 We acknowledge the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Nunnerworld people past and present. My name's Rory Medcarff. I'm the head of the National Security College here at the Australian National University in Canberra. It's my real pleasure to welcome you to this event today, one of our public outreach and policy engagement events at the college. We do a lot of training, a lot of education, a lot of which occurs behind the scenes, but as an institution that is both an independent academic institution, but also a training institution set up in partnership with the Australian government. We see it very much as part of our mission to enrich the public debate on security issues of great public importance. I think that the set of issues around nuclear weapons, nuclear security, non-proliferation, disarmament and all the wider nuclear risks and challenges are very much one of those sets of issues of wider concern. So it's with that in mind that we've decided this year and beyond at the National Security College that we'll be increasing our attention and focus on nuclear issues. Also because as the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Peter Bogey is reminded us this week in a lecture elsewhere here at the university, the John G Memorial Lecture. Australia's nuclear expertise is in decline. This nation is at risk of losing a lot of the informed and expert insights that it needs. If it's going to pursue agendas in, for example, non-proliferation, if it's going to indeed manage its own nuclear future, whether it's in research or energy or safeguards or what have you. So I think in the national interest that the college here does more to foster interest and debate on nuclear issues. And that brings us to tonight's topic and our speaker. So with the, this is one of the few events we felt recently that has an exclamation on proliferation alert. But in all seriousness, this is an issue of alert and alarm. The very in-depth research that's been unveiled here this evening by Dr. Trevor Finlay, looking at non-compliance reporting and the International Atomic Energy Agency. It's a piece of research that I'll let Dr. Finlay unveil in more, at a greater length of a moment. But it's about very serious issues of how effective is the global nuclear proliferation regime when it comes to the crunch and it comes to dealing with state's non-compliance with the treaty. How effective is the system really both in reporting and follow through. Now this piece of research by Dr. Finlay, it'll look both at the theory and the practice of non-compliance assessment. Looking at the key cases to date, of course Iran, I believe, will come up pretty early in that conversation. But this goes beyond countries in the Middle East. It looks also, for example, at North Korea and indeed it's at South Korea as well. So it looks really with a very global focus. This project, and Trevor will explain a little bit more, I think about the genesis of this project and the further research that it's leading to, it's really the result of two years, isn't it, of very substantial research which we're sharing with you this evening. Both, I think, in exactly a summary form outside, but also this is the full report which is available online. Now one or two points about our speaker, about Trevor, who I've had the pleasure of knowing for some years now as part of the international nuclear non-proliferation mafia, and has been very proud to say a very prominent Australian in that important informal club. So Trevor Finlay has recently returned to Australia from, I think, a very extended and distinguished state overseas, particularly in the United States, working in this field. He's recently been appointed Principal Fellow at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and has been working very much in this space. But until recently, until very recently, Finlay was Senior Fellow with the International Security Program and the project on managing the Atom at the Belfer Center in the United States, which of course those of you who have been working in this space know is really absolutely the pinnacle of global research and thinking on these issues. He's also been Professor of the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs at Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada, and Holder of the William and Jeannie Barton Chair in International Affairs. He's a member of the US Secretary General's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters, and his career in this space began quite some time ago, but not that long ago, in the 20th century, here in Canberra, with both a doctorate in international relations at the AMU, but also working originally for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra. So from practitioner to research, it's been quite a journey and we're privileged to listen to you here this evening. So please welcome Trevor Finlay. Thank you, Rory, very much. And it's a great pleasure to be here at my Elmer Martyr, as the Americans say, and this impressive new facility. I didn't actually know this building was here till today. It looks terrific. So as Rory said, what I want to do is to describe for you the research I've been undertaking for the past two years on this subject of noncompliance. So here's the outline. I'll talk a bit about the aims of the project, the methodology I used, seeing this as an academic setting, I think that's necessary. Some of the terminological pitfalls that I encountered while I was doing this and they're still rife within this field. So make sure that I don't misuse the terms as I come to describe them. I'll talk about the issue of noncompliance reporting in theory, which is one thing, and then how it actually works out in practice, which is quite another. And then I'll talk a bit about the applicability of the Iran agreement. And I think that's one of the reasons why this report just happens to be timely because now we're thinking of course about how we're going to verify compliance by Iran with its undertakings under the JCPOA. I presume you're familiar with some of these acronyms, otherwise I'll be here all night. So the aims of the study, it was to examine the theory in practice, as I've said, of IAEA noncompliance reporting, and to consider the various roles of the players. And hopefully you're familiar with some of these, the Secretariat, the Director General of the IAEA, the Board of Governors, which is the Management Authority at the IAEA, the UN Security Council, which as you know, is the Protector of International Peace and Security, and then various ad hoc players. And until I did this study, I hadn't quite realized the number of ad hoc players who have been involved in this business and tasking the IAEA with various tasks. The report is a comprehensive survey of the eight cases to date, the eight serious cases of noncompliance with safeguards that have been discovered. And it is surprising that so little has been written on this area because I think it is one of the most difficult areas. Verification and monitoring has received a lot of attention in the literature, sanctions and the role of the Council, the UN Security Council has received a lot at the other end. But I'm dealing with that middle bit of the noncompliance life cycle if you like. So it starts with monitoring and verification, it goes through a whole series of noncompliance steps and it ends up sometimes in the UN Security Council. So it's the middle section I'm dealing with of that life cycle. In my report, I've drawn some conclusions and made some recommendations and then I consider the Iran case. The methodology, it's the standard fare really, but I just did want to note the importance of memoirs of IAEA officials and government officials. They really reveal the human face behind this. And one of the things that struck me in looking at all these cases was that this is a deeply human activity with all its foibles and all its quirks and interpersonal relationships are very important, particularly when it comes to the relationship between the IAEA and governments that are under suspicion of noncompliance. And I had the benefit of talking to many government officials and IAEA officials, but as usual, they declined to be named in my report. So you'll see a lot of things in that report, which I don't necessarily have the ability to source, but you just have to take my word for it. Some of the terminological pitfalls in this business, and there are a lot, I'm just astonished how people misuse terms. And the first one is report not referred. So even the director general of the IAEA gets this wrong. The real term and the reason I titled my report, this noncompliance reporting is because you actually report a case to the board of governors. You report a case to the UN Security Council. You don't refer. And I think the reason there is opposition to the use of referral, because it sounds like the IAEA simply hands over the case to the UN Security Council and washes