Paper short abstract:

This paper examines epistemological differences in two knowledge regimes in operation at the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as how the actors conceptualize nuclear risks temporally. It shows how nuclear inspectors attempt to ensure that the nuclear future is like the present.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1970s, the International Atomic Energy Agency's nuclear inspectors go into nuclear facilities around the world to make sure that no illegal nuclear weapons are being built. In other words, they ensure that the nuclear future is like the nuclear present. Since the 1970s, the way that the IAEA has been carrying out these inspections has changed from an accounting-based audit practice to a practice of risk assessment. The precipitating event for the change in the nuclear inspectors' knowledge practices was the discovery of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s. While the old audit practices were faulted for not being able to discover what the state did not declare to the IAEA, the new risk assessment practices are criticized for putting states under permanent scrutiny and for allowing forms of knowledge (such as qualitative modes of analysis) that are deemed un-objective.

Based on research conducted since 2011, this paper examines the epistemological differences in the two safeguards knowledge regimes as well as how the actors conceptualize nuclear risks temporally. The movement to nuclear risk assessment at the IAEA makes explicit domains of uncertainty about the future and simultaneously reveals the precariousness of the present which the actors themselves are highly uncomfortable with. Both the diplomats and the bureaucrats at the IAEA struggle with risk assessment; the former want it as their exclusive domain, whereas the latter are exhausted by the endless iterative cycle of risk evaluation where the uncertain future is constantly encroaching upon the present.