively well off nuclear workers in other countries (such as the United States) who have high expectations and who can be, in many cases, more easily embittered by a faceless/heartless bureaucracy than their Russian counterparts with low expectations. Indeed, sabotage is committed most often by employees who are bored, feel overworked, have unresolved grievances, are attempting to gain unfair competitive advantage, or are simply disgruntled. Acts of sabotage usually stem from people who have deeply personal beefs about workplace treatment, and want their employer to feel their pain. [6] The employee may have been shown disrespect, passed over for promotion, given additional responsibilities with no pay increase, denied adequate resources to do the job, or didnt receive what he or she considers adequate credit for work performed... [7]. There can be no doubt that truly disgruntled insiders do indeed represent a very serious security threat [2,3,8]. For example, Jim Long, President of Wackenhut Services (a major provider of security services to the U.S. government) has been quoted as saying that, the main threat in this day and age is the disgruntled employee [9]. Steve Dougherty, Director of Information Security, California Independent System Operator says, The greatest exposure to any organization is what I call the knowledgeable insideranybody from a janitor to a vendor or an active or ex-employee. [10]. Jim Nockels, Australian Security Intelligence Organization: The biggest threat to your agency will come from the trusted insider... Research indicates that staff disgruntlement is a major factor in causing disloyalty to an agency, government, or country. [11] Stephen Hanauer, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC): I worry a good deal about an inside job by a disgruntled

or psychotic employee. These employees have the know-how, means and opportunity galore. Add a motive and you concoct trouble [12]. It is also worth noting that a study of 50 insiders convicted of espionage against the United States found that more than a third of them had displayed fragrant disgruntled behavior prior to engaging in espionage [13]. There is evidence of both an increase in overall bitterness among employees in different workplaces over the past decade, and an increase in general employee espionage, sabotage, and retaliation [6,7,14,15]. Nuclear workers are potentially more susceptible to disgruntlement than workers in other fields because a high percentage are scientists, engineers, and technicians with specialized knowledge, training, and education. Such high-tech professionals expect to be respected, valued, treated fairly, and consulted about the conduct of their organization. If these things fail to occur, as is often the case in large government bureaucracies, they can become highly embittered. Exacerbating the problem is the likelihood that many of these technical employees will tend to be characteristically introverted and/or lack subtle people skills, attributes known to correlate with employees who engage in retaliatory behaviors [15]. Changes taking place globally may also contribute to the incidence of employee disgruntlement. These include global downsizing, weakening of labor unions and collective bargaining, the greater use of temporary and limited-term employees, the disappearance of lifetime employment, increased workforce diversity, technical obsolescence, the rapid pace of organizational change, an increase in whisteblowing, and depersonalization caused by increased urbanization, expanding government bureaucracy, the growth of multinational corporations, and the increased use of email and virtual meetings [5-7,10,11,13,14]. In the United States, certain intrinsic attributes of American workers may increase the chances for employees to become disgruntled compared to their counterparts in other nations. These attributes include a tendency to define ones identity through his/her work, working long hours, strong individualism, and a traditional belief in fairness and the American Dreami.e., that one will be rewarded fairly for ones efforts [16]. Moreover, as historian Richard Hofstadter has remarked, Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life [17]. Considering the nuclear risks associated with disgruntled insiders, we believe it is essential not to mislabel employees as being disgruntled, or to overlook those who genuinely are. TRANSPARENCY Transparency in the nuclear arena has come to mean virtually any act of gathering data, including highly invasive on-site treaty inspections and even spying (by satellite or other means) [1, 18-21]. This is a major corruption of a term that originally referred to a nation-state releasing data by engaging in voluntary, unilateral self-disclosure and public openness, conducted in an isotropic, timely, continuous, non-micromanaged, and multi-channeled manner [1]. We fear that by hijacking the original meaning of the word transparency, theorists, planners, and practitioners draw attention away from true openness as a powerful confidence-building measure that can contribute enormously to the success of nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and safeguards.

VERIFICATION Verification is a term that brings along a host of historical baggage, expectations, political arguments, and value judgments [1]. It is often confused with transparency and safeguardsmuch to the detriment of its careful discussion and analysis [1]. The term has an absolutist connotation that is unhelpful because it is inconsistent with the probabilistic, interpretive nature of real-world verification. Further confusing matters is that fact that verification is both a process and an endpoint. SAFEGUARDS Safeguards now refers to a rather vague idea about protecting nuclear materials, with domestic safeguards (MPC&A) becoming blurred with international safeguards (treaty monitoring). In truth, domestic and international safeguards differ dramatically in terms of goals, adversaries, protagonists, resources, time frames, access, facilities, consequences of failure, and other important attributes [1,18]. In particular, domestic nuclear safeguards is very much a traditional security application: The good guys own the assets of interest (nuclear weapons or materials), and control the facilities they are stored in. The bad guys may potentially try to break in for nefarious purposes, and are (ideally) ignorant about many of the security countermeasures employed by the good guys. With international safeguards, however, everything is backwards: The bad guys own the assets and control the facilities they are stored in. The bad guys must know all the details of the security and monitoring hardware being used, or they will not permit its use. The good guys are not present for extended periods of time, yet must be convinced that the bad guys are doing what they promised. Given how radically the two applications differ, it seems self-evident that the hardware, methods, strategies, expertise, and personnel used for domestic safeguards are not automatically appropriate for international safeguards [1,18]. There nevertheless exists in our experience (in part or in some environments), a historical tendency to treat the two functions (domestic and international safeguards) as if they were virtually identical [18]. Indeed, technical assistance provided by the United States and other countries to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or to Euratom typically involves personnel who are primarily domestic safeguards experts. There are also multiple examples of domestic nuclear safeguards techniques and hardware that have apparently been applied to international nuclear safeguards with little or no significant modification, and without a careful analysis, comprehensive vulnerability assessment, or optimization of their new role. These include certain tamper-indicating seals, non-destructive enrichment measurements using gamma ray spectroscopy, neutron coincidence measurements, calorimetry, improved semiconductor detectors, video monitoring systems, and container sampling statistics [18,22]. This unfortunate one size fits all attitude towards nuclear security and safeguards is potentially dangerous. We suggest alternate safeguards terminology. We believe that nuclear MPC&A (Material Control, Protection, and Accounting) is a more accurate and specific term for domestic nuclear safeguards (and security)[1]. International safeguards would be better called what it is treaty monitoringthough in this era of informal disarmament agreements, agreement monitoring might also be appropriate.

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