An award for the struggling nuclear detectives

Oct 7th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

The International Atomic Energy Agency and its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. While the choice has been welcomed by world leaders, the Bush administration may not be best pleased

TWO years ago, pleading in a signed Economist article for a strengthening of the United Nations’ regime for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), accurately described the anti-proliferation regime as “battered”. In recent times, Mr ElBaradei has himself come in for a battering. Earlier this year, the Bush administration, with the support of some other countries, tried to stop him being re-elected to a third term as head of the agency, after reportedly tapping his phones to seek evidence to discredit him.

In 2003, ahead of the Iraq war, Mr ElBaradei had a spat with America over the quality of its intelligence on Saddam Hussein's allegedly continuing programme to build nuclear weapons. America went ahead and invaded anyway, only to find that the programme no longer existed. More recently, and perhaps with more justification, the Bush administration has accused Mr ElBaradei of not being tough enough with Iran over its highly suspicious nuclear dabblings. However, other countries on the IAEA’s governing board, including some of America’s closest allies, declined to back the Bush administration’s attempts to turf him out given the lack of a credible successor and, in June this year, he was re-elected for a further four years. On Friday October 7th, the agency and its chief received an important vote of confidence when a committee in Oslo announced that they were the joint winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Though many others had been nominated for the Peace Prize, including Bob Geldof and Bono, two rock singers turned anti-poverty campaigners, the choice of Mr ElBaradei and his agency might have been expected, given that this year is the 60th anniversary of the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nobel committee had awarded the Peace Prize to anti-nuclear campaigners on the 40th and 50th anniversaries of what were the first and—so far—only nuclear attacks the world has seen.

Meeting in Paris on Friday, as news of the Peace Prize broke, Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair welcomed it. In Washington, America’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, called it “well deserved”. But whatever the Bush administration says publicly, it is unlikely to be pleased. Though the Nobel committee’s chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, denied that the award was a veiled criticism of Washington and its unilateralist tendencies, the committee’s announcement made it sound rather that way: “At a time when the threat of nuclear arms is again increasing, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to underline that this threat must be met through the broadest possible international co-operation.”

Despite its dissatisfaction with Mr ElBaradei's performance, America has given strong financial support to the IAEA, providing it with the resources to keep its inspectors in the field. The agency's record, overall, has been mixed. Perhaps its most notable coup in recent years was to help investigate an astonishingly sophisticated international ring of nuclear-technology peddlers, centred on Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, whose customers included Iran, Libya and North Korea. This network of proliferators distributed everything from bomb designs to nuclear materials—and even offered clients an after-sales service.

The IAEA played an important role in tracing the trail of clues that connected Mr Khan’s laboratory to the nuclear dabbling that some countries were conducting in defiance of their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In 2003, the IAEA’s inspectors confronted Iran’s authorities with traces of bomb-usable, highly-enriched uranium that had been found on its secretly imported centrifuges. This prompted Iran to point the finger at their supplier, back in Pakistan. In the same year, Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, owned up to a secret nuclear programme and agreed to scrap it, after he was confronted with evidence gathered with the agency's help.

However, much of the initial information about the Khan network came from intelligence services, not the IAEA—for instance, it was South Korea’s spooks who first pointed to Pakistan as a likely source of North Korea’s uranium-enrichment technology. In the case of Iran, many of the initial revelations about its nuclear facilities came from exiled opposition groups. The eventual discovery of what a shocked Mr ElBaradei called a “Wal-Mart” of black-market proliferation only underlined how little he and his agency had known about an enormous operation that had been going on right under his inspectors’ noses.

As with any other important UN agency and its leader, the ability of the IAEA and Mr ElBaradei to do their job properly depends to a great degree on the powers given to them by the UN’s member governments, and on the diplomatic support they get when pressuring a rogue regime to come clean. World powers often put their rivalries, and their national interests, first. For instance, Russia’s programme to build a nuclear-power station in Iran has sometimes made it reluctant to join wholeheartedly in efforts to press Iran to co-operate with the IAEA.

A leaky treaty

Nobel prize notwithstanding, Mr ElBaradei and the IAEA may not get much further in their efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists without agreement among world governments to strengthen both the NPT’s safeguards and the powers of the IAEA’s inspectors to enforce these. After the discovery, following the 1991 Gulf war, of Saddam’s earlier attempts to build nuclear weapons, the agency’s member states introduced a tough new inspections regime. But it was not made compulsory for NPT members to accept it—and many of the countries most in need of close monitoring have declined to sign up for it. There is thus a strong case for making this more intrusive inspections regime mandatory. Likewise, the right enshrined in the NPT for countries to enjoy the “benefits” of civilian nuclear power—which Iran misinterprets to argue it has a right to whatever nuclear technologies it likes—could be repealed or curtailed.

But the chances of such a tightening seem dim. At last month's big gathering of world leaders at the UN, its secretary-general, Kofi Annan, expressed dismay at their failure to agree on any statement on anti-proliferation or disarmament. Even countries that seem unlikely to be secretly coveting an atom bomb of their own, such as Brazil, bristle at the idea of being forced to let IAEA inspectors snoop freely around their civilian nuclear facilities. By arguing that the original five nuclear powers—America, Russia, China, Britain and France—have made insufficient efforts to reduce their stocks of weapons, other countries have found a handy excuse to drag their feet. As Mr ElBaradei lamented a couple of years ago, “In all of human history, no civilisation has ever voluntarily laid down its most powerful weapons. It remains to be seen whether ours can be the first.”

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