So, one of my friends got back to me on the Trust and Verify blog and said that after reading it, he felt a little dizzy. I thought I’d go back to basics and do a little cut-out-and-keep guide to the IAEA like I did for the CTBTO with that slightly crass frog analogy, especially as the IAEA is in the news a lot right now because of the Iranian talks and the addition of a new pitstop on the IAEA itinerary of fun places to visit in Iran.

Most of the mentions of the IAEA I hear in conversation go something along the lines of “you know, the IAEA, those nuclear dudes, the ones with Hans Blix and Iraq and he was all like ‘no, don’t invade yet cos we still need to do some inspecting and that’ and the US was all like ‘time’s up buddy, ship out’ and then the Iraq war happened and Hans Blix got fed to some sharks by Kim Jong-Il“, which I think is a pretty good identification of the agency.

The IAEA is an international organisation that has two main purposes: a) promote the use of nuclear technology for peaceful uses like energy and treating cancer and so on, and b) discouraging the use of said technology for making nuclear bombs. To do this, it has three main activities:

- Safeguards and verification: this means checking that governments are not diverting nuclear material or misusing technology to make nuclear warhead. This is the famous one that always gets in the news, especially re. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Iran.
- Safety and security: helping governments to improve the safety of nuclear facilities (so as to prevent another Chernobyl) and security to protect them against criminal activity (this is where prevention of nuclear terrorism would fall)
- Technical cooperation: helping countries develop their civilian nuclear technology. This might include energy programmes, but not necessarily – it could also be for medical or agricultural uses.

Some stuff about Safeguards

While some people get frustrated at the limitations of the powers of the UN, the IAEA Safeguards inspectors are necessarily restricted. Firstly, you cannot have forced on-site inspections (the idea was mooted once in the early days of nonproliferation) because governments have to give consent to what’s happening on their territory. Secondly, they can only go in and inspect declared nuclear facilities – these are the ones that governments give their consent to be inspected. And thirdly, they cannot actually view nuclear weapons facilities because that would compromise national military secrets – they are only looking for evidence that suggests that civilian nuclear material and technology are being misused for military purposes.

Muahahaha! I’m a hypothetical evil dictator and I am thinking about developing a nuke and taking over the universe. What happens now?

Well, it would be a bit weird for a government to allow the IAEA to discover substantial proof of a nuclear weapons programme, so suspicions would be aroused by a government being unhelpful to the extent that IAEA inspectors are unable to verify that there is no diversion of nuclear material (slightly too many negatives there!). This is called non-compliance, and while what exactly non-compliance means is a little ill-defined, the IAEA has found non-compliance five times so far. If this kind of stuff interests you, there’s more on it here. The Board of the IAEA then asks the non-compliant country to pull its socks up and reports non-compliance to the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.

That’s all they can do, report me?

I think Hans Blix’s comments on being fed to sharks are helpful in answering this question. The IAEA is the only agency that reports directly to the UN General Assembly and the Security Council (all the other ones have to report to the UN Economic and Social Council). If the Security Council thinks that what it’s hearing has an impact on international peace and security, they do whatever ass-kicking it is the Security Council does, like sanctions and the like. The IAEA itself can stop or suspend technical assistance to the non-compliant government and ask for its stuff back (materials, technology, etc).

Why should we care about this?

The IAEA is part of a nuclear nonproliferation effort that has been remarkably effective in preventing proliferation considering that proliferation estimates in the 1950s predicted as many as 30 nuclear weapons states. Aside from the fact that we do all need someone to go into countries running nuclear programmes and check nothing weird is going on, the interactions of governments with the IAEA and Safeguards are telling about their attitudes towards nonproliferation and weapons, and about their positioning in international politics. Of course, the system is not without many limits, and one continuing question for the international community is how to manage countries who stay outside the mainsteam nonproliferation system and don’t have a Safeguards agreement.

Ta-da!

From Monday next week I’ll be at the International Atomic Energy Agency General Conference (here in Vienna) contributing to the VERTIC Trust and Verify blog coverage of the event. VERTIC is a London-based NGO dealing with verification (checking and confidence-building after states have signed treaties or promised to do stuff) relating to arms control and disarmament (nuclear, biological, chemical), the environment and peace treaties. VERTIC is naturally an observer at the IAEA because much of the Agency’s work relates to nuclear verification, making sure that civilian nuclear projects are not used for military purposes.

I’ll be helping Andreas Persbo, the acting executive director of VERTIC, and Hassan ElBahtimy, nuclear researcher, provide regularly-updating coverage of the Conference. So keep checking! It’ll be just like being there, but without the bag search!

The blog is here.

And the IAEA is here.

The NPT Review Conference does what it says on the tin: every five years, it reviews how the work of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (effective as of 1970) in stopping folks with nukes helping folks without nukes to get nukes. Of course, this only covers the countries who have signed the treaty, and not those who haven’t, who are India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. For a lot of people, the last review conference (2005) went down like a lead balloon because it was as substantively productive as a group challenge on a particularly booze-sodden episode of Charm School.

