The Concept and Criteria of Safety

There is a general definition of safety adopted in the international documents of the IAEA: "Safety is the state of protection of a person, society, and the environment from excessive danger." At the same time, the concept of "excessive danger" is disclosed in the text of the definition itself: "Safety is a property of real processes and systems containing sources of threat and their potential victims, to maintain a state with an acceptable possibility of damage caused by incidents" . The concept of "safety" is considered in relation to the category of danger of various factors affecting a person.

In the general theory of state security, various scholarly works and research papers on safety, the basic concepts considered include: "safety," "protection," "subjects and objects of safety," "safety system," "methods of ensuring safety," and others.

Most often, safety is understood as "the state of protection of the individual, society, and the state from external and internal dangers and threats, based on the activities of people, society, the state, and the world community of nations in identifying, studying, preventing, mitigating, eliminating, removing, and repelling dangers and threats capable of destroying them, depriving them of fundamental material and spiritual values, causing unacceptable, objectively and subjectively inadmissible damage, and blocking the path to survival and development" .

Article 1 of the Law of the Russian Federation No. 2446-1 of March 5, 1992, "On Security," defines safety as "the state of protection of the vital interests of the individual, society, and the state from internal and external threats" .

Protection can be regarded as one of the possible but insufficient responses to danger. M. A. Kotik, a leading specialist in the psychology of occupational safety, believes that the concepts of "“protection” and “safety” should not be regarded as synonyms" . The former defines a person's potential capacity to withstand dangers, while the latter is the result of the practical realization of these capacities.

In most studies, safety is considered in the context of ensuring national and information-psychological security.

Our contemporary, Doctor of Political Sciences M. Yu. Zelenkov, believes that safety as a state of preservation and reliability presupposes maintaining a certain balance between the negative impact on a subject from its environment and the subject's ability to overcome this impact, either through its own resources or with the help of bodies or mechanisms specially created for this purpose. He interprets safety as a property of a system that includes potential victims and threats to them. It is ensured by the stability, resilience, and survivability of the victim, and by its use of the following methods: avoidance, protection, or elimination of sources of danger, threats, and challenges. Resilience refers to the ability to function normally under disturbances; stability refers to the totality of resilience to long-acting disturbing factors; and survivability refers to the ability of systems to maintain functioning under conditions of purposeful counteraction" .

The concept of national security includes the following types of security:

• • political (regional, public, diplomatic, informational, etc.);
• • military (space, radiation, military-industrial, naval, nuclear-chemical, etc.);
• • economic (financial, energy, transport, food, etc.);
• • social (medical, psychological, educational, pension, consumer, etc.);
• • cultural (intellectual, safety of art and mass culture, safety of the press and mass media, etc.).

The contemporary researcher in the field of national interests I. L. Prokhorenko views national security as "a combination of internal and external circumstances affecting the life of the state, in which there are no threats of a critical nature, while the state retains a full capacity to respond adequately to these threats should they arise" .

In viewing safety as a combination of "certain circumstances," researchers did not take into account the role of the subject of safety (the individual, the state, society). In our view, it is precisely the subject of safety — characterized by a level of activity, self-regulation, and self-determination — who acts as the organizer or destroyer of their own safety.

In the engineering and technical scientific literature, safety is considered in two aspects: first, as the state of a system together with its infrastructure, other systems of the same level, and external connections, in which the protection of safety objects (the population, territories) is ensured; second, as a certain property or capacity of the given system to maintain a certain stable state.

The first aspect corresponds to the previously given formulation of safety for socio-economic systems. The second is characteristic of organizational-technical systems, which include explosion-, fire-, chemical-, and radiation-hazardous facilities. The concept of safety in this aspect can be formulated as follows: safety is a property (capacity) of an object to maintain, while functioning under certain conditions, a state in which the probability of accidents and catastrophes does not exceed permissible values, and the possible damage is minimal .

Most researchers examining the problem of safety in various spheres of human activity, when defining safety, rely on the notion that there is a relationship between the magnitude of the impact of some harmful factor on the object under consideration and the effect of that impact, observed as a change in the object's functions, composition, and structure.

Safety can be considered at several levels: the individual safety of a person, the safety of society and the family (as a cell of society), state safety, and planetary safety. It is important to remember that a person, as the subject of safety, can become either the organizer or the destroyer of their own safety as well as of societal and state safety, and can even endanger the existence of our planet. In addition to external factors, psychologists draw attention to "internal circumstances." We therefore consider it possible to generalize the existing knowledge and offer the following definition of safety.

Safety is a combination of internal and external factors that contribute to preserving the full capacity of a person, society, and the state to function and develop.

The group of basic safety criteria includes:

• • individual (including medical or sanitary-hygienic) criteria, designed to limit impacts on any person. Indicators characterizing the state of a person's health should be used to measure the degree of a person's safety;
• • genetic criteria, preserving the gene pool and limiting the increase in the frequency of genetic diseases in the first and subsequent generations of offspring;
• • social criteria, limiting the effects of dangerous factors on groups of individuals;
• • psychological criteria, reflecting the degree of rejection by society and individual persons of the level of technogenic risk or natural disaster;
• • economic criteria, designed to ensure stable long-term economic development;
• • technical criteria, placing restrictions on the possibility of accidents and catastrophes, for example, a strict limit on the upper level of probability of a severe accident or the maximum permissible amount of harmful and biologically hazardous substances;
• • biological criteria, designed to preserve species diversity. For example, in Russia a reduction in species diversity of more than 1% is not permitted, and in the Netherlands, more than 5%,
• • ecological criteria, designed to ensure the preservation of ecosystems and therefore limiting impacts on ecological processes in order to preserve the structural stability of the ecosystem.

Restrictive criteria include:

• • geographical restrictions on impacts on drainage basins, soils, and certain other geographical elements within the space of climatic parameters;
• • demographic restrictions on the rate of population growth, which serve as the main criterion, this restriction naturally following from the level of economic development;
• • resource restrictions and regulation of the intensity of use of renewable and non-renewable natural resources.

Safety criteria may also include:

• • political-informational criteria, reflecting the public's awareness of and participation in decision-making on potentially dangerous technologies, and access to any information about them;
• • moral and legal criteria, reflecting the formation of new moral categories and values associated with an understanding of the need for the long-term survival of civilization.

The development of scientifically substantiated safety criteria is a long-term task and requires considerable expenditure on carrying out an extensive complex of research work. However, a certain effect can already be achieved by fully observing existing norms and rules, since they rest on the practical experience accumulated in the design and operation of hazardous facilities and on scientific experience in the field of reliability theory applied to the study of accident processes.

Thus, in constructing a safety system, it is necessary to consider an interrelated set of factors, including both objective external factors characteristic of organizational-technical and socio-economic systems, and the subjective human factor.