The IAEA had come a long way since its inauguration in 1957, when it was created to promote the peaceful development of nuclear technology. Its other role as nuclear watchdog—to ensure that countries didn’t secretly apply that technology to weapons development—was supposed to be secondary. But in the five decades since the agency’s inception, the latter task had gradually become its most critical, as one nuclear crisis arose after another. Unfortunately, the agency’s ability to fulfill this role was often thwarted by its limited authority to investigate or punish countries that violated their
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