Development and implementation of international safeguards

The unique institution of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards has been commented on at length by both technicians and politicians. IAEA safeguards have variously been extolled as a great international break-through and model for other arms control verification regimes and alternatively as a not very credible arrangement with many weaknesses and contradictions and which cannot, essentially by definition, do the job it's supposed to do. The 1981 bombing by Israel of the safeguarded Iraqi research reactor at Tuwaitha is used by both extremes to support their positions. As a physicist who has been working in this area, among others, for several years it seems to me that neither side is giving the reality of IAEA safeguards a fair deal. The bottom line on safeguards is to ensure that nuclear material, especially plutonium or highly enriched uranium (>20% U-236 but usually 93% U-235) under safeguards, is not used to make nuclear explosives or to further other military purposes. In the first instance they are pretty good and do represent a major concession by sovereign states; but the structure of the safeguards regime was designed in another era. The system has its flaws technically, but it is also a political system which, because of its dual nature can and does do a very useful and important job for the international community