 On December 8th, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower came to the United Nations General Assembly to propose a global nuclear energy program. Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starred areas of the world. The United States pledges before you to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death but consecrated to his life. The delegates applauded with enthusiasm as they realized Cold War military secrecy was out. Sharing information, nuclear technology and uranium was in. Atoms for war were about to become Atoms for Peace. Hello, I'm Tom Wellock, the historian for the NRC. The Atoms for Peace program left a complex legacy. It jump-started the civilian nuclear industry, and U.S. reactor designs dominated the global market. But Eisenhower's utopian ambitions for Atoms for Peace proved elusive. He hoped the program would lead the post-war world, as he put it, out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light, toward peace and happiness and well-being. But the Atoms light was clouded by questions about reactor safety and how to create safeguards that prevent reactor fuel from being made into bombs. Sixty years later, safety and safeguards make the NRC's international programs a critical mission. In the 1950s, protecting safety and safeguards seemed relatively simple. The United States and Soviet Union supported the International Atomic Energy Agency's efforts to create binding safeguard agreements. The United States also required that any nation purchasing its reactor technology had to accept our regulatory input and inspections of its facilities. But this system did not stop France and China from exploding their own weapons in the early 1960s. To keep the nuclear club small, 61 nations signed the Nuclear Non-Polarification Treaty in 1968. Non-nuclear nations pledged that they would not develop nuclear weapons in exchange for access to civilian nuclear technology. Unfortunately, there were exceptions. In 1974, India, which had not signed the treaty, detonated what it claimed was a peaceful nuclear device. The blast concerned other nations because India did it by using resources from its civilian nuclear program, which it had set up with assistance from France, Canada, and the United States. But even greater concern was the rise in global terrorism, underscored by the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Was it possible that terrorists could steal nuclear material to make weapons? Nuclear plants abroad might lead to nuclear terrorism at home. Meeting these challenges proved difficult. By the time the NRC was created in 1975, the United States no longer monopolized nuclear technology, and it didn't control the debate over safety and safeguards. After the oil crisis, Western nations needed to spur exports, and West Germany announced it would sell to Brazil uranium enrichment facilities, nuclear power plants, and technology for spent fuel reprocessing. To some countries, the move was alarming, since uranium and plutonium could be diverted from enrichment and reprocessing plants. In 1976, U.S. negotiators convinced other nations to restrict such exports, but they couldn't win support for an outright ban. Even as U.S. dominance of the global market waned, the U.S. designed reactors that had already flooded the world market provided opportunities for international cooperation. The NRC collaborated with other nations to share information and to pool resources for research. For example, Japan and West Germany supported research at Idaho National Laboratory for loss of coolant accidents, and the U.S. helped fund research in Sweden on containment building performance. Then came the 1986 accident at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It ushered in a new era of nuclear international relations, which had stalled after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Chernobyl and warming relations between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev spurred a dialogue among regulators. NRC chairman Lando Zek and his Soviet counterpart signed an accord to create working groups of Soviet and NRC specialists on safety issues. Over the next decade, the NRC's technical and diplomatic responsibilities grew. Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics such as Russia and Lithuania needed help making the reactors safe. The collapse of the Soviet Union really provided the first opportunity for the international nuclear safety community to really understand and appreciate what the safety issues were and the safety concerns were associated with the Soviet designed reactors. The international community, through the heads of state of the G7, convened a special conference in Lisbon, Portugal in 1992. At that conference, they actually established a special program to focus on safety issues with Soviet designed reactors. We supported the Lisbon initiative by working with our regulatory counterparts to help them establish their basic regulatory infrastructure, the infrastructure that you need for oversight of a nuclear power program. For example, the attorneys from the NRC spent a lot of time and effort working with their counterparts to help them draft nuclear legislation. On the technical side, we did technical activities as well. We would bring our counterparts over to work with NRC staff, learn from NRC staff. We help train and provide things like computer codes, the computer codes that the NRC uses for our own confirmatory safety analyses. Even today, our regulatory counterparts, the countries that we worked with are still relying upon and still utilizing the regulatory infrastructure that we help them build. On the diplomatic front, the NRC supported post Chernobyl treaties to provide notification and assistance to other nations in the event of an accident. Later conventions created an international framework for the safety of spent fuel, waste and nuclear power plants. The latter was known as the Convention on Nuclear Safety. After the Chernobyl accident, it took about five years for countries to negotiate this document. It is a legally binding document that ensures that there is a national regulator that has independence, that has sustained funding, that has skilled personnel and has the ability to inspect and enforce. It also is unique in that it is an incentive convention. It tries to bring countries together to discuss safety and ensure that there is support for all countries that are engaging in nuclear power. Using carrots rather than sticks has improved safety regulation without violating national independence. The end of the Cold War also raised safeguards issues. Former Soviet republics had large stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium. Through its import licensing mission, the NRC helped implement an agreement dubbed the megatons to megawatts program. It turned this uranium intended for bombs into reactor fuel for nuclear power plants. Quite literally, atoms for war became atoms for peace. In the last decade, events such as 9-11 and Fukushima have expanded the NRC's international programs. Its mission is still safety and safeguards, but it has taken on new areas such as security and helping other nations keep track of many kinds of radioactive material. As the world becomes ever more interconnected and as interest in nuclear power continues in some parts of the globe, the NRC's international programs have become more essential than ever.