IAEA verification experience related to disarmament and its applicability to the future multilateral disarmament treaties

It is widely recognized that if the US and Russia would continue nuclear disarmament negotiations in the future, they may have to be dealing with numbers of deployed or stored nuclear weapons small enough for arsenals of other states with nuclear weapons to become clearly relevant. Once that happens, the disarmament negotiations process will have to involve such states, including the ones that never signed the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT). Multilateralization of the nuclear disarmament process will most likely bring to the fore the issue of verification of future treaties, which may (if and when successfully negotiated) end up regulating either fissile materials or nuclear warheads or both. The IAEA has already participated in the verification of disarmament efforts in South Africa, Iraq and Libya. Additionally, the IAEA has an experience of implementing safeguards under a wide range of scenarios in all nine states currently having nuclear weapons. This paper will attempt to discuss the practical experience of disarmament verification gained by the IAEA, as well as to try to better understand this experience by putting in a theoretical framework.