Strategic Panorama 2009 - 2010 - IEEE

Vicente Garrido Rebolledo
to the IAEA by adopting concrete sanctions against Iraq that amounted to
backing the NPT even though two of its permanent members, France and
China, had not yet signed the Treaty.
In what might be regarded as the other side of the coin, many argue
that the Treaty has been unable to prevent some States Parties from benefiting
precisely from their non-nuclear-power status to acquire a nuclear
military capability through transfers of products and technologies from
other countries, whether or not Parties to the Treaty, under the guise of
technologies for exclusively civilian purposes (in addition to Iraq and Libya
in the 1980s, Iran in the early 1990s).
As a result of the debate—and, in particular, following the discovery of
Iraq’s secret nuclear programme (which, despite the US’s accusations, the
IAEA stated to have been fully decommissioned in 1993) (30)—efforts were
stepped up to stem nuclear proliferation by strengthening the IAEA safeguard
system to prevent similar cases from going undetected in the future.
After several years of talks, in 1997 the new enhanced system of
safeguards was adopted. Set out in a «Model Protocol Additional to the
Agreements for the Application of Safeguards» (INFCIRC/540), under
the name of «comprehensive safeguards», the system reinforces the
organisation’s powers of verification by encompassing the whole cycle
of nuclear production (uranium mines, nuclear materials, waste and installations).
The Protocol, ratification of which was non-compulsory (it was
not signed by Iran), allows inspectors access to all nuclear facilities and
infrastructures in a country, guaranteeing fuller knowledge of the activities
it is carrying out (even through the collection of environmental samples)
and identifying more clearly any possible diversion of nuclear materials.
THE REVIEW CONFERENCES OF 1995 AND 2000 AS THE BASIS OF
THE DISARMAMENT AGENDA
Another of the particular features of the NPT lay in the fact that it was
not a treaty of indefinite duration. Initially concluded for a 25-year period,
(30) The report submitted by the Director General of the IAEA to the United Nations Security
Council on 27 June 1998 (S/1998/684) stated that «there are no indications of Iraq having
achieved its programme’s goal of producing nuclear weapons», «most of the IAEA
activities involving the destruction, removal and rendering harmless of the components
of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme […]were completed by the end of 1992» and
«there are no indications of Iraq having retained any physical capability for the indigenous
production of weapon-usable nuclear material».
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