MOHAMED El-Baradei’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize is both well-deserved and timely. As head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the 63-year-old Egyptian has had a tough time, not simply in the agency’s dealings with North Korea and Iran, but from the Americans, who opposed his reappointment as the IAEA’s boss. His sin in Washington’s eyes was that, as America prepared to invade Iraq, he said clearly he did not believe that Saddam’s regime still had nuclear weaponry. As one of the few people in a position to know this, his intervention was an unwelcome contradiction of the grounds for invasion. History proved Baradei right and the Bush White House never forgave him. He only won another term because the Americans recognized the political cost of resisting his nomination.
The Nobel Peace Prize is, therefore, in part a recognition of the courage and integrity of a senior UN official who could so easily have held his peace and let US policy run its misconceived course. Though the Nobel Prize committee has denied that the award was in any way a criticism of Washington, the fact is that in highlighting the integrity of one man, it has supported moral strength over the diktats of realpolitik. Had the prize been given purely to the IAEA itself, Baradei’s detractors might have sought to claim it was a snub to the man who had proved an unexpected thorn in Washington’s side.
Baradei’s award is, however, about a lot more than his challenge to the US. It is about the very serious risks of the proliferation of nuclear weapons, not simply via full-blown technology programs but also via the creation by terrorists of so-called “dirty bombs”. These could use conventional explosives to distribute deadly radioactive material. Though the immediate loss of life from such an attack would be small, the economic consequences of cleaning up large areas of a major world city could be disastrous.
While some of Baradei’s time is devoted to negotiations with North Korea and Iran, he has also had to concern himself with the immense task of tracing nuclear material “lost” in the former states of the Soviet Union. His inspectors are ranging far and wide in countries such as Kyrgyzstan, looking for missing nuclear material, not simply from old Soviet weaponry but from hospitals, industrial processes and even abandoned lighthouses.
What has characterized Baradei’s approach to these daunting problems is his statesmanship and patience. It would have been easy for the IAEA to state the obvious — that Moscow has much to answer for over the insecure nuclear shambles it left behind when it shed its empire. But the blame game has not been Baradei’s way. He has instead plugged away quietly and time will probably show that this was the most effective approach.
Those who criticize the IAEA for its lack of success ignore the challenges with which it has been asked to cope. Baradei’s award recognizes the steps toward peace that it has already taken and anticipates successes to come. It is richly deserved.
