The IAEA's role in nuclear arms control: Its evolution and future prospects

Abstract

The International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA's) potential role in nuclear arms control and nuclear disarmament has been under consideration, off and on, since the beginning of the negotiations that led to its establishment in 1957. The advent of the postCold War era, which has been accompanied by fundamental changes in the international geopolitical environment, has created a need for innovative approaches to the building of a new nuclear world order for the 21st century. This, in turn, requires that we reexamine the opportunities that the IAEA may present as an international mechanism capable of managing future nuclear arms control arrangements. As a more distant but no less compelling goal, the Agency should be considered as the likely organization for administering future schemes for international control over nuclear energy, if and when relating to international safeguards-were revisited during the negotiation of the IAEA Statute. Although President Eisenhower had to settle for a more limited proposal than the Baruch Plan, he thought of the Atoms for Peace plan as a step towards a more far-reaching scheme of control over nuclear energy. In a letter to his brother Milton of December 11, 1953, three days after the Atoms for Peace proposal had been submitted by him to the United Nations, he wrote: