There are 27 000 nuclear warheads in the world and that is ”27 000 too many”, said International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Mohamed ElBaradei after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway on Saturday.
Just hours before ElBaradei received the £750 000 prize, Iran appeared to reiterate its intention to defy attempts by the United States and the United Nations atomic watchdog to curb its nuclear ambitions. In Tehran, the country’s top nuclear official, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, said there is ”no doubt” Iran will enrich uranium and produce nuclear fuel.
In his acceptance speech in Oslo, ElBaradei (63) said the world should work towards nuclear weapons being seen as immoral.
”The hard part is: How do we create an environment in which nuclear weapons — like slavery or genocide — are regarded as a taboo and a historical anomaly?”
After receiving a gold medal and diploma with IAEA chairperson Yukiya Amano, ElBaradei said the world faces ”threats without borders” — weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, organised crime, war, poverty, disease and environmental degradation — that can only be tackled through multilateral cooperation.
”In regions where conflicts have been left to fester for decades, countries continue to look for ways to offset their insecurities or project their power. In some cases, they may be tempted to seek their own weapons of mass destruction, like others who have preceded them.
”We must ensure, absolutely, that no more countries acquire these deadly weapons. We must see to it that nuclear weapon states take concrete steps towards nuclear disarmament,” he said.
Before the ceremony, ElBaradei said Iran should be given three more months to cooperate.
”It may be slow, but diplomacy and verification is the way to go,” said the Egyptian lawyer who has headed the IAEA for eight years.
Iran has rejected an offer to shift its enrichment programme to Russia under a plan that envisaged that Moscow would make sure nuclear material was enriched only to fuel levels, not to weapons-grade. The US claims Iran’s programme is geared towards producing warheads. Iran claims it is producing electricity.
On Friday, ElBaradei said the