Taking the Long View: International Collaborations Amid a 21st Century Test for Diplomacy

At the Institutes 55th Annual Meeting in Atlanta in July 2014, we had an extraordinary second plenary session on Tuesday that included a presentation by Tero Varjoranta, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Safeguards (Figure 1). Only two days after the IAEA had provided confirmation to the P5+1 (or E3+3, as it is called in some venues)1 that Iran had implemented all of the voluntary measures it had agreed to under the Joint Plan of Action,2 Tero spoke about the need to further optimize the productivity of the Agency as it faces an ever-increasing international workload, and new challenges with the advancement of technologies and increasingly complex diplomatic efforts to resolve issues in a world where more nuclear facilities and material is coming under IAEA safeguards. The interrelationship of diplomatic efforts to resolve the Iranian situation and the technical capabilities of the IAEA to provide verifiable information to support those efforts is an amazing success story of diplomacy in the 21st Century.