Centers of Excellence in East Asia: Encouraging Collaborative Approaches to Nuclear Security

Within the Nuclear Security Summit process and outside of it, the human element has been recognized as a key factor in strengthening nuclear security systems. A number of countries have established or are in the process of establishing centers to serve as hubs or coordinating mechanisms for providing nuclear security training, education, and technical services to a range of relevant stakeholders, including facility managers, regulatory staff, scientists, engineers, or technicians.

This policy analysis brief by Daniel Salisbury and Christopher Hobbs of the Centre for Science and Security Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London examines the role and impact of nuclear security centers of excellence (COE) and nuclear security support centers (NSSC) supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in six East Asian countries: China, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Vietnam.

Salisbury and Hobbs provide an overview of the diversity of the centers and the type of training they offer, assess their efforts at regional and international collaboration and the challenges of metrics in this regard, and develop recommendations for further sustainable development of COE and NSSC in the region. Among these recommendations, the authors highlight the opportunities for centers to provide a significant contribution to international nuclear security initiatives through activities such as the development of scenarios for use in tabletop exercises for the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, collaboration on new and revised guidance documents under development at the IAEA, and improvement of the quality and frequency of nuclear-security-related reporting and information sharing in UN Security Council Resolution 1540 (2004), Proliferation Security Initiative, and the Code of Conduct on the Safety and Security of Radiological Sources.