Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements - Recent Experience
Comprehensive IAEA safeguards have been applied since the 1970s and no diversion of any significant quantity of material which has been placed under safeguards has been detected. The discovery in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War of a clandestine nuclear weapons development programme involving the separation of a few grams of plutonium from irradiated fuel, together with an extensive programme of uranium enrichment involving large quantities of undeclared uranium, was a watershed in the history of IAEA safeguards. It should, however, be noted that in Iraq the safeguards applied to the declared material effectively ensured that the highly enriched uranium in the fuel of the safeguarded reactor at Tuwaitha was not used in the weapons development programme (see picture: Measuring fuel at a Tuwaitha reactor damaged during the Gulf War). The discovery of the Iraqi nuclear weapons development programme has led to the recognition that the IAEA safeguards system must be strengthened to provide assurance, not only of the non-diversion of declared material but also, as far as possible, of the absence of any undeclared nuclear activities in States which have signed comprehensive safeguards agreements with the IAEA.
Following South Africa's signature of the NPT in 1991, the IAEA General Conference requested the Director General to verify the completeness of the inventory of nuclear installations and material included in South Africa's initial report to the IAEA. As a result of the request by the General Conference, an IAEA team made a number of visits to South Africa to consult with officials and to examine historical accounting and operating records of both operating and closed down facilities. In addition, a large number of measurements were made of various types of nuclear material. The team's general conclusion was that there was no evidence to suggest that the declared inventory of nuclear installations and material was incomplete. Following South Africa's announcement of their abandoned nuclear weapons programme, the IAEA examined the facilities which had been involved in the programme and their associated historical data in order to observe that the programme had been terminated and to gain assurance that all the nuclear material used in the programme had been accounted for and was under IAEA safeguards (see pictures: Rendering harmless the Kalahari test shafts in South Africa).
In the case of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), inspections conducted in 1992 found inconsistencies between the information provided by the DPRK and the information obtained by the analysis of samples of material taken by IAEA inspectors. These inconsistencies suggested that the DPRK had not declared all of its nuclear material (see picture: IAEA visit at a reactor in the Dempcratic People's Republic of Korea). The IAEA also obtained information on sites in the DPRK which appeared to be nuclear related and which had not been declared in the initial report covering nuclear facilities. Because the DPRK would not allow the IAEA to carry out activities necessary to resolve the inconsistencies, the matter was reported to the IAEA Board of Governors, which decided to refer the matter to the United Nations Security Council.
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