its hands of it. That's not how it happens at all. The agency never hands the case over. It reports to the council and the agency continues to be seized, that's a great word for you, seized of the issue at the same time as the council does. And the council will often anyway refer back to the agency and say, okay, do more verification work, do more inspections, get more information. So I can really see the point why the legal department, especially at the IAEA, get very upset about the use of the word refer. So it's report. So I'll do that occasionally laps into refer. I did that this morning at DFAT, but it's such a common misuse of the term. There are competing definitions of noncompliance and the interesting thing in this field, there's no definition of noncompliance. So this poses an enormous challenge for the agency. They essentially have to make this up as they go along. Some people say, well, it's a noncompliance case if the board so decides. Some say it's if the UN Security Council decides. In my report, I take the common sense definition, if you will, that any breach of an agreement is a case of noncompliance, whether it's minor, major, in between. I don't think you can really write a report on this subject without taking that stance. Otherwise you're qualifying yourself the whole time. But the agency itself does not characterize noncompliance cases as trivial, minor, major or serious for a very good reason because it then might give the impression that somehow, well, you can have a minor transgression. We're really only worried about the major ones. And I think that's very wise on the agency's part. So you'll never see them use these qualifiers. They'll talk about serious concern, for instance, but they won't attach an adjective to noncompliance. Then something that also occurred to me while I was doing this is in English at least. And the thing is we're working in English, but there are a hundred and whatever member states of the agency whose native tongue isn't English. So again, problems arise from this, including because the director's general aren't native English speakers. So there are two meanings of report in English. One is neutral, just to simply provide information. And if you read the statute, that's the way it sort of implies is the case. You're simply reporting information. But the other is pejorative, like reporting a misdemeanor to the police. So in the Iran case, the early Iran case, when John Bolton, US under Secretary of State for Disarmament was talking about reporting Iran to the Security Council, he really meant naming and shaming Iran. So that has a different complexion to simply providing information to the council. So again, in this field, and you see people switching between these two meanings all the time without actually realizing it. So again, in this field, one has to be very careful. I've tried to be, but maybe not always successfully. So what's the theory of noncompliance in these international agreements and international organizations? They're supposed to be an autonomous, impartial body, and in this case, it's the IAE Secretariat, which monitors and verifies compliance with an international agreement. And then on discovering noncompliance, that body, that technical body is supposed to report to a political body representing states. And in this case, this is the Board of Governors. And the Board of Governors is then supposed to decide the case one way or the other. And then if warranted, that body is then supposed to send, inform or report, if you like, to a higher authority, in this case, the UN Security Council, for possible action or not. And we'll come to the or not later on. But these provisions, in fact, in all these international agreements are very thin. There's very little detail. So this is the broad theory, the broad concept. But when you look for the detail, it's simply not there. And I think that's because states are really wary about putting such detail into international agreements because they know the provisions could be used against them. So you don't want to put anything in there that might rebound on you. And they're particularly worried about frivolous accusations, all worse. So the IAEA statute has two reporting routes and neither of these are very helpful. So article 12.C is the key one. And you'll notice here, there are lots of shells. So in international law, shell means you have to do it. Doesn't sound like in an ordinary parlance, but in fact, in legal documents, shell means you have to. So here, the statute sends a message that this is automatic. There's no choice involved. So the inspectors, and we'll come to that, why that's weird later on. The inspectors shall report any non-compliance. However minor, however trivial, have a technical to the Board of Governors. The Board shall, it has to, then call upon the recipient state to remedy that non-compliance. And then the Board shall report the non-compliance to the UN Security Council and General Assembly of the United Nations. This sounds all like the agency has no choice. When I presented this in Vienna, people pointed out to me there, officials of the agency, that there's another article which I hadn't been aware of, but that's quite useful. So the agency annually provides a report to the UN General Assembly, but it can also use this article to report things which fall within the competence of the UN Security Council. And I imagine when they drafted the statute, it was things like the collapse of the safeguard system itself, or maybe a state leading the NPT and the drawing from the IAEA, something that really threatened international peace and security. But people at the agency point out, this could also be used in a case of non-compliance. So there are two elements and sometimes you see Article 3B4 quoted in IAEA documents as well as being useful. But you can see how thin this is. That's sort of it. So in comprehensive safeguards agreements, we get this, which is much more relaxed. So these are the most common types of safeguards agreement between states and the agency. And here we have May. May make the reports, as mentioned under the statute. May also where applicable take measures. So you can see when the safeguards, safeguards agreements were negotiated, they relaxed the standard of automaticity. And there is, it argued by some, Pierre Goldschmidt being one of them, that we should reinstate that automaticity. I disagree with that and I'll talk about that a bit further as we go along. But you can see safeguards agreements don't match the statute. And furthermore, the additional protocol, which you may have heard of, which strengthens nuclear safeguards and is attached to these comprehensive safeguards agreements. It doesn't mention noncompliance at all, which is odd in a way. But those additional protocols are attached to a broader agreement, which is supposed to express the view about noncompliance. As I mentioned before, there's no definition of noncompliance. So the agency and its personnel from the very beginning worked in the dark. There's no definition in statute, no definition in safeguards agreements. The safeguards glossary, which is the Bible of inspectors, if you like, at the agency, it's not legally binding, it's just something the agency's made up itself. And it's a rather circular definition, violation by a state of its safeguards agreement with the agency. Well, yes, we know that. And there are examples, but they're not comprehensive. And the things have happened, which don't actually match those examples. The agency does have definitions of a discrepancy in safeguards and an anomaly. These are things that don't quite look right when inspectors go and inspect a state. So there's something not quite right, the amounts aren't right. But these are generally regarded as low-level cases of noncompliance. They're not generally considered to rise above that level to the point where you would tell the board there was a problem. These are relatively minor, often technical discrepancies, anomalies. And the whole point here is that it's not absolutely clear when these do rise above being an anomaly and a discrepancy to being a noncompliance issue. There's no definition of this. There's no documentation to say when this is done. This is all done simply by the agency and its officials deciding, okay, this case is sufficiently serious to warrant a noncompliance case. And that's happened once that I know of in the case of North Korea, where the amounts that North Korea hadn't declared were sufficiently below what they'd normally think was an anomaly or discrepancy. But because North Korea had been behaving badly from the beginning of having its safeguards agreement, there was a suspicion that this actually could be a case of noncompliance. So they moved that up the chain and alerted the director general. But again, that's simply a judgment call on the part of the agency officials. And this whole business is, as you can probably guess, not problematic