Several nuclear safeguarding treaties and agreements have been set up through the IAEA and others to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. However these cannot and have not prevented a rogue country from acquiring nuclear weapons. Assessing that a country adheres to the treaties is not sufficient on its own to rule out that a country is not trying to develop an elicit nuclear weapon program. The aim of this thesis is to examine that the systems methodology set out by Blockley and Godfrey (2000) called ‘doing it differently’ has the potential to improve the effectiveness of nuclear safeguarding. The advantage of the methodology is that it has the potential to enable the whole context (hard and soft systems) to be addressed in a consistent manner. Thus all of the information and evidence relating to both the hard systems (e.g. gas centrifuge facility, reprocessing facility) and soft systems (eg political intent to comply with agreements, developing scientific expertise) can be combined into one model. By combining hierarchical process modelling with uncertain evidence management then performance and success may well be improved. All of the players in the processes such as inspectors of the IAEA, experts, intelligence analysts, policy makers, the media and the citizens have to be involved to build a comprehensive model. The model developed in this thesis incorporates sufficient of the technical, scientific, political and economical issues to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. The main objectives of this research are to: 1) build a feasible paper version of a process model; 2) define and name a detailed set of sub-processes; 3) identify some of the processes through which the model could be tested in this and future work; 4) define descriptors for each of these processes; 5) test the ‘Italian Flag’ methodology for assessing uncertain evidence outcomes intuitively (i.e. not yet using the mathematical formulation). In this thesis a partial feasible model of the whole nuclear safeguarding process (i.e. testing that ‘Ruritania’ does not pose a nuclear threat to international peace) has been produced using mindmaps. The classification of the sub processes was done using BCIOD+R. The operational ‘O’ processes were developed in more detail to the technical level (e.g. components of a gas centrifuge rotor). Certain of these processes have been described in detail using ‘why, who, what, where, when and how’. The work has shown that the ‘doing it differently’ methodology is feasible for application to nuclear safeguarding. Clearly substantially more development work is required to deliver even a preliminary prototype. The work has demonstrated that the methodology has enormous potential to: co-ordinate information and evidence from various technical experts in the field; co-ordinate technical and non technical information and evidence; to create an ability to search and visualise evidence to derive answers to high level (or even low level) questions; to create better value for money in the whole safeguarding activities; to improve the provision of the right information to the right person at the right time.

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Quite apart from its apparent political obsolescence, the policy of nuclear deterrence is vulnerable to attack for its seemingly obvious immorality. Nuclear war is blatantly immoral, and nuclear deterrenec requires a genuine intention to resort to the nuclear retaliation which would precipitate such a war. Therefore, since it is wrong to intend that which is wrong to do, deterrence is immoral. This thesis seeks to examine the nature of the deterrent intention as a means of verifying the soundness of the above deontological argument. This examination is carried out by first suggesting an acceptable notion of intention in general and then, after analysing the views of deterrent intention by other writers, proceeding to demonstrate the uniqueness of that intention. Having done this, and having explored the possibility that deterrence need not contain a genuine intention to retaliate, the thesis moves on to suggest and defend a moral principle which states that endeavours requiring the formation of an immoral intention may nevertheless be moral. Called the Principle of Double Intention (and based on the Principle of Double Effect), it offers a method for the moral assessment of agents who form immoral intentions within larger contexts. By applying this principle to nuclear deterrence, it is demonstrated that agents who undertake such a policy may be morally justified in doing so, provided certain conditions are met. The thesis closes with a refutation of the objection that an agent cannot rationally form an intention (such as that required in deterrence) which he has no reason to carry out. By highlighting the objection's reliance on a claimed isomorphism between intention and belief, it is shown that the objection, while generally sound, does not apply to the special case of nuclear deterrence. The conclusion suggests a framework for disarmament which results in a deterrent force structure which is both strategically effective and morally acceptable.