International Atomic Energy Agency

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The Vienna-based agency, established in 1957, that became the inspection arm of the non-proliferation system. Its Cold War significance is administrative rather than dramatic: the Non-Proliferation Treaty obliges each non-nuclear-weapon state party to accept safeguards negotiated with the Agency on all its peaceful nuclear material, which converts a political promise into a measurable accounting problem — material balances, design information, seals, cameras and inspector access. The Agency does not enforce; it reports to its Board of Governors, and what happens next is political. That division of labour is the structural weakness that later proliferation cases all turned on, and it was designed in from the start, because no state would have accepted an agency with enforcement powers.