The UN's nuclear watchdog began as a failed plan for a nuclear bank
In 1954 the United States proposed an international agency that would take custody of the world's fissile material, a kind of nuclear bank. Moscow refused unless disarmament came first. What survived was a clearinghouse, and in 1957 it became the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based body that now inspects nuclear sites worldwide.
An earlier attempt, the UN Atomic Energy Commission founded in 1946, stopped working in 1949 and was dissolved in 1952. The fresh push came in 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his Atoms for Peace speech before the General Assembly and called for a body to both regulate and encourage peaceful nuclear power amid rising tension between Washington and Moscow. A dozen countries negotiated the founding statute between 1955 and 1957. It was approved in October 1956 and took effect on 29 July 1957, once the United States ratified it.
The agency pursues three missions: spreading peaceful uses of nuclear technology, verifying through safeguards that nuclear material is not diverted to weapons, and raising safety standards. It sits within the UN system yet answers to its own treaty, reporting to both the General Assembly and the Security Council; unusually for such agencies, much of its work runs through the Security Council. After the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, every non-nuclear signatory had to agree a safeguards arrangement allowing inspectors into its facilities. Beyond power plants, its scientists apply isotope techniques to water, farming and health, and since 2004 a programme called PACT has helped poorer countries build radiotherapy services for cancer.
Disasters reshaped its priorities. The agency stepped up safety work after the reactor explosion near Chernobyl in 1986 and again after Fukushima in 2011, when Director General Yukiya Amano proposed peer-reviewed safety checks on reactors worldwide. In 2011 it spent 8.9 per cent of a 352 million euro regular budget on protecting plants from accidents.
Leadership has been remarkably stable. After former US congressman W. Sterling Cole's single term, two Swedes ran the agency for nearly four decades: the scientist Sigvard Eklund, then Hans Blix. Egypt's Mohamed ElBaradei followed, and in 2005 he and the agency shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In Oslo he argued that one per cent of spending on new weapons could feed the entire world. In 2019 Rafael Grossi became the first Latin American to head it.
Source: International Atomic Energy Agency
