Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture The IAEA, Iraq, and the Future of Non-Proliferation

The role of organizational culture in international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

In Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture, Trevor Findlay investigates the role that organizational culture may play in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, examining particularly how it affects the nuclear safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the paramount global organization in the non-proliferation field. Findlay seeks to identify how organizational culture may have contributed to the IAEA’s failure to detect Iraq’s attempts to acquire illicit nuclear capabilities in the decade prior to the 1990 Gulf War and how the agency has sought to change safeguards culture since then. In doing so, he addresses an important piece of the nuclear nonproliferation puzzle: how to ensure that a robust international safeguards system, in perpetuity, might keep non-nuclear states from acquiring such weapons.
 
Findlay, as one of the leading scholars on the IAEA, brings a valuable holistic perspective to his analysis of the agency’s culture. Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture will inspire debate about the role of organizational culture in a key international organization—a culture that its member states, leadership, and staff have often sought to ignore or downplay.
 

Trevor Findlay is a Principal Fellow at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Nuclear Energy and Global Governance: Ensuring Safety, Security and Nonproliferation, Unleashing the Nuclear Watchdog: Strengthening and Reform of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and several other books and publications.

List of Illustrations vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
1. IAEA Nuclear Safeguards and Iraq's Nuclear Program 9
2. Missing Iraq: Political and Organizational Explanations 35
3. The Explanatory Power of Culture 71
4. Culture Shock: The Impact of Iraq on Safeguards Culture 127
5. Contemporary Safeguards Culture 171
6. Conclusions and Recommendations 231
Notes 237
Bibliography 313
About the Author 343
Index 345
About the Belfer Center Studies in International Security 361
About the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs 366