Year
2002
Abstract
In 1994, in response to the new R&D and political scenarios emerging for safeguards in the last decade, the European Safeguards R&D Association (ESARDA) decided in to undertake a thorough review of current science and technology initiatives aimed, in particular, at identifying new fields of R&D and new techniques not yet applied in safeguards that could help in increasing efficiency and effectiveness at no additional cost. With this objective in mind and to stimulate interchange amongst experts in the various technologies and in safeguards, ESARDA promoted a number of activities, some of them jointly with INMM. These activities were grouped in three areas. First, together with the INMM, ESARDA organised, a series of workshops on “Science and Modern Technology for Safeguards”, with the aim of informing the safeguards community about selected sciences and advanced technologies that are currently available or that will become available in the next few years and that could be used to support the required advances in international safeguards and non-proliferation. Three Workshops have been held and a fourth one is under preparation in co-operation with INMM, to be held in 2003, which will be focusing on “New Verification Technology in a Changing Nuclear Environment”. The second area of reflection concerned the similarities between nuclear safeguards and other verification conventions, both nuclear (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT)) and non-nuclear (Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), Biological Weapons Convention (BWC)), but which are also concerned with the control of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Such similarities, if properly investigated, may lead to interesting scientific developments useful for nuclear safeguards and, at the same time, to significant cost saving. Therefore ESARDA decided to dedicate its 1998 Annual Meeting to the topic, “Modern Verification Regimes: Similarities, Synergies and Challenges”. The third reflection area has been more focused onto the challenges presented by the new safeguards concepts (integrated safeguards, the Additional Protocol) and the new environment in which nuclear safeguards is to be implemented. The 2000 ESARDA Annual Meeting was dedicated to integrated safeguards issues and the 2002 ESARDA Annual Meeting had the theme: “R&D Responses to the New Safeguards Environment. This paper presents some findings drawn and lessons learnt from the above event