Soon after stepping down in 1976 as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that the IAEA "is the one UN institution the world could not very well do without." But in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein nearly completed the development of a nuclear weapon under the noses of IAEA inspectors. Since then, rogue states like North Korea and Iran have either produced nuclear weapons or brought themselves to the threshold of doing so by defying or evading the IAEA. This calls into question the overall efficacy of the inspection agency as a monitoring organization.

Is the IAEA an effective shield against nuclear proliferation? If not, how can it be improved? Is there an alternative mechanism that can be proposed?

AEI will host John R. Bolton, under secretary for arms control and international security, to discuss these and other questions. Panelists will include Joseph Cirincione, director of nonproliferation at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Mark Groombridge, special assistant to the under secretary for arms control and international security; Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control; and Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar at AEI.