when it really is technical or inadvertent in terms of noncompliance or when it's really obvious like Iraq, it's the middle ground that's a problem. And you could, if you just think about the Joint Comprehensive Agreement with Iran, there are lots of places where this middle ground is going to be difficult to assess. So here's the practice, that was sort of the theory. Here's the practice. And as you'll see, there are eight cases. I call them significant. The agency doesn't describe them in any way like that. But you can see there's a whole range and there's a whole range of numbers of reports. One of the problems as a scholar in this area is that not everything's available. So in the case of North Korea, for instance, only 40% of the documents are accessible by me. I did learn they're actually all in the British records office in Kew. I could have gone there and sat in the garden and read them, but I found that out too late. The British government apparently send all the IAA documents to Kew. But so the purposes of this project, I really couldn't access everything. Also, I don't have any access to the oral briefings that the board gets on non-compliance cases. And you can imagine those technical briefings as a lot of two and fro between board members and the secretariat, which would, I'm sure, be really illuminating. I've seen some leaked board records and it is really quite fascinating to see the way the secretariat has to handle the expectations and criticisms of member states of the board. So in some ways, we're operating in the dark here. But in the case of Iran, there's a lot of information. So that's good. The United States pressed the agency to release every document on Iran that went before the board, all these quarterly reports, and they did so. So from a scholarly point of view, that's a really good precedent and hopefully that will be followed from now on. Anything else I want to say about this? I think it will be covered elsewhere. So as I've already intimated, essentially the system ignores the script laid out for it in the statute. It's been nowhere near automatic. And in the case of the inspectors, the statute talks about the inspectors reporting to the director general. But in fact, now there's a whole safeguards department which didn't exist when the statute was negotiated. And because of the state level concept, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. The IA now looks at the state as a whole when it's judging noncompliance, not just the particular facilities or materials that are declared. It looks at the whole state. Because of that, there's a whole group of analysts who are looking at, for instance, intelligence information provided by member states, open sources. So it's no longer just the humble inspector who does the reporting, it's a whole department. So this of course changes the nature of it. The director general, if you read the statute, it looks like he's a post office. He just rubber stamps what the inspectors tell him and then he sends it to the board. In fact, that was always unrealistic. The director general is the head of the agency. He presents reports to the board of governors. Naturally, he or she is going to put their stamp on it. That's inevitable. And so they should. You can't have individuals within the department sending noncompliance reports to the board. It has to go through the director general. And he may do an oral briefing, which is unfortunate from a scholarly point of view because you never quite get the gist of that unless you talk to members of the board. And written is possible, but sometimes both. And there are technical briefings as well from officials. And here's where it also gets very interesting. So the board may or may not adopt a resolution. So they may or may not do anything about a noncompliance report they receive. That's not how the statute looks. It looks like they've got to report it onto the UN Security Council, but they don't. There's always some toing and froing. Sometimes the board goes back to the secretariat, says do more inspections. We need more information. Sometimes they do act on the recommendation of the director general, sometimes not. So again, this doesn't follow the rulebook at all. And they may or may not refer the case to the councillor. Even when noncompliance has clearly occurred. So they did quite a lot about Iran in the original case, even though it was pretty clear to outside observers that Iran was in noncompliance, they waited. There was negotiations going on. They didn't do that immediately. And now they've even taken upon themselves to refer a case to the UN Security Council for information purposes only, which to me is bizarre because it's like telling the council what to do with this information. Don't act on it in other words, just for your information. Whereas the UN Security Council has its own mandate to guard international peace and security and really the IA Board of Governors can't tell it what to do with information. So to me, that's a very strange novelty. There are also additional reports which I also hadn't realized the extent of. So when you have ad hoc negotiated arrangements like the six-party talks in case of North Korea, all the EU plus permutations over Iran, they almost invariably asked the IA Secretary to report more, do more. So they'll set out new obligations, including in the JCPOA and the agency has then lumbered, if you like, with the job of verifying compliance with this and reporting on it. So the agency's reports have got much more cumbersome over the years as these various outside bodies have added additional tasks. And also you have additional, what might be thought, non-traditional safeguards reporting on freeze, in the case of North Korea, dismantlement, and the case of Iraq, North Korea, Iran, and disarmament. So the script has widened. So the characteristics of the reports, I've read all of those I showed on the screen. They're becoming longer and longer, more complex, technically more difficult. I'm not a nuclear physicist and you really have to concentrate to figure out what the agency is saying here. As I said, there are multiple reporting mandates. So these reports not only report standard compliance with comprehensive safeguards agreements and additional protocols, but all these other tasks as well. So they get very unwieldy and the agency often has trouble laying these out in a sequence that's useful. Again, non-safeguards reporting, as I mentioned. And some of these are really drawn out sagas. You get the impression from the statute that you have an incident, the board deals with it, the council deals with it, situation finished. Well, that's not how it happens at all in real life. The case goes back and forwards between the council and the board and now you get overlapping cases. So you have several non-compliance cases happening at the same time and not only are they linked in time, they're linked substantively. So the AQ Khan network, for instance, was behind a lot of the proliferation activity that was occurring in several of the cases, Libya, Iran. So you can see that these are linked and this is something not envisaged in the statute. It looks much neater and cleaner in the statute. So here's the overlapping effect. So here all the state Pacific non-compliance reports since Iraq, since the first one. And you can see, this is a huge job for the agency. They've got several cases on the boil at once. And sometimes they just need a bit of updating every quarter but sometimes there's a lot of new information comes in which the agency has to digest. So the area I'm missing here is Romania because Romania only had a verbal report to the board. That was it. But the rest of them are all there and as you can see they go up and down, they overlap. This is a huge, huge task. So who drafts the reports and how is this done? This is the most mysterious part of the whole thing. In fact, when I asked someone at the agency said, well, it's a bit like asking how sausages are made. You don't really want to know. And this is where the human aspect comes in. It's like any drafting process. It's messy, the drafts go back and forwards. The director general will question things and then they'll be revised. And now these days it's a team effort. It's not just one inspector going to the director general. It's since the state level concept was developed. The director general's executive office is closely involved and the old days it tended to be the safeguards people would draft report and the director just say, oh, this seems okay. Now, probably because the whole issue for non-compliance become politicized, it's much more obvious in a 24 hour day media world. So the director general has become more and more involved in report drafting as time's gone by. And there's been controversy about this. There's been accusations that the director general is massaging the reports, taking the information the secretary provides and then making sure it's politically