The international level

Abstract

After the experience in Iraq in 1991 and with the difficulties verifying the initial nuclear material inventory for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recognized that additional steps were necessary to strengthen its safeguards system. Clearly, the interpretation of comprehensive safeguards agreements (based on INFCIRC/153 Corr. [1]) until that time was focused almost entirely on the verification of nuclear material, its accounting practices and inspections restricted to key measurement points only. In the years after the revelation of Iraq's nuclear programme, the Agency's Board of Governors approved a number of new measures, as proposed by the IAEA Secretariat. There was little time to loose, and these measures were implemented speedily. One of them concerned the use of additional information, which, until then, was deemed to uncertain and unfocussed. © 2006 Springer Berlin · Heidelberg.