Is the IAEA ready for additional verification responsibilities?

The International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, has traditionally been verifying what Member States have declared as their inventory of nuclear material. The Non-Proliferation Treaty Article HI speaks about \"safeguards... shall be applied on all source and special fissionable material in all peaceful nuclear activities ... \" and the NPT type Safeguards Agreements with the IAEA request the parties to accept safeguards on all nuclear material, in a\\l peaceful nuclear activities, on its (the State's) territory or under its control anywhere. Thus , from legal point of view, it does not seem necessary for the IAEA to limit its verification activities to declared nuclear material only. This weakness of the system became very transparent when Iraq's clandestine programme became known. In order for the IAEA to retain its credibility, it has to add certain new activities to its safeguards system in order to repair this imperfection. At the same time there are ongoing discussions to add new tasks to the IAEA, including safeguarding nuclear material coming from dismantling of nuclear weapons, verifying a cutoff treaty, controlling the management of HEU and plutonium, and verifying compliance with a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This paper will, in the light of 1995 NPT extension conference, discuss some questions regarding the continued credibility of the IAEA safeguard and will also briefly discuss some of the consequences for the IAEA should it be asked to undertake additional verification responsibilities. Current safeguards practice is to have safeguards approaches designed for each type of facility in order to be able to detect, essentially through independent accountancy verifications supported by C/S measures and at intervals corresponding to the timeliness goal, the possible diversion of one significant quantity of nuclear materials. The corresponding routine inspections result from the \"safeguards criteria\" and facility attachments, making the timing and scope of most inspection activities quite predictable a long time in advance for the State and the operator. It is felt essential to improve effectiveness by making such inspections quite unpredictable by letting the IAEA choose freely within a much larger range of possible independent verifications.