Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture - (Belfer Center Studies in International Security) by Trevor Findlay (Paperback)

About the Book

This study is a product of the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. The research was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York--Preface.

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.