Salzburg Report: SAFEGUARDS

All previous indications had pointed toward the IAEA Salzburg conference being an especially timely and important international meeting on the urgent topic of nuclear energy and its fuel cycle —and certainly from the standpoint of safeguards, Salzburg did indeed live up to all expectations. On opening day, the pivotal issues of nonproliferation and safeguards were clearly the driving force behind the highly controversial new U.S. nuclear energy policy that had been elaborated for heads of foreign delegations by Fri open criticism, and generally negative reaction to the U.S. policy of deferring commercial reprocessing and Plutonium recycle in the United States and calling on other nations to do the same in return for assured fuel supplies, to be secured through future cooperative arrangements between seller and buyer nations. Many delegates from various nations expressed the opinion that deferral or denial of reprocessing had little bearing on the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation inasmuch as reprocessing technology is readily available to any country determined to acquire it, and that in any case commercial reprocessing facilities are by no means the most economical or practical vehicles for obtaining weapons-usable fissile materials Joseph Nye of State and Robertof ERDA. There was initially considerable confusion,