Challenge Inspections in Arms Control Treaties: Any Lessons for Strengthening NPT Verification?

Recent revelations of an ongoing and sophisticated nuclear weapons development program in Iraq have lead to suggestions for strengthening International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. Especially troubling was the realization that safeguards, as presently applied, could not detected such a program. It is inspections which have taken since the Gulf War could only posed on a nation which had suffered a military defeat. It has, however, been possibly have clear that the place in Iraq have been imsevere argued that challenge or \"challenge 1 ike\" inspections already incorporated in or proposed for the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (the CFE Treaty) the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Treaty Between the United States and the USSR on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START) might serve as models for enhanced special inspections in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (the NPT). The expectation that none of the challenge or challenge like inspections in the above treaties would provide a model for the NPT was confirmed although certain characteristics of these inspections do provide useful points of departure. Although the context *This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Deptartment of Energy, Contract No. DE-AC02-76CH00016. of challenge inspections in CWC bears substantial similarity to the NPT, it is from the provisions for \"suspect-site\" and \"formerly declared site\", challenge like inspections in START that innovative ideas for strengthening special inspections in NPT may be derived.