inoffensive. I'm very skeptical about that. I think the director general has to, that's part of his role, to look at what the secretary presents. He's putting himself out there or she in the future, in front of the public, such people have to be able to justify the report themselves. What would be damaging is if the director general sways one way or the other due to political pressure, either from the non-compliance state or from the Western group or any other group of countries. So it's a very fine balance to get this right. You have to craft the wording properly. You have to make sure there's no implicit or explicit prejudice in there. But in terms of having a report that the director general is comfortable with, that's absolutely essential. And it seems that anyone at that level presenting a report would have to do the same. So I'm not bothered by the fact that DG is involved more and his office is involved more. What would really bother me, and I haven't seen any evidence of this, is if the director general was under the influence, undue influence of a particular member state. One of the issues that's come to the fore in my research, and I hadn't realized this, and no one else has really ever done this chart. So I hope this is groundbreaking, is the use of the term non-compliance. So if you look at the behavior of the secretariat and the Board of Governors prior to the Iran case, there was a simple use of the word non-compliance in the director general's reports, and then the Board of Governors would also use the word non-compliance, and then they would send a resolution to the Security Council that used that word. So it just seemed to be assumed that one should use this word because after all, that's what it is. But when it came to Iran, this use of the term became raised politically, partly because the United States, the Bush administration wanted to refer, if you like, Iran to the UN Security Council, and they were demanding that the secretariat use the word non-compliance. Somehow they'll baritide smelled a rat, quite rightly, because of this implied automaticity in the statute. You can see how this one thing leads to another, and he clearly didn't want Iran referred at that time to Security Council. There I go, you see, I can't help myself, referred. The European Union didn't want it either, so it wasn't just the director general, you can recall the European Union states were negotiating with Iran, so they didn't necessarily want this kicked up to the UN Security Council. So the director general in his wisdom started to use words like breach and violation, and he even said, well, they're stronger words than non-compliance, which I think is debatable in English, but he clearly wanted to avoid the word non-compliance. And since then, that word has not been used by the secretariat, they've stood clear of it. So the Iran issue has, in a sense, muddied the waters here and made the secretariat allergic to that word. Because what has tended to happen in the past if the secretariat used the word, then the board would use the word. In a way, this goes back to the theory of non-compliance that I talked about before, so the idea is that there should be an impartial technical body which makes an assessment, but then the judgment is made by the political body. And so in doing this, originally I thought, well, this is bad, why is the secretariat not using this word? But I think it's actually a good development because it returns us to the whole theory of non-compliance, which is that the secretariat should do the analysis, provide the factual information, and the board should make the judgment call on whether this is non-compliance or not. It forces those member states to do that, and often they're reluctant, it's too hard, and they can't agree amongst themselves. So I think this is actually a good development. And as I said, the board has trouble with these issues. So this is a clear trend, the board over time has become more and more divided. I've never seen anyone do this chart either, so I'm quite proud of this, that over time there have been fewer votes in favour, of sending a non-compliance case to the UN Security Council reporting it. There's even been an absentee in the board. Now actually what is the cause of this? We had a discussion at DFAT this morning about what actually is the cause of this. Some say it's the increasing politicisation of the board. I've always been sceptical about that. I think there are always moments when it was extremely political, despite this so-called spirit of Vienna, which everyone talks about, the spirit of Vienna, not being politicised, taking everything on a technical basis. We're scientists here, we're nuclear physicists, we can judge these things on their merits. Well, I'm very sceptical about that. The old time, let's talk about this spirit of Vienna. But in any case, I'm not sure it's necessarily only politicisation. It also could be the complexity of the cases. And it's important to remember that developing countries on the board who don't have a large amount of expertise, either on their delegation or back home, they have trouble interpreting these reports. I do. After reading probably hundreds of them, it's often hard to know exactly what this technical language means and the Secretary was always discreet. They don't just blurt things out. They put everything in a certain diplomatic-style language. So, small delegations, Bikina Faso or something, you'll have, there'll be one person at the mission of Bikina Faso in Vienna and they've got to cover six international organisations. How could they possibly, if they're elected to the Board of Governors or even in the General Conference, even read all these documents, they're huge. Much less understand them. So, there could be an element of that, that the complexity of the case has actually driven the willingness of states to make a judgement call down. They're not going to need a chance to arms because they don't understand. One other theory, of course, is that the non-aligned movement arrived in Vienna around 2000 and since then, they're starting to vote more as a bloc. So, the radical NAMM states, non-aligned movement states, like Syria and Algeria and others, will, and Venezuela, Venezuela's been on the board several times, will pressure their fellow NAMM members or simply have the capability of interpreting these documents and using them to argue that the NAMM should vote against this in a bloc, in a sense. Well, they don't really vote in a bloc, but they could certainly be influenced by that. So, let me talk finally about the applicability to the Iran case. To my mind, this is the most important and difficult case the agencies had to deal with today. Goodness knows they've been complicated already, but this one is even more complicated simply because of all the moving parts of the various agreements. And it's crucial to the outcome of the whole JCPOA, the whole settlement with Iran, most notably sanctions. So, if the IAEA cannot verify Iran's compliance with the new agreement, then sanctions aren't lifted. This puts an enormous responsibility on the agency. And they could be lifted anyway, but that would really be a slap in the face of the agency if that happened. So, everyone's looking to the IAEA to make judgments about this. First, in relation to the roadmap, you probably heard about this roadmap regarding possible military activity by Iran in the nuclear field. This has been a running sore for quite a long time. The Iranians have not been very cooperative. They've given bits and pieces of information. So, as we speak, the agency is grappling with this issue and they'll issue a report by 15th of December. So, we'll know then how the agency handles this. And that will be a critical element in going forward with the JCPOA. If the agency issues a negative report on the roadmap, then, I'm plunging into darkness here, that, so if the agency issues a negative report on the roadmap, that, I think, will bring things to a grinding halt. I don't think that will happen. I think it will fudge the issue somewhat. But still, you can imagine how nerve-racking this is for the IAEA on an issue that's really been very difficult to get to the bottom of. This is essentially the history of Iran's nuclear program up to date. And the agency had trouble finding out Canada's entire history of involvement with nuclear materials and experimentation and facilities. So, in Canada, it was more or less fully cooperative. So, you can imagine in this case, that's going to be much more difficult. And then, of course, after the roadmap, you have the entire JCPOA with all its restrictions on enrichment, for instance, converting the Iraq reactor so that it doesn't produce plutonium for weapons. So, these agreements are complicated and they're interlinked. So, in regard to the possible military dimensions, the DG, the Director-General, has to provide an exception to the Board, which is described as a final assessment