Nobel Peace Prize for IAEA is a bad joke

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei (R) talks to journalists during a press conference yesterday in Vienna. The 2005 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA and its Egyptian director general ElBaradei for their efforts against nuclear weapons proliferation, the Nobel committee said. PHOTO: AFP

A French group, Sortir du Nucleaire (Get Out of Nuclear) said the IAEA should be scrapped because, by "promoting" civilian nuclear power, it had given countries the means to build atomic bombs.

"The IAEA is hoodwinking the public by claiming that its inspections are preventing access to nuclear weapons by countries that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty," Sortir du Nucleaire said in a press statement.

"India, Pakistan and Israel have joined the five 'great powers' (the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain) in having an unjustifiable right to possessing nuclear weapons and in not meeting their pledges on nuclear disarmament.

"Recent developments (Iran, North Korea etc.) have confirmed the IAEA's patent failure," it said.

In Amsterdam, Greenpeace International spokesman Mike Townsley acknowledged that IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei had been "a voice of sanity" in his advocacy of a nuclear-free Middle East.

But, Townsley told AFP, ElBaradei was trapped by the IAEA's "contradictory role, as nuclear policeman and nuclear salesman."

The agency promoted nuclear energy and at the same sought to prevent countries that use this technology from making nuclear bombs, he said.

The Nobel Committee said the IAEA's work was "of incalculable importance" at a time when disarmament efforts "appear deadlocked, when there is a danger that nuclear arms will spread both to states and to terrorist groups, and when nuclear power again appears to be playing an increasingly significant role."

The Nobel jury has rewarded nuclear non-proliferation twice before in the past two decades, also on major anniversaries of the nuclear bombing of Japanese targets by the United States in World War II.

In 1995, the coveted award was given to the Pugwash group and its founder Joseph Rotblat, and in 1985, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War received the prize.