Critiques on Security and Probabilistic Risk Analysis

Critiques on Security and Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA)
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July 29, 2017
During my research, I was able to find strong and highly regarded credentials for the authors (except Dr. Giovanni Manuntra) which would be the topic of this paper. Our first author, Norman C. Rasmussen, was originally a physicist and a professor in MIT. Since he was the head of the nuclear engineering department, and is primarily focused in gamma rays and radiation research, he established the fields of Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA) and Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) in order to determine potential dangers in nuclear research and technology CITATION Sal03 \l 1033 (Sales, 2003). Because of him, PRA was established, and was then proven to be useful not only in nuclear research, but also in other fields such as national and international security. More specifically, in his paper entitled Probabilistic risk analysis: its possible use in safeguards problems, he reviewed an RSS (Reactor Safety Study) about its tools and methodologies in determining the risk involve in nuclear research as well as other “societal activities” that might affect it. However, it is apparent that PRA as used in this paper, is focused more on the assessment of potential failures in safety systems of power plants and the health consequences that it entails, rather than possible security breaches or acts of terrorism. This brings us to another author which has focused on PRA assessment of “human variables” than mechanical and safety features.
The next article, How Probabilistic Risk Assessment Can Mislead Terrorism Risk Analysts on the other hand, critiques PRA and its methods when used against the human variable. According to Brown and Cox (2011), the problems with using traiditional PRA (as used by Manuntra) is that the methods and tools which ...