on the resolution of all past and present outstanding issues. This is enormous undertaking, considering how difficult it's been to date. So, in the next couple of months, after a visit or two to Pachin, the military base, and discussions in Tehran, this is not probably going to be possible. There's been little public indication of how this is turning out. We've heard about the swiping at the onsite inspections at Pachin, which is controversial, and I'm sure the Republicans in the US Congress will use this as a reason, as I know, this deal is ridiculous. This PMD issue hasn't been clarified. So, in the United States, at least, this is politically toxic, this whole PMD issue. The DG says he will base his judgment on the facts, so you can see there's organizational learning here. He's not doing what Al Baradai did and giving a judgment call. He's saying, let the Board make the decision, and he'll not judge past or future intentions. This issue of intentions is problematic. I personally don't see how you can do any monitoring verification without at least thinking about intentions. You don't have to express them, but you want to know what the plan is of the state that you're monitoring. But there's an ideology or a theology, if you like, that you don't talk about intentions. And the precedent has been set for not declaring Iran in non-compliance with the PMD issue because the secretariat, as you saw by that chart, has never used that word in relation to Iran. The Board has, but not the secretariat. So that actually puts them in a good position. We don't necessarily expect the secretariat now to say Iran's in non-compliance with the PMD roadmap. Although, hey, you're in non-compliance with the roadmap. It's also problematic. But anyway, so I think there'll be a face-saving fudge. I don't think that's the agency's fault. I think the pressures are so enormous. The saving grace with all this is if the agency doesn't get to the bottom of these PMD issues, then when Iran adopts the additional protocol and seeks the broader conclusion, which is a conclusion that you as a country have got a clean record going back to the beginning of your nuclear activities, or you've revealed everything you're doing, like Canada and Australia, we've all got the broader conclusion. If Iran seeks that, and that's the gold standard, then they will have to anyway, tell us exactly what they're up to all those years ago. And the agency, hopefully, won't give them the broader conclusion under the additional protocol until they're satisfied. So there's another whole, another process which Iran will be forced to go through if the PMD thing doesn't work out. So I'm not too worried about this. What I'm really worried about is the Republicans in Congress. They could cause a lot of trouble over this, unfortunately. The compliance reporting on the JCPOA. So the agency will continue to have these quarterly reports on Iran. You can read them online. The board now releases them. It'll cover the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement. They're just the normal reporting on that. It'll now start reporting on Iran's preparations for adopting an additional protocol, at least. But then there'll be these very specific categories that the agency will have to judge Iran on. And there's some of them there. And it's time to go through the whole JCPOA, but they're quite various. Many of them are well within the experience of the IAEA. So I'm not overly worried about some of the things which are really obvious. They can look at the modification of the Iraqi actor and see what's happening. They can see that centrifuges have been moved and stored and parts have been moved and pipes have been sealed. They'll have 24 hour access. I don't see that that's really a problem. What I do see as a problem is if the agency's asked to make an overall assessment of how the agreement's going, there are so many moving parts in this that it's going to be really awkward. The agency will also have to be prepared to issue ad hoc reports if anything goes wrong. So you might see a flurry of special report, special board meetings. Again, this is a huge amount of work for the agency. But everything depends on Iran's cooperativeness and transparency. Obviously that's almost a platitude. But if they do what Libya did, even better, if they do what South Africa did, then the whole task will obviously be much easier. But there are further challenges. I think Iran's compliance based on past record is not going to be perfect at all. They've had grudging, offer grudging cooperation to the agency in the past. The agency and member states have to press them for various things. And even in a technical basis, if you read this gigantic complex document, it's hard for anyone to figure out. And I've heard experts at Harvard get things completely wrong about the JCPOA. And they're, in theory, talking to Washington and they've got all these great contacts on what this really means. And of course the Americans interpret things one way and the Iranians another. You just see the ambiguity in the text. There are things missing. So Ali Hainan, who used to work for the agency as head of safeguards says there's no declaration required by Iran. Normally, in any arms control agreement, you start with a declaration of what you have. There's nothing in there about that. So the baseline would then have to be based on presumably Iran's declarations under the comprehensive safeguards agreement. So there are bits that are linked but not necessarily explicitly. So there's the interpretation problem. One of the big issues is undeclared materials and activities. You don't know whether Iran has declared everything under its existing safeguards agreement, much less whether it will then declare what it has under the new regime. So there are various mechanisms built into this. So the agency can ask for inspections of undeclared sites, which can already do under the additional protocol. But you recall the famous 24 day rule. So now if the Iranians refuse a special request for a visit to a military base, for instance, they can appeal, they can refuse that and the appeal then goes to this joint commission of the parties to the JCPOA, on which the Western states have a majority. So they could overrule Iran. Iran sits on that. So that doesn't go to the board of governors necessarily, it goes to the joint commission. So it's not quite clear how this is meant to gel with the normal procedure, as described in the statute, where it's the board of governors which decides on non-compliance, not a joint commission. This has not quite been worked out. And I can imagine the development countries who are on the board of governors as elected members are going to be concerned about this. Why should this small group of states, mostly Western states be in judge of Iran as opposed to the board of governors? And you can see why the parties did it. They did that for a very reason. So the board wouldn't necessarily be involved in this. Research and development is very difficult to verify and Iran is permitted to continue certain activities in researching uranium enrichment, for instance. So it's difficult to go into labs and see what people are doing. You can see if they're conducting experiments in the open and some things you can observe, but it's a very intrusive procedure to go into a research lab and ask people what they're doing and try and observe it. So that is inherently difficult. And as I said, making the overall assessment is really almost impossible. There are so many different aspects to this. And there'll be a lot of pressure on the secretary to say, okay, overall is Iran in compliance. Can we move forward with various steps? The agencies can say, well, on this bit, they're doing really badly. This bit, a lot of cooperation. How do you weigh that? I don't know. This is a problem. There'll be enormous pressure, as I said, and there'll be this juggling these relationships, including the council. There's a whole security council resolution which puts the frame on all of these agreements as well. That's another aspect. So my conclusions. So the non-compliance cases are looked at. They're all unique. That sounds like a petitude, but they really are all unique. They're non-linear. They don't follow the prescription in the statute. They go backwards. They go forwards. They get interlinked. The reporting process is increasingly complex, politically and technologically as well. The reports are getting more and more sophisticated technically, which is great. But from the point of view of a small delegation or outsiders, it's difficult to know what the agency's actually saying. It's an intensely human process, as I said, and lots of foibles in there. And we really do need the best possible people at the agency, including considering when we select a director general, what are their capabilities for astute diplomatic activity in this area and judgment? As I said, the secretary is probably moving