Purpose: To develop a risk metric for failure cause that can help determine the action priority of each failure cause in FMEA considering time sequence of cause- failure- detection. Methods: Assuming a quadratic loss function the unfulfilled mission period, a risk metric is obtained by deriving the failure time distribution. Results: The proposed risk metric has some reasonable properties for evaluating risk accompanied with a failure cause. Conclusion: The study may be applied to determining action priorities among all the failure causes in the FMEA sheet, requiring further studies for general situation of failure process.