INTEGRATED SAFEGUARDS: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet “What’s in a name?..A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This familiar adage must have made sense to Juliet but it may not hold true for nonproliferation safeguards. For many years, “declared material,” a term that does not even appear in INFCIRC/153, dominated and ultimately came to define comprehensive safeguards, with damaging consequences that are all too familiar. The term “integrated safeguards” is absent from both INFCIRCs/153 and 540, but has dominated safeguards development for the past several years. Is this term, too, destined to lead to potentially undesirable changes in the verification system we know as international safeguards? Is it, as no doubt intended, nothing more than a convenient name for a needed process of optimization in meeting the objective of detecting non-compliance with nonproliferation undertakings? Or is the possibility of both these outcomes present, with the result dependent on how the process of optimization is pursued? Through the Agency’s unequivocal commitment that the safeguards system will continue to be driven by considerations of effectiveness, there is every reason to believe that “integrated safeguards” will not lead to unacceptable compromises with the fundamental principle of independent verification. Nevertheless, a frank recognition that both outcomes are possible and a serious examination of the factors that will determine whether the balance is positive or negative will help ensure the desired result of a more effective and efficient safeguards system. To put the remarks that follow into perspective, they are not intended to suggest that the proper course of action would be to implement the Additional Protocol while leaving classical safeguards unchanged. That option, if it ever existed, has long since expired. The issue of integrated safeguards today is not whether but how, in what degree, and under what circumstances classical measures can be modified to more closely approach the optimum combination of all measures to achieve the safeguards objective of verifying compliance or detecting noncompliance. Under comprehensive safeguards agreements, the acquisition of weapons-usable nuclear material may involve either pathways that include the diversion or use of safeguarded nuclear material, sites, or facilities, or those that rely exclusively on materials, activities, sites and facilities built and operated clandestinely. There is wide agreement that effective safeguards require that all credible pathways to acquisition be covered by a realistic probability of discovery, regardless of the category in which they fall. As we learned from Iraq, to accept less than complete coverage is to provide a would-be proliferator with a free pass to weapons-usable nuclear material. In the case of entirely independent pathways, there is no alternative to seeking to detect their existence through measures that, in the final analysis, rely on the acquisition and analysis of information which the proliferator has done his best to conceal. In the case of pathways that involve both safeguarded and unsafeguarded materials, sites or facilities, the use of the pathway may in principle be discovered either by measures applied to safeguarded activities or by information analysis to identify undeclared activities.