VIENNA, 10 December 2003 — It was a bold response to a fearsome menace: erasing the threat of nuclear annihilation by establishing a global agency to keep nations from abusing the power of the atom.

But 50 years after US President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s landmark “Atoms for Peace” speech on Dec. 8, 1953, the UN nuclear agency born of his address is still struggling to contain the threat and move the world “out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light.”

Nuclear weaponry poses even more of a danger than it did during the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed El-Baradei conceded in an interview ahead of Monday’s anniversary of the speech.

When Eisenhower addressed the UN General Assembly, there were just two known nuclear powers. Today, there are at least seven: Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, Russia and the United States. Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, and North Korea says it has atomic arms, a claim that has not been verified.

“I’d like us to see nuclear weapons the way we perceive slavery or genocide — that it’s taboo,” El-Baradei told a small group of reporters at his agency’s sprawling Vienna headquarters overlooking the Danube.

“I would not be surprised if we see more countries acquire nuclear weapons,” he said. “We need to change that environment — to move toward a world free of nuclear weapons, which have no place in our defense arsenals of the future.”

It hasn’t been easy. This year alone, the IAEA has convened emergency meetings on Iraq, Iran and North Korea — US President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.”

Not that El-Baradei, an Egyptian, caters to Washington. His inspectors angered US officials before the war in Iraq by declaring they had found no signs of an active nuclear weapons program.

Coalition forces have yet to uncover any evidence of such weapons in Iraq, although El-Baradei is pressing for the return of his inspection teams, who were pulled out just before combat began, to verify.

The IAEA also has clashed with Washington recently over how best to deal with Iran, which the United States accuses of covertly trying to make atomic arms.

Last month, the agency, convinced that keeping Tehran engaged is better than driving it back underground with an explicit threat of UN sanctions, withstood American attempts to toughen a resolution demanding greater Iranian openness.

In an interview last week with the French newspaper Le Figaro, El-Baradei criticized the US Congress for releasing $6 million for American research into “mini-nukes” of less than 5 kilotons. “Unfortunately, the message from the United States is counterproductive. Far from aiming for nuclear disarmament, the United States is looking to improve its arsenal,” he said.

Eisenhower, the retired general who had commanded the western allies in Europe during World War II, believed the best way to deal with the nuclear threat was to get countries to commit to using atomic technology for purely peaceful purposes.

El-Baradei said the IAEA is supporting efforts to develop a new “proliferation-free” fuel cycle that would produce waste unfit for diversion and reprocessing for weapons use.

The UN agency also is focusing on ways to minimize the risks of terrorists acquiring nuclear material that could be used to make “dirty bombs” — conventional explosives that would scatter radioactive material — a menace he said didn’t occur to the agency until after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Now we’re spending a great deal of time working on this threat,” El-Baradei said.

Nuclear technology, he said, is like the mapping of the human genome, which can lead to breakthroughs in fighting disease as well as to unethical and dangerous attempts to clone human beings.

“Just because biological agents can be used as weapons doesn’t mean we’re going to stop making vaccines,” El-Baradei said. “There will always be some danger. We’re going to try to make the best of it.”

Although El-Baradei still sees a future for nuclear energy despite the weapons threat, he describes himself as a “nuclear agnostic” and likens the IAEA to international aviation agencies which set safety standards without advocating air travel.

Eisenhower’s speech, anchored in his belief that “if a danger exists in the world, it is a danger shared by all,” envisioned an agency that would control the world’s nuclear stockpile by putting it “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.”

The IAEA, created four years later, didn’t turn out that way — it doesn’t have the world’s uranium and plutonium under lock and key.

Instead, the agency polices more than 900 facilities in 70 countries to ensure they comply with their commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and other international accords.

IAEA inspectors regularly visit nuclear facilities to check records that countries keep on the whereabouts and inventories of their nuclear materials, looking for signs that uranium and plutonium at reactors or laboratories might be diverted to military uses.

“The vision is still as valid today as it was 50 years ago. We’re working diligently to rid ourselves of the destructive force of nuclear weaponry,” El-Baradei said.

“But we’re not there yet. ‘Atoms for Peace’ is still a work in progress. We need to do better.”