ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author offers his thoughts on the place of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the international order, and its role in addressing the multiple challenges that appeared in the 1990s and played out over the next decades, including the need to strengthen safeguards in the aftermath of the Gulf War, noncompliance by North Korea and Iran, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears of “loose nukes.” Like most of the international institutions established in the postwar period, the IAEA has always had critics in the United States. During the early 1990s, as the IAEA worked to put an effective inspection regime in place in Iraq, it faced another crisis: the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and the question of what would become of its vast nuclear arsenal. The IAEA also played an indispensable role in addressing the North Korean nuclear crisis of the early 1990s.