One of the issues that will come up, of course, is disarmament. To make the distinction, nonproliferation is all about stopping naughty people getting hold of nukes, and disarmament is all about getting countries who already have nukes to throw them (responsibly) in the bin. The NPT members who have nuclear arsenals are the US, the UK, Russia, France and China. As you can imagine, this makes things awwwwkwwaaard with the non-weapons members of the NPT. While disarmament may seem a bit pie-in-the-sky, the NPT text of 1968 does include some vague commitment to nuclear disarmament at some unspecified point one day maybe (“Article VI: Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”). The Review Conference of 2000 produced the ’13 Steps’ – not an Alcoholics Anonymous pledge but an action plan for the implementation of Art VI (which you can read in a super-short document here). The failure of the nuclear weapons states to stick to disarmament rehab was one of the major party poopers in 2005.

Spectators are holding out some hope for the future of the 13 Steps in 2010. First of all, there’s the argument that we live in a post-Cold War, post-9/11 world, and the nuclear weapons powers have other security worries now, and will start to change their thinking accordingly. Then, of course, there’s the Obameffect. One of the big issues is the failure of the US to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and Obama has expressed his support for pushing it through (read this if that means absolutely nothing to you). Here is a weather forecast for NPT 2010 based on the ’3rd Prepcom’ (the Preparatory Committee for the conference – the UN have been preparing since 2007) from Rebecca Johnson of the Acronym Institute.

Blog posts comprising of more than 30 words coming soon, I promise.

Like most hip young people, instead of going out and having fun with my friends on a friday night, I’m staying in, watching BBC World News 24 and guzzling stir fry. Fars have reported 70% turnout at the Iranian elections, the Islamic Republic of Iran news agency site has crashed, and both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are declaring that according to exit polls they have won a majority over 50% that excludes  the possibility of the vote going into a second round, the funny bit being that if what they both say has a ring of truth to it, it’s too close to call, and it will have to go into a second round. It will become a bit clearer tomorrow, though results may delayed by the volume of votes (they had to extend voting for 4 hours). If it is announced in Ahmadinejad’s favour, of course, Mousavi’s supporters and the rest of the world will cry vote-rigging and we shall all go on the road to nowhere. If, somehow, Mousavi is announced president, we can expect Khatami-like politics, but in an even more turbulent world than in Khatami’s time.

Some media sources have noted that Mousavi has said in an interview with Al-Jazeera that he would not suspend the Iranian nuclear programme. Those who express some surprise at this or think this counts against Mousavi are foolish, foolish individuals. What Iranian president would halt the nuclear programme? Why would a presidential candidate who would propose that be allowed to run for office? Why would the president even have more control over that than Ayatollah Khameini? It’s a non-story!

Here’s a bit of background info on the idea of a UN specialised agency for women, which recently came floating back up to the top of the UN pile of proposals.

Doesn’t the UN already have a women’s agency?

No. What already exists is UNIFEM (the United Nations Development Fund for Women), which funds and gives technical assistance to projects aimed at the empowerment of women and gender equality, but it does not have projects of its own.

There is also the Division for the Advancement of Women, and ECOSOC (UN Economic and Social Council)’s Commission on the Status of Women. Then you have the UN Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality, the Office of the General Advisor on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women.  However, none of these are actually agencies, in the way that UNIDO or the ILO are specialised agencies.

So, in a word, no!

Why do we need an agency?

An agency would centralise efforts and pull together the strings in the UN system. It would also be significantly more visible and effective than what is currently there. The dudes listed above are not big players in the UN system. Before I started typing this, out of the list above, I’d only heard of UNIFEM. While few people have heard of the Universal Postal Union or the International Maritime Organisation (both specialised agencies), everyone’s heard of the World Bank, or the World Health Organisation, or the IAEA (well, I suppose it depends who you mean by everyone). But anyway, it would be visible, centralise efforts and make them concrete, you would know who to go to in the UN about women’s issues. And depending on how it’s mandated, it could do significantly cooler stuff than what the system offers now.

This can’t possibly be a new idea, can it?

Oh, not at all. A lot of women’s pressure groups and coalitions have been demanding this for a while, and Kofi Annan supported the idea, but realised he wouldn’t be able to push it through before the end of his term as Secretary-General. There’s still some disagreement about whether the agency would be a beefed-up UNIFEM, or a totally new organisation.

I know I link to the Guardian website way too much, but they’re liveblogging the Iranian elections so it’s hard not to do it today.

Here’s the coverage, oven fresh.

If you don’t want to click on another Guardian link (I’ll give it up next Lent, I promise!), here’s a reasonably good (if not super fresh) collation of comment on Iran on the dissenting Iranian expat site, Iran Va Jahan. And while some people fume at the rhetorical couching of the news on the Islamic Republic News Agency site, I can live with it, and it comes direct from Tehran. There’s also the independent news agency, Fars.

Apologies for the lack of blogging of late. The British news websites, where I get most of my chow fodder from, have been awash with duck landlords and moat owners for the past month. And then, of course, there were the scary European Parliament election results on Monday morning.

The other big election this week is, of course, in Iran. The two elections this week, in Europe and in Iran, although very different and thousands of miles apart, are both defining moments. The European Parliament now has to deal with a strengthened Eurosceptic coalition and a few European countries (the UK included) have to deal with the rise of the far right. The Iranian electorate have to now choose the direction of their country, and this one’s hotly contested. Because of the clear differences between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, this election also has implications for Iranian foreign policy. Well, we know who the West is rooting for, like we knew who everyone was rooting for in the US elections! So I don’t know about you, but I’m keeping my CNN/BBC world on on friday!

In the meantime, here’s some silly Iranian election-themed fun.