International safeguards without material balance areas

Recently altered perceptions of the role of the non-proliferation regime, as well as continued IAEA funding constraints, suggest a need to re-examine the fundamentals of IAEA verification strategy. This paper suggests that abandoning certain material balance area (MBA) related concepts that nominally form the basic framework of ''full-scope'' safeguards would result in a more flexible inspection regime. The MBA concept applied in the domestic context enables a national authority to localize losses in space and in time and to minimize the need to measure in-process inventory. However, these advantages do not accrue to an international verification regime because it cannot truly verify the ''flows'' between MBAs without extensive containment/surveillance measures. In the verification model studied, the entire nuclear inventory of a state is periodically declared and verified simultaneously in one or two large segments (containing possibly many MBAS). Simultaneous inventory of all MBAs within a segment would occur through advance ''mailbox'' declarations and random selection of MBAs for on-site verification or through enhanced containment/surveillance techniques. Flows are generally speaking not verified. This scheme would free the inspectorate from the obligation to attempt to verify on-site each stratum of the material balance of every facility declaring significant quantities of nuclear material