Transforming IAEA Nuclear Safeguards Culture

The paper will consider the role played by organizational culture in IAEA safeguards. It will employ a cultural lens to examine the Iraq case in the 1990s to determine whether and to what extent culture may have led to the failure of IAEA safeguards to detect that country’s non-compliance. This analysis, drawing on organizational and cultural theory, will be used to supplement well-known political, institutional, and technical factors. The paper will seek to gauge the impact that the Iraq episode and subsequent non-compliance cases have had on IAEA safeguards culture and to what extent the culture has changed, both deliberately and inadvertently, since then. The paper concludes with some thoughts on how IAEA safeguards culture can be further enhanced to boost the role of safeguards in non-proliferation efforts.