The Problem With Voluntary Compliance

The New York Times, in this story, illustrates the main problem with the current non-proliferation scheme in the form of the IAEA.

International inspectors are requesting access to two secret Iranian military sites where intelligence suggests that Tehran's Ministry of Defense may be working on atomic weapons, despite the agreement that Iran reached this week to suspend its production of enriched uranium, according to diplomats here.
[...]
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., said in an interview here on Wednesday that he had repeatedly asked Iran for access to the two sites, but that it had not yet been granted.

The whole basis of IAEA inspections relies on the honesty and good faith of the countries which the IAEA is inspecting. Iran has been cheating for almost 20 years, yet the EU-3 makes agreements with them ignoring this record. Since the military sites where Iran is doing nuclear "research" are not subject to inspections, a country that chooses to develop weapons can easily get around the whole inspection and non-proliferation regime.

International arms control is, in some ways, very similar to gun control. In both cases the goal is to limit the access to weapons to those whom society considers dangerous. So for the law abiding, there are restrictions. Yet for those who choose to flout the law - the very ones the laws are made to constrain - these restrictions are meaningless.