What’s Expected of International Safeguards Evolution of thinking over the decades

Those of us who work on international safeguards and nuclear proliferation “know” what the purpose, the objective, of IAEA safeguards is. But that is not necessarily the same thing as what policy makers – or the public – expect of safeguards. Expectations are not technical, and they are not legal, and for those who do not deal with the details of something at a professional level and on a daily basis, expectations are how success is really measured. This has long been an issue for the IAEA and for those of us who represent professionally what IAEA safeguards are really all “about.” The IAEA has prepared material explaining that safeguards cannot (as no scientific or engineering enterprise can) “prove the negative.” Safeguards can only confirm that declarations about quantities, kind, and locations of nuclear materials are correct, and that nothing was detected that might indicate concealment of something that should be declared but wasn’t.