The IAEA Inspections: Creating a Collective Security System

Through their successes, their achievements and the hopes they raised of a world where the law would replace the arbitrary, but also through the failures imputed to them and the fragility of their action, the inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have become a symbol of the capacities, the limits, and the weaknesses of the international system founded in 1945 by the UN Charter. Originally, their objective was much more limited. Historical developments - the Cold War, in particular - have turned the inspections into the major instrument of a unique mechanism of collective security, that is recovering its full significance in the current international context