Inspectors on the ground

It is the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which is responsible for monitoring that any authorised use granted to the NNWS is respected. The use of the Agency to carry out verification tasks enables, through its presumed independence, this monitoring to be rendered politically acceptable for the recipient States. But the problem is that the IAEA guarantee systems only concern a proportion of the goods which nuclear law subjects to transfer authorisation. In effect the majority of the checks bear on, historically, source or special fissionable materials, and not on equipment, technologies, facilities etc. Why? Because at the beginning of the 1950s it was thought that uranium deposits were so rare and so localised on the planet that a ‘proliferating’ State could not access them without the main supplier States knowing it. Thus a monitoring of materials seemed widely sufficient. A concrete example: if such or such a quantity of nuclear material has ‘disappeared’ from the normal circuit, the IAEA’s verifiers might suspect fraudulent use. But the discovery of an increasing number of uranium mines has rendered this view obsolete and pushed the supplier States to be more actively concerned by equipment and technology transfer. Without however succeeding in putting into practice a verification system which guaranteed that the use of these goods was really in line with the ‘civil’ objective which had been declared.

The system established by the NPT has a precise technical objective: detecting in time the diversion of significant quantities of nuclear materials from peaceful activities towards the building of nuclear weapons, and to dissuade any such diverting through the risk of rapid detection. It is not a question of providing proof that a nuclear weapon has been clandestinely constructed, but of simply establishing that nuclear materials have disappeared from the normal circuit. Today, however, the system of guarantees must verify not only if the declarations made by the States are true, but also if they are exhaustive and complete: what people are thus looking for is to ensure that there are no undeclared nuclear activities. In addition to a regular accounting of the flow of nuclear materials and precise and regular information about all the activities linked to the nuclear fuel cycle, the system of guarantees enables the IAEA to regularly carry out on-site inspections. They are carried out by the IAEA’s inspectors, designated in agreement with the State being monitored. During these on-site checks, the inspectors examine the accounting of nuclear materials but can also take independent measurements, take samples from the environment, use seals and other systems to identify and detect fraud, etc. They enjoy, on the territory of all the Member States, the legal capacity and the privileges and immunities required to carry out their functions.

Any violation of the guarantee agreements observed by the IAEA inspectors is brought to the knowledge of the Agency’s chain of command, which informs every Member State of it and refers it to the UN’s Security Council and General Assembly. Once informed, the States can decide to act individually and/or collectively. The sanctions can be of a political nature (breaking off diplomatic relations), an economic nature (embargo), and even of a military nature.

Up until 1991, the alarm procedure only seemed to have a marginal effect on a State which deliberately opted for concealment. But things seem to have changed that same year when the UN’s Security Council for the first time took a decision related to a manifest violation of the IAEA guarantee system, condemning Iraq and authorising sanctions against Baghdad involving, if necessary, the use of force. The sanctions imposed on Iraq following the discovery of its clandestine programme (elimination of weapons of mass destruction, destroying missile launch systems, etc.) have had, without the shadow of a doubt, a dissuasive effect on States potentially interested in developing nuclear weapons.

More recently the embargo imposed on Iran is another example of the sanctions adopted by the UN’s Security Council. In total 4 resolutions have been adopted, quasi unanimously, from 2006 to 2010. The main cause for these measures was the reticence of the Iranian authorities to comply with IAEA requests, in particular to supply a list of all of its nuclear facilities and to authorise access to the Agency’s inspectors. If the tone of these resolutions has tended to harden, they for the most part consist of a more and more severe restriction of trade exchanges of nuclear and related goods with Iran, but they do not allow the use of force, as was the case for what was imposed on Iraq in 1991.