The new role of non-proliferation surveillance

Non-proliferation and nuclear safeguards are intimately connected with the peaceful development and use of nuclear power. The contractual obligation to forgo any misuse aimed at the construction of atom boms has been, and is, an important basis of all activities in the nuclear field. For the Federal Republic of Germany and the other participating states, subdivided into nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states, the 1954 Brussels Treaty, which contains a fundamental clause waiving the production of nuclear weapons, the establishment of the European Atomic Energy Community, EURATOM, within the framework of the 1957 Treaties of Rome, and the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Non-proliferation Treaty) within the framework of IAEA are the underlying basic legal instruments. These treaties, and the extended agreements based on them, operated on the basis of the 'old' system of surveillance of fissile material (nuclear safeguards). Both the inspection effort to be coped with by IAEA, which has kept rising steadily since the eighties and for which no additional budget funds were made available, and the violation by Iraq of the treaty as corroborated by a UN inspection team discovering a program for the production of weapons of mass destruction, boosted efforts in the early nineties to revise the existing system of treaties and controls. The International Atomic Energy Agency, among other measures, decided to improve nuclear safeguards by introducing immediate measures and optimization programs and upgrading inspection possibilities by a new model agreement. The model protocol, INFCIRC/153, adopted by the Board of Governors in September 1997 among other things serves to supplement the existing system of verification of the correctness of information received by another system verifying the completeness of such information. It incorporates an extended duty to supply information and extended rights of access. This includes activities not explicitly connected with nuclear activities. The German federal parliament in 2000 passed implementing legislation of the model protocol. After having been signed by all EU non-nuclear-weapon states, the protocol will probably enter into force in late 2001. (orig.)