Year
2009
Abstract
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and colleagues, it is a great honor and pleasure to be here today on behalf of the IAEA with my team, Jill Cooley, Jack Baute, and Diana Fischer. In total, there are half a dozen of us here to tell you about the future of safeguards and about the future of the IAEA. When I came here, I went to Wikipedia to find out what the world was like in 1959, the year the INMM was established, 50 years ago. It was a very interesting survey. I am not going to go through the entire history from 1959 until today, but a couple of remarks. Back in 1959 gasoline was 25 cents a gallon in the United States of America. It was the rosy dawn of nuclear energy. People had acknowledged the benefits of nuclear energy, but as Charles Curtis put it a few minutes ago, there was also recognition of the possible downside of nuclear energy; how it might be misused. An important step was taken that year: IBM produced the first computer to use transistors rather than electronic tubes. Indeed, this was a very important step for our verification world of today. Modern information technology is the backbone of verification work.