Consideration of fuel cycle safeguards approaches

Many people in the field of international safeguards agree that the implementation of international safeguards should be carried out in a more effective manner than they have experienced or observed. However, the definition of effectiveness differs from person to person. States have allowed the IAEA to assume hypothesized adversary actions in order to establish technical procedures of actual inspections, but have never accepted an assumption that states might be adversaries to the IAEA safeguards system itself. On the contrary, many states have accepted voluntary IAEA safeguards and have consistently assisted the IAEA in developing and applying its safeguards system. If this fact had been taken into account in the design philosophy of the IAEA safeguards system, it would have been a more cooperative system than the present one. The authors believe the solution is to be found in trade-off procedures between the theoretical effectiveness of the system and its practical implementation, and what decisive parameters to be used in such procedures will be found in the characteristics of the fuel cycle within a state or group of states. They call such an approach to the effective implementation of safeguards fuel cycle oriented safeguards