VIENNA — When the International Atomic Energy Agency opened in 1957, its staff of physicists and diplomats would commute daily to a notably glamorous headquarters: Vienna's Grand Hotel at Kärntner Ring 9. Legend has it that the agency’s nuclear laboratories operated out of a basement kitchen and that the safeguard department could be reached through the laundry room.
The IAEA has long since moved, and is now hosted by the Vienna International Center, a sprawling concrete complex just across the Danube River that evokes bureaucracy more than Secession-era grandeur. Still, the international agency is grappling with the same mission: keeping the nuclear age from hurtling toward planetary annihilation.
And that mission is again very much a present-day concern, and some see today’s nuclear threat as more dangerous than the height of the Cold War.
“Countries are becoming significantly more secretive about their nuclear arsenals,” said Matt Korda, associate director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, during a lecture in Perugia earlier this year. “Everything is getting a lot worse.”
Other experts are sounding the alarm too. The 2026 yearbook published earlier this month by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute warned that the global nuclear order that had long kept the risk of catastrophe in check is becoming perilously frayed.
‘The dangers associated with nuclear weapons are growing due to advances in weapon technology, the breakdown of nuclear arms control and heightened geopolitical tensions,” said SIPRI Director Karim Haggag in a statement.
Last February, the last bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia — which together possess around 83% of all stockpiled warheads — expired, ushering in a new nuclear arms’ race. And the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — a landmark agreement adopted in 1968 to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, which the IAEA is mandated to protect — is under strain amid repeated attempts to reform it.
The treaty seeks to ensure that no other states beyond the five recognized nuclear-weapon powers — France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia and China — develop nuclear arsenals.
But it’s an open secret that India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea all possess nuclear weapons outside the framework. Meanwhile, as the prospect of U.S. security guarantees loses credibility, Poland, Japan and South Korea are also considering developing atomic arms of their own.
And then there’s Iran — the IAEA’s biggest headache. Despite decades of diplomatic efforts to prevent Tehran from enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels, there is growing evidence that the country may now possess enough nuclear-grade material to build weapons.
The growing number of states joining or wanting to join the nuclear club also increases the risk of these weapons falling into the hands of rogue actors.
“We are no longer in the days of the Cold War, when it was just two superpowers that were pointing missiles at each other,” said Korda. “Today we are in a nine body problem in which the actions of one state can trickle down the line and cost a domino effect.”
Making of the world’s ‘nuclear watchdog’
Although the agency was not formally established until 1957, its origins can be traced to a landmark speech by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In his “Atoms for Peace” address to the U.N. General Assembly in 1953, Eisenhower argued that only a joint, independent international agency could prevent humanity from having to “accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed” and the “annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind.”
The agency’s core business was to dispatch nuclear inspectors around the world to ensure civilian nuclear programs weren’t being diverted to produce illicit arms. But it also promoted nuclear power as a way to produce vast amounts of energy and treat patients for life-threatening cancer.
“The peaceful uses [of nuclear] and the safeguard missions [have always been] on the same footing,” explained Noah C. Mayhew, a senior research associate at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.
It eventually expanded into a 2,500-staff body with 180 member states, nearly matching the U.N.'s membership. For decades, the non-proliferation framework it policed was seen as a success. So much so that in 2005 the agency, then led by Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
The optimism of that period was expressed in a 2009 speech by former U.S. president Barack Obama in Prague, where he laid out a vision of a “world without nuclear weapons.”
Putting the IAEA on the political map
Until 2019, the agency had largely been regarded as a technical body with little political ambitions in the U.N. system, which it’s not formally part of. The nomination of Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi, though, brought seismic changes to how the body was perceived.
Grossi, who last year launched a bid to succeed Secretary-General António Guterres, made clear from the outset he intended to raise its profile beyond that of a safeguard agency. Observers say it was no coincidence that he became a familiar face at high-level climate conferences and on the front lines in Ukraine.
“Grossi is more of a salesman,” noted Mayhew, the research associate, comparing the IAEA’s directorate-general to his predecessors, notably with low-profile Yukiya Amano.
In the laboratories of Seibersdorf, a town 35 kilometres from Vienna, where nuclear energy is used for a variety of peaceful applications — from breeding new banana varieties to sterilizing mosquitoes — visitors can watch an interactive video of Grossi and quiz him on what it takes to work for the agency or on his biggest personal career challenge.
To some extent, the timing of Grossi’s arrival proved fortuitous too. While nuclear energy fell out of favor after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, complicating the agency’s diplomatic work for years, a resurgence of pro-nuclear sentiment has recently made the IAEA more visible and propelled Grossi’s profile on the international stage.
An atomic proliferation comeback
If external events are forcing the agency to shapeshift, many still see the IAEA's technical DNA as its greatest selling point. This matters at a time when multilateral organizations are routinely dismissed as irrelevant — a complaint Grossi himself has addressed to the current U.N. leadership.
“We are not a talking shop,” Martin Gajdos, Grossi’s chief of staff, proudly told reporters in Vienna. “We do real stuff. Stuff that you can poke, you can touch, you can hold. And which has a real impact on the lives of people somewhere in the world.”
He has a point. The agency played a crucial role in brokering ceasefires in the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Ukraine, which is exposed to both Russian and Ukrainian drones. Such ceasefires are necessary to allow repairs to power lines, ensuring the plant has sufficient electricity to cool the reactors.
“It's really unprecedented in the history of the house," added the IAEA official.
Unlike other multilateral organizations, the agency has so far avoided sharp funding cuts — something that some ascribe to Trump’s championing of nuclear energy and Grossi’s savvy networking style, including with Trump’s MAGA circle, which is expected to back his candidacy to become the U.N.’s next Secretary-General.
Still, that doesn’t mean the IAEA’s future is safe. Staffers at the Vienna International Center regularly point out that funding has actually dropped in real terms, as inflation surges and budgets remain flat.
“There is this trend now that everything should come cheap, that our inspectors should travel in economy class for 10 hours and then go and inspect the nuclear facility and so on,” lamented Gajdos. “There are limits.”
To Mayhew, the research associate, it’s clear that the challenges requiring the swift action of the IAEA are only set to multiply, especially if a nuclear renaissance were to materialize, amplifying the need for inspections of nuclear facilities.
“The role of the agency is not going down, it's certainly going up. And it needs the support of the member states to do its job,” said Mayhew.
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