Barriers against military misuse

Attempts at misusing the peaceful use of nuclear energy for the production of nuclear weapons are prevented by the use of effective international inspection. The construction of nuclear weapons also requires extremely pure fission products, which do not occur in the commercially used light water reactor fuel cycles. Also, an optimum trigger mechanism would have to be developed, which can only be done by years of development or by spionage. The commercial enrichment and reprocessing plants could only be converted to military use with great efforts. This could not be done unnoticed by international inspection. The corner-stone of all efforts is the International Non-proliferation Treaty, which was supplemented by regional agreements. (orig.)