Iran nuclear deal: Are IAEA safeguards ‘dangerously obsolete’?

As US and Iran try to revive nuclear deal, experts warn about IAEA safeguards governing the frequency of inspections.

As United States and Iranian negotiators attempt to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, experts are sounding the alarm over the standards that govern how frequently international watchdogs inspect the world’s civilian nuclear facilities to ensure that weapons-grade materials are not diverted to military uses. A report (PDF) released on Thursday by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC), a Washington, DC-based non-profit, warns that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is using long-outdated benchmarks for detecting amounts of redirected nuclear materials needed to make an explosive device with a destructive capacity rivalling the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The benchmarks in question are known as “significant quantities” – or SQ values for fissile materials. Those SQ values determine how often the IAEA inspects civilian nuclear facilities to ensure that dangerous amounts of plutonium or enriched uranium are not channelled covertly into weapons programmes.