THE MSSA CONSEQUENCE TABLES: ORIGIN & MEANING

The Master Safeguards and Security Agreement (MSSA) is the mechanism through which the U.S. Department of Energy is implementing a policy of graded safeguards. Under this concept, the level of protection provided to a target is proportional to the \"cost\" of the loss of the target. Cost is measured by use of the conditional risk equation in which the protection system ineffectiveness is multiplied by the consequence to society of a successful adversary attempt. The consequences which are used in the MSSA process were developed in the summer of 1986 by a consensus of DOE per- sonnel and contractors. There are separate conse- quence tables for theft of SNM, radiological sabo- tage, and industrial sabotage. The consequence values in the tables were deliberately not cross- normalized. The consequence values in each table correspond to a societal or DOE cost, for example, the consequence values for SNM theft compared to a normalized estimate of the expected number of fatalities from a successful use of the stolen material times an estimate of the likelihood of successfully using the material. Consequence values for radiological sabotage correspond very roughly to a similar expected fatality level. Values for industrial sabotage are an estimate of the impact on DOE weapons production or impact on the nuclear weapons stockpile. Problems have arisen in the use of these tables and are discus- sed in the paper.