closer to theory, so sticking to reporting the facts. If it goes too far in that direction, I think that's a mistake. It shouldn't just be reporting facts, lists of figures. It should be interpreting and analyzing. It doesn't have to use the word non-compliance, but it certainly should give an indication of its interpretation of the material. So it's a very fine balance. One thing I missed, I said the case is now intertwined, so the agency needs to have a proliferation overview, not just examining each case through blinders, but looking at the whole risk of proliferation. I think automatic referral security council is unwise. As I said, there've been people advocating this. It just sounds very neat, very organized. It's the way we do things. In our Western culture, we have it all set out. The penalties, the procedure, I don't think that works in this case. Flexibility is very useful, both to the secretary and to the board in dealing with cases. You know, you get lots of side diplomacy. You get the director general himself engaged with states before it even gets anywhere near the board, which is a good thing. You don't want to box states in your corner. You don't want to embarrass them publicly unnecessarily. So that is all useful, that flexibility, which doesn't appear anywhere in the statute, is very helpful. And then finally, Iran I think is the most complex challenge the agency's faced in non-compliance terms, and it'll be fascinating to see how this works out. I hope they read my report. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you for that, Trevor. And we've got time for a few questions to stick around. Yeah, sure. I think we want to drill a little bit more deeply. I think you've set the scene very well, and it's quite clear that you've had a very original and comprehensive task, and I think it is of global significance. And we need to, I think, work with you to get it beyond the specialized audience that would automatically take an interest. But I think two questions arise in my mind. I know that others in the room might have questions as well, so we'll go to those in a moment. But I want you to look forward a little bit and project from your research, project from your findings. I mean, I guess you've concluded that we're going to be stuck with Iran for quite a long time as really the biggest problem, the biggest challenge for really managing this process. Yeah. You say about, I mean, are there any wildcards you see on the horizon, whether there are other potential cases that are going to potentially stretch the system? And what would your, I guess, projection, I won't say prediction, what's your projection for how the Iran situation will play out over the next few years? Wow. Okay. Looking at the future is always different because it's in the future. But yeah, I think, well, I mentioned this morning at DFAT, the agency in the safeguards department now has a strategic plan that requires the department of safeguards to look forward to the future non-colliferation threats and risks, which is really terrific. The thing is, I don't know whether they do it or not. So every five years, they're supposed to take a global view of where the risks are, the dangers, and probably amongst themselves, they talk about individual states. But that is a great process if they can do that because they're their experts and they gather the information. They should be able to project some trends into the future. That's one thing that I would recommend they do. The rest of us should do it as well. Particular cases of concern for Saudi Arabia. And because Saudi Arabia hasn't been very cooperative in upgrading its small quantities protocol, that's also attached to a safeguards agreement. So if you don't have much nuclear activity, you can get away with a lot of the requirements of safeguards by having a small quantities protocol. So New Zealand has one, for instance. They recently upgraded it in part because of concerns about Saudi Arabia. And the idea is now you're subject to more strict requirements than the old small quantities protocol. This sounds very technical, I know. But essentially you're asking states, even if they don't have much activity, to report more to the agency so that it can keep an eye on states which may in future be a problem. I'm not saying Saudi Arabia will necessarily seek nuclear weapons, but they certainly will seek a nuclear industry and they're clearly, they've got the money to do that. Beyond that, something I didn't mention, which I do, I've got a whole section on it in the report, is the Safeguards Implementation Report. So that is the annual accounting by the agency of the state of safeguards. And this country is usually by category as to what undertakings they've made and how the safeguard system was applied to individual states. This has traditionally been secret. So while we have this huge amount of publicity and release of reports on Iran and Syria on the relatively minor cases, which can be potential future big cases, we have very little publicly released information. Now they've been leaked in the last couple of years, these Safeguards Implementation Reports from the board. And they're fascinating reading because you can actually see there are some states which haven't even signed a comprehensive safeguards agreement. They're required to, soon as they sign the MPT and they haven't. So that's bizarre. There's a handful of them in Africa and elsewhere. There are some which haven't got a proper national authority to handle safeguards. There's a whole raft of things which, you know, by a technical definition, amount to non-compliance. So I think we've focused so much on these serious cases, so-called very little on the relatively minor cases, but I think it's much more healthy if we have a whole view of the range of potential non-compliance. And that in a way takes some of the sting out of the, or of a stigma out of it, if you like. If you see the countries for various governance reasons probably aren't complying as they should, or the agency doesn't have resources to help them comply, that is all useful in building up, I think, these barriers to proliferation. At the moment it's all, you know, there's a publicly released version of this Safeguards Implementation Report, but we want the whole thing and there's really nothing in there that's Safeguards confidential, which is what the member states always hide behind. So to me, that will be a very healthy evolution. And then we could all see where every state is, you know. What could control that evolution apart from all links? The secretariat itself is in favor of it. So that's good. So we just have to convince Mr. Romano to allow this. And member states, presumably, there's some who would not like this to happen, but there are others, you know, including the United States, which who are in favor of transparency. I don't know where Australia stands on this, but the public release of the sur I think is essential and would help us see, as I said, this spectrum. What was your other question? I'll bet Iran. I think it'll work, but it's going to be a long haul. And I think you'll have a whole series of extended delays in the deadlines. I think the will is there, as far as I can see, Iran to do this. The big question, of course, is what happens when this regime ends and will the internal situation around have changed so much and will the rest of the world have changed so much that they will actually forego future, plutonium production, for instance. So once those bans end, that's when it really starts to become a question of how sustainable this is. The 10 to 15 year timeline is good. That's quite a long time in terms of the country changing its fundamental policies. The real question is, has Iran made a strategic decision to do this? I can see in parts of the government it has, not necessarily all parts of the government. But if that does change over 15 years, then I think the whole thing will prove good. Iran continues, though, to be under normal safeguards and under the additional protocol, once it ratifies, it will be under that. So they will be continuing, obviously, inspections and the normal safeguards regime applied to Iran. So that will carry on unless they completely decide to leave the MPT or the IEA, but that's very extreme and they've never intimated they would do that. So yeah, that's my guess. It's just a guess. Who knows? We've got a good point to try. Thank you. We'll take one or two questions from members of the group, members of the audience. So we'll start with Dakin over on the... Hi, Dakin. Right. One point that comes to mind to disclaim your presentation is fatalistic. I mean, did really come out with any statements about how things could be done methodally or in despondent order, you went to the track and thought, my question is, if you were the general, what would you do differently? I would, and I do have ideas in my report, but they're all relatively minor because I was hoping to