The Changing Role of IAEA

Headquartered in Vienna, IAEA was founded in 1957 as an outgrowth of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace Plan of 1953. Under its enabling statute, it was authorized to:

"establish and administer safeguards designed to ensure that special fissionable . . . materials, services, equipment and facilities made available by the Agency are not used . . . to further any military purpose" (Elliott, 1989, p. 254).

Bundy (1988) and others have criticized this charter for being too narrow (p. 293), but over time the IAEA has become the international agency responsible for establishing safeguards to "deter the diversion of nuclear materials from peaceful uses to military uses through the risk of timely detection" (Spector, 1987, p. 336). Its authority to conduct these activities is derived from the Treaty on the NonProliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which went into force in 1970 and the companion 1967 Treaty of Tlateloco which covers Latin America. Under the NPT, IAEA

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overnmental groups revolutionaries, terrorists or blackmailers"(p. 293). IAEA has a critical but nonetheless limited role in that effort. As of August, 1994, IAEA had 200 trained inspectors conducting approximately 1000 nuclear facilities in over 60 countries (Raphael, 1993, p. A 18). The comparable number of facilities inspected in 1985 was approximately 514 in 51 countries (Spector, 1987, p. 245). The reason for this expansion in IAEA's detection activities is a series of shocks received by the world with respect to theretofore covert warmaking nuclear developments in India, Pakistan, Iraq, North Korea and possibly Iran. As the emphasis of IAEA has shifted away from support of peaceful nuclear development to the monitoring of weapons programs, some knowledgeable observers, such as nuclear scientist Gordon Thompson, have alleged that there is an inherent conflict between the two activities and that IAEA should shed its nonmilitary related functions (Thompson and Burkenhas, 1992, p. 18 and Thompson, 1993, p. E 14). Once a nation makes the investment in a large civilian reactor, it can proceed to the next step provided it has facilities to enrich natural uranium into U 238 or to reprocess U 238 into plutonium (P 239). The
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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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