PRIORITIZING ACQUISITION PATHWAYS IN THE STATE LEVEL CONCEPT

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Department of Safeguards has stated that it needs to “further evolve its safeguards system to become fully informationdriven in order to optimize the use of IAEA resources for meeting safeguards objectives.” To this end, the Agency is further developing the State-level concept for the planning, implementation and evaluation of safeguards activities with an emphasis on integrating inspection-related activities and the State evaluation process to draw safeguards conclusions in the most efficient way. The credible implementation of acquisition pathway analysis is central to the success of the IAEA’s State-level concept. The Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI) is sponsoring Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to produce a study that will examine the use of acquisition pathway analysis in: developing a state specific State Level Approach (SLA) and Annual Implementation Plan (AIP); structuring the state evaluation process; maximizing the utility of the physical model; and supporting resource allocation decisions through a pathway prioritization. To deal with the challenge of developing a “nondiscriminatory” safeguards approach, this study looks at: (1) basing safeguards resource allocation decisions not on a priori assumptions about a State’s proliferation risk, but rather on its behavior (e.g., transparency, cooperation, etc.); and (2) prioritizing proliferation pathways instead of making subjective judgments about States themselves. The study makes use of case studies and concrete examples in order to illustrate how new concepts and approaches will be implemented, and how they differ from more traditional safeguards approaches.