Year
1967
Abstract
Mr. Chairman, Ladies, Gentlemen: It is a privilege to be able to address myself to an audience of this high level. It includes the leading experts on nuclear material management. The Institute itself has acquired a world wide reputation through the excellent standard of the meetings which it has organized and of the work accomplished at such meetings. It is therefore an honour to address a few observations to you. I am pleased to do this - especially as in the course of the meeting of this year for the first time representatives from the Commission of Euratom, the European Atomic Energy Community, are taking an active part in the proceedings. It is an opportunity for me to assure you of the ever-growing interest aroused in Europe by the work of your Institute. But I also want to take advantage of this first context to offer you some reflections of a general nature prompted by ten years' activity in the field of safeguards, that is to say, ten years of new problems in a field hitherto unexplored, namely the application of multinational safeguards to six countries. •Qjese countries, I would remind you, are France, West Germany, Italy and the three Benelux States. Ihe project was a bold one ten years ago for countries which, a few years earlier, had been embroiled in a savage war. But the experiment has proved a success. I hope that what I am about to tell you will enable you to understand the factors underlying this achievement, for they constitute the conditions necessary for success of any development in this field.