Analysis of the IAEA’s Approach to Allocation of Safeguards Resources

Almost every state in the world has concluded a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA is responsible for verifying the peaceful use of nuclear materials and facilities in each of these states. The IAEA must allocate its finite safeguards resources among states with a variety of different types of safeguards agreements and different nuclear activities. In recent years, the IAEA has developed its “state level concept”, whereby the IAEA aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of safeguards by developing a different safeguards approach for each state based on an assessment of all of the state’s known nuclear activities, along with other state-specific factors. This paper investigates how the IAEA varies safeguards resource allocation among states. It uses data from the IAEA’s Safeguards Implementation Reports (SIRs) for 2013 and 2014 to investigate variations in the cost of safeguarding each state, as well as variations in safeguards intensity among states. By applying multivariable linear regression, it finds that much of the variation among states, in terms of both the cost of safeguards and the number of person-days of inspection, is explained by the scale of each state’s safeguarded nuclear industry. This paper finds a highly linear relationship between resource allocation and measures of the scale of each state’s nuclear program. The degree of linearity is surprising because, in principle, the number of technically plausible pathways by which a state could acquire fissile material does not bear a simple linear relationship to the size of the state’s nuclear program. The results for 2013 and 2014 indicate that safeguards resources were still being allocated in a largely “uniform” manner, similar to the IAEA’s traditional facility level approaches to safeguards. By applying the new methodology in this paper to future SIR data, it will be possible to track changes in safeguards resource allocation among states as the IAEA progressively develops state level approaches.