Twenty-five years safer? Assessing the IAEA’s Model Additional Protocol and its role in international politics

In 1991, international inspectors discovered Iraq’s clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In seeking this capability, Iraq was violating its commitment to the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. After this discovery, the international community and the International Atomic Energy Agency worked to improve nuclear safeguards so that secret nuclear-weapons activities would be more easily detected in the future. One of these improvements was the 1997 Model Additional Protocol. This article explores the value of the Additional Protocol and argues that it is the strongest signal available to states that they support the nuclear nonproliferation regime and have benign nuclear intentions. The article then assesses the reasons why several notable holdout states remain.