Until World War II, agreements and treaties among nations were generally based on mutual trust among the parties involved, and included no means for verifying compliance with the commitments undertaken. From the 1950's onwards, when countries began to market nuclear materials and equipmente for peaceful uses, it became common practice to celebrate international agreements covering the peaceful use of nuclear energy that established a “safeguards” system in order to systematically verify that the State or States involved were not using the respective nuclear materials for purpose not authorized by such agreement. In general terms, this is a verification system that seeks to ensure that the States comply with their commitments, contributing to increase mutual confidence and avoiding nuclear materials being diverted through swift detection of anomalies. Safeguards objectives. Safeguards are technical means of verifying compliance with legal oblligations relevant to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Their objectives are political, that is, to assure the international community of the peaceful nature of safeguarded nuclear activity and to deter the diversion or misuse of safeguarded materials or facilities through the risk of early detection.

        In December 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower made an historic address to the 8th Session of the Unite Nations General Assembly. Eisenhower proposed the creation of an international atomic energy agency to harness the atom for the benefit of humanity. In 1954, the General Assembly set the proposal in motion, and a group was formed to define the new agency’s mandate. Within the UN system, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is an autonomous organization in its own right. Often thought of as “Atoms for Peace” organization.
        The IAEA Statute was approved on 26 October 1956 at an international conference held at UN headquarters in New York, and the Agency came into existence in Vienna, Austria, on 29 July 1957. In November 1957, the General Assembly and, whenever necessary, to the Security Council, which has primary responsability for developmental work of the UN and its specialized agencies.
        The Agency is an autonomous, inter-governmental organization formed by its Members States, which now number well over 130. The Permanent Headquarters are at the Vienna International Centre (VIC). In 1979 this ambitious project, the VIC, became the Agency’s Permanent Headquarters, to be sited in the Donaupark, for the Agency, UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) an a number of other United Nations bodies.

        The Common System of Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials is the set of criteria and procedures applicable to all nuclear materials in all nuclear activities carrided out in the territories of the signatory nations, or under the jurisdiction thereof, in order to detect opportunely and with a reasonable degree of certainty any diversior of significante quantities of nuclear material for unauthorized uses as established in the Bilateral Agreement.
        The SCCC consists of the General Procedures and implementation Manuals for each category of installation. The implementation Manuals set out in detail all the accounting and control procedures to be used in the installation, establish the frequency and types of inspections planned, and describe all the requirements to be complied with by the operator, in terms of records, reports and measurements of nuclear materials.

        Both Brazil and Argentina have had safeguards agreements in force with the IAEA since the 1960s and 1970s. They derived from co-operation agreements that Brazil had signed with the United States, Germany, and Argentina with the United States, Germany, Canada, and Switzerland. These INFCIRC/66-type safeguards agreements dealt with specific cases of co-operation and did not cover the nuclear materials involved in each country’s autonomous programmes, which are now under the full-scope safeguards established by the bilateral agreement, subject to the SCCC and verified and monitored by ABACC.
        In addition, on the basis of the bilateral agreement, a quadripartite safeguards agreement was signed on 13 December 1991 between Argentina, Brazil, ABACC, and the IAEA.(This agreement entered into force on 4 March 1994).

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