TO: Mohammed ElBaradei
Director General, IAEA

FROM: George Perkovich

RE: Handling Radioactive Facts

Let’s be honest. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not a household name. Many political leaders and pundits still garble the agency’s abbreviation. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the importance of the agency’s work. Nuclear proliferation is a growing menace. The war in Iraq has revealed the difficulty of preventive wars of disarmament and thereby underscored the critical role the Vienna-based agency must play. Still, its recent record is mixed. Weak safeguards allowed Iraq to advance its nuclear-weapon program before the 1991 war, but agency vigilance in the 1990s—authorized and supported by the U.N. Security Council—ultimately helped eviscerate Iraq’s nuclear program. IAEA inspectors discovered North Korea’s secret, illegal diversion of plutonium for nuclear weapons in 1992 and more recently helped expose a long history of Iran’s illicit attempts to create a nuclear-weapons capability.

The world’s security now depends more on the IAEA than ever before. The agency has grown stronger under your leadership, but a confusing mandate created by states, limited investigative procedures, and an occassional aversion to publicizing unpleasant facts sometimes hamstring the agency. Your challenge, Mr. Director General, is to uncover and expose facts so plainly that states cannot ...