Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture: The IAEA, Iraq, and the Future of Non-Proliferation

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.