Integrated Safeguards: Issues and Challenges

For most of its history, the IAEA has been acclaimed as a highly professional and competent technical organization. Its safeguards pioneered on-site inspections and involved unprecedented inroads into Member States’ sovereignty. These inspections have evolved over time to meet the challenges posed by new threats, new technologies, and new international undertakings. Until the end of the Cold War, this evolution had been gradual and largely uncontroversial. The revelations about Iraqi and North Korean nuclear-weapon programs resulted in intense criticism and initiatives to fundamentally change the IAEA safeguards system. The IAEA has been working on technological and administrative improvements in safeguards. It faces issues and challenges in developing and implementing integrated safeguards, which are the harmonization of measures under old and new authority. These include developing State-specific approaches; establishing new safeguards criteria; utilizing new tools designed to implement credible capabilities for the detection of undeclared nuclear facilities and activities; pursuing universal adherence to integrated safeguards; and, perhaps, providing for a more intensive involvement in applying safeguards in new roles including countering nuclear terrorism or verifying a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. The IAEA has already begun the process of changing international safeguards. The progress the Agency has made in the last few years will need to continue and focus on key difficulties in order to allow integrated safeguards to evolve to meet new challenges.