have a great recommendation to make that would sweep away the whole system, but I don't think that's politically feasible and I actually couldn't see one. No one ever suggested one to me. So I think if I were director general, I would make sure I had the best possible analysts. I'd change the way the agency recruits people. I would be more transparent. I would answer the critics, not just let them browbeat the agency. So the agency has a policy of not responding to any criticism. I produced a whole report on the agency and how it should be strengthened. So there was critical comments in there. They simply didn't reply. I even asked Mr. Amano in person, he declined to respond. So they're so averse to criticism that they've just taken this idea that they won't respond. And I don't think in a 24 hour media world, you can do that anymore because your critics then have all the running. The agency looks like it doesn't have a clue or it's cowering. So greater response to public demand for information. It was apparently in the Fukushima incident, for instance, the agency were very uncomfortable about being public about what they knew and their interpretation of events. So greater transparency on the part of the agency. So that involves releasing this SIR, crafting their reports in a way that the public can understand them better. So with an executive summary, for instance, where the developing countries can understand better. So in the general conference, for instance, you may have more sympathy for the secretariat if they were able to communicate better through better crafted reports. They've evolved in some ways, they've improved, they've standardized some of the language. But in my way, in my mind, they could do better. For instance, they don't generally make judgments about how much faith they put in the various evidence they receive. So the US security intelligence community learned after the Iraq case that they should characterize the strength of the intelligence. The agencies tried that a bit. How reliable is this information? Do we have full confidence, little confidence? I think that would help. You would get some measure of the agency's processes of thought. So there are various things they could do. They don't amount to a silver bullet. Perhaps one of the most controversial things is to think about when you recruit the director general that it's someone with some sensitivity, political sensitivity, someone experienced with handling, very powerful states, and handling technical matters. It's striking that there's only ever been one director general who was a nuclear expert. And he was the Swede, he was an Eklund. The rest have been political people, people, lawyers. So the lawyerly culture of the agency produces legal speak, which is legitimate, but it's not the way you communicate with either member states or the outside world. That's a cultural issue. In fact, I'm doing a whole report on the IAEA's organizational culture, which is the third in my series, which looks at this whole issue of the agency's culture. And one of it is very legalistic. And finally, in terms of resources, the agency does need to beef up its ready availability of resources. So one of my proposals in my next report, which is on financing the agencies, to have a nuclear emergency fund funded by donations from states, but as well, people like Bill Gates or the rich and famous who don't currently see this as something they can contribute to. So it would be an endowment. And it would provide the agency with a ready source of funds when they need it quickly. And I think increasingly, these non-compliance cases require urgent action. You get an agreement, suddenly you have to have all these additional experts. So the agency's been pulling clever people in from other parts of the agency, outside safeguards and putting them on the Iran case. That doesn't do much good for the rest of the agency. And also it scrambles. And you probably know the recruitment chain for the agency is really terrible. And they rely a lot on voluntary contributions, a lot on seconded experts. This is no way to run a railroad when you're doing something as serious as the Iran case. So if they adopted all those things, I think if I was DG, that would help. I don't want to be DG, but anyway, if that... So often these issues, there isn't a silver bullet. It's the hard work of gathering the necessary ingredients to make the system better. We love you by the end of this trip. The IAEA, you're three reports. You're there to help. I know, I know. I'm explaining the IAEA to the IAEA, I don't know. That's not a good question. We'll take maybe two more questions. Is there another one, please? Thanks very much. My name's Eloise and I'm from the United States. I'm curious, especially when you just updated that today, no secrets, no secrets. What you think DFAT is doing in responding to the IAEAA, besides, you know, lifting economic sanctions on Iran, the U.S. lifting theirs, and what more do you think they could do to strengthen the international community's monitoring? I'm not fully across what DFAT does, and I can't speak on their behalf, of course. They're giving money to the fund, and that's something the agency needs, money to fund this undertaking. It's very expensive, and the JCPOA promises the best technology available and sufficient funding to do this, so Australia has kicked in money for that. Australia punches above its weight internationally. I can see that both from having been here and abroad, and from the point of view of the Australian public, I think they probably do about as much as they can do. You know, there isn't huge public understanding of these issues in any country, so foreign ministries are often pushing the limits to contribute, and I think Australia does that very well. There are other countries which do not contribute as they should. They underplay their potential role, so I think Australia, as far as I can tell, is doing fine, and it's just one voice amongst many, and you imagine this is just one issue. Like on nuclear security, that's another very important thing to preventing terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons, so Australia has been very active on that as well, and also now thinking about the longer implications of nuclear disarmament if we ever get to that and what would be the technical requirements for monitoring and verifying nuclear disarmament. Australia is involved in this international partnership on verification you may have heard about, so lots of fingers and lots of pies. I could make recommendations to them, but I won't share them with you, but yeah, I think overall the record is good. Come to your recommendations in a moment. I'm sure there are some recommendations you offer openly, but we'll take one more question from the group. Is there another question? Please, gentlemen. I'm a nuclear physics student, and you just had a question about the technical capability of verification. I mentioned a lot about the hearing of how difficult it was for the verification of nuclear weapons by Iran. What kind of technical capabilities do they have to maybe find the minuscule amounts, which they may or may not want to report given their tendency to not want to say non-compliance, and how that might go up over time, suggesting a larger case than what they might see when they take that forward? Yeah, so the technical requirements for detecting minute amounts of nuclear material are good. They're very good, and they've got better and better. The problem is where to look. That's not a technical problem. That's often a political problem. So you need to go to undeclared sites, so you have to convince the country to allow inspectors to go to a site which is not nuclear, has never been declared on any declaration, and use this swiping technology or remote sensing technology, wide area sampling to discover if this is a nuclear site. Typically, countries are only willing to allow certain access to certain sites, and they're allowed to do that under additional protocol or other agreements. They can have what's called managed access, so they're allowed to put restrictions on what inspectors can and cannot do as long as the inspections can conclude what they need to conclude with those restrictions, then that is possible. So it's not a technical problem so much, unless we develop some super technology that can look in every nook and cranny across the country. There's also a financial problem. So the agency could use wide area sampling, which, as the name suggests, allows you to cover a very wide area. It's very expensive. The Americans have developed the technology, but for the agency to use that on a regular basis, they would need a lot more money. So part of the problem, and I talk about this in my next report, and I'll come here, Rory, and present that as well, is that the agency is not necessarily as well funded as it should be in the verification area, partly because it has several different mandates, and it often has to balance providing more money for technical cooperation, which is essentially assistance to developing countries with verification. If one goes up, the development company will say, well, so should assistance. So there's this terrible vice that the agency is in in terms of its budget. So it's not simply a matter of saying, oh, here's extra verification money in the regular budget because then there'll be pressure to raise the other areas. So it's a problem. And I've just discovered the agency doesn't have enough money to replace all its remote cameras in all nuclear facilities. It's very old technology. They can do a certain number each year, but there are scores of old cameras sitting there which need to upgrade urgently, and the agency simply doesn't have the money. So these are deferred capital works. They've only just recently upgraded their safeguards analytical laboratory in Vienna. I toured there a few years ago, and it was bizarre. The place didn't comply with the agency's recommendations that it was trying to foist on member states. There are whole conventions, whole rafts of regulations. The agency itself wasn't complying with them. You could just walk onto the site. They had plutonium samples, and one poor woman actually was seriously hurt by a plutonium sample. So, yeah, that's improved, but we have to think that if the agency's going to do a good job on non-compliance, we need to give them the best tools possible, and there are political reasons why that is not possible. Do you think with the focus of... I mean, the very clear focus of your work, there's a bigger picture which I'd be interested to hear you touch on a bit further, and that is, frankly, the willingness of major powers and the willingness of major countries potential to contribute to the agency to actually make those contributions. Is there some kind of looming crisis of contributions, or do you think the agency will muddle through? I think it will muddle through, as it always has. Particularly in the Iran case, I think the United States and other Western countries wouldn't let the agency be held back by the lack of funding. I mean, the agency has to justify it, obviously, but they always come good at the very end. It's one of those funny things. So, in the Iran case, because that's regarded politically very important, sure, I think states will come to the party, and Australia should. It's in our national interest to do this, but it's other areas where it's not so glaringly obvious that it's difficult. In my next report, I don't want to preview it too much, but one of my recommendations is that China now starts to provide more funding to the agency. China's been a free rider on the agency for many years. They actually consulted the agency in the very early days as soon as they joined to get the agency's advice on how to run a nuclear reactor power program. The agency sent many delegations there. They assisted them. This is all a freebie, and when you look at how much China pays, it's actually below what they should. They actually get a discount on safeguards. You know, there are nuclear weapons states. They don't have many facilities under safeguards, but they benefit enormously from the agency when you particularly think of the proliferation threat in Asia Pacific. And the United States pays 24% of the budget. And China pays less than 10%. So my argument is if China wants to be a serious world player and is a permanent member of the Security Council and all the privileges that gets from that, and if it says it's the number one economy and boasts about it, put your money where your mouth is. You should be paying as much as the United States, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, that's a bit of a rant, but that's one country that really is free riding on the IAE. And there are a few others. A few of them have actually various categories of payers. A few have moved out of that free riding category. But the Gulf oil states, for instance, could afford more. It's all based on GDP per capita, right? So there is a formula, but I think it underestimates the ability of states to pay. So it's not all bad news. There's room for growth. But it's going to take some serious pressure and explaining to get that moving. Any more questions in the room before we stop? Yeah, we'll take this gentleman here. Please. You're saying the US... What's your name? Oh, sorry, David Martin. I'm just an interested citizen. Yeah, good. But also it's... But you need more of you. But also it's UN personnel for like 30 years ago. The US, 24% but does it actually pay? Aha, good question. It's not in arrears anymore. No, not when it comes to the IAEA. So actually they... You recall years ago there was this controversy about how much the US was paying to various international organizations. So it was normally 25%. They cut that back to 21% in some cases. They made an exception for the agency. So the agency gets 24%. The problem with the US is the budget cycle was out of sync with the agency's budget. So they pay late. So often the agency has to dip into its contingency fund to just keep going. They've got a month or so left. It's because the US pays such a huge amount. If they're late, then that's problematic. So in my report on the budget, I have to come back, obviously, I'm recommending the US address this. It's very awkward because it means they would have to pay for two years in one go to catch up, in a sense. So their budget cycle matches. Well, that was one of the first things that Bob talked to when he came in as the double paid all of the UN contributions. Yes, he did. Well, the US needs to... And getting that through the Congress is a nightmare. Exactly. Nick, maybe that's a good note for us to wrap up on looking at the US perspective going forward. We've got a new president before, and you've been in the administration before so long. You've seen in your time at Belfer and elsewhere, you've seen, I think, will be quite close, the debates around nuclear security and onto the forage in the United States and globally. Again, I mean, do you think, you know, we had this in the early years of Obama, this, I guess, cycle of, you know, a degree of hope about nuclear arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament. We've seen some pretty hard realities. We've seen some interesting outcomes all the same. How engaged do you think the United States is going to be going forward on this and the wider non-proliferation agenda? Given there's so many other security problems it's dealing with in the world. If Hillary's president, there will be a certain amount, but she's never expressed very much interest in this area. So I think her priorities will be elsewhere. So the bureaucracy will carry on and do its own thing. The nuclear security issue, I think, is going to start to flail because the summits end next year, in March, that's the last nuclear security summit. It was an Obama program. I don't think Hillary would be interested, or certainly not a Republican in carrying that forward. Many of the activities under it, I think, will still keep going, but the next project is about how to get the IAEA to take on what it can in terms of the nuclear security summit's agenda and activities. So there is a bit of momentum there, but it will be a pity because I think whether it's Hillary or Donald Trump, the United States is not going to be putting priority on nuclear security in the way it has. The Obama case was special. Nuclear disarmament, I haven't heard Hillary talk about nuclear disarmament, and certainly the Republicans won't go near it. It will be in jeopardy. But having said that, the United States is an incredibly complex country, and even through all those terrible years of administrations which weren't very interested in multilateralism, the IAEA was often singled out. So even under Bush administration, we got a special increase in the budget over three years from the Americans, even under Bush. So there's a certain value to global nuclear governance that all administrations will recognize and I think don't have any choice. Clearly there are things there that in the US national interest or any administration would support. So yeah, taking the long view, I don't think disaster is afoot, but there will be certainly some disappointment. Thank you, Trevor. This evening's presentation I think has been a reminder of not only the importance of the road you've been on, the research you're doing, and we want to help people in a wider audience, a multidisciplinary approach that this college has taken to security issues. It's great to have colleagues from nuclear physics and also from the university. Officials from government agencies are interested in these issues as well. I think it's part of the mission of the college to bring these minds and these voices together. Trevor, I want to thank you for your insights this evening. Thank you very much. Thank you all for your great questions. Thank you.