IAEA Photo Surveillance: The First 30 Years

This partly anecdotal history of the IAEA's use of photo surveillance is largely the story of the twin Minolta photo unit. It began in a haphazard manner as a stopgap system in the early 1970s and continued developing over the next two decades into a major surveillance program. The Minolta's two predecessors were the ROBOT and the Contarex, Events in 1978 concerning video development are described at some length because they set back the routine use of video surveillance by about 10 years, thus protracting the use of the twin Minolta systems. At their peak, around 1990, these Minolta units were producing approximately 2,000 inspection films per year with an average of about 5.000 frames per film.