Fifty Years Of NPT Safeguards

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entered into force on March 5, 1970 and led to a transformation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards system. Article III of the NPT requires each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to conclude a comprehensive safeguards agreement (CSA) covering not just specific materials or facilities but all nuclear material in all peaceful nuclear activities in a state. The IAEA Board of Governors approved the structure and content of CSAs in 1972, and as the NPT has become nearly universal, so have CSAs. The NPT does not require nuclear-weapon states (NWS) to accept safeguards, but all five now have “voluntary offer” safeguards agreements in force based in part on pledges made during NPT negotiations. In the 1990s it became clear that implementation of CSAs up to that time was insufficient for the IAEA to provide credible assurances that states were meeting their NPT obligation to place all nuclear material under safeguards and that their declarations to the IAEA in that regard were both correct and complete. Following Program 93+2, the IAEA Board decided to strengthen its implementation of CSAs and to develop a new legal instrument, the Additional Protocol (AP), to give the IAEA additional information and access needed to provide credible assurance of the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in a state. The great majority of NPT Parties, particularly those with safeguarded nuclear facilities, now have APs in force, making the combination of a CSA and an AP the de facto standard for achieving NPT safeguards objectives. The IAEA continues to refine and optimize its approach to providing credible safeguards assurances at the level of the State as a whole. This paper will review key developments in the evolution of safeguards from the negotiation of the NPT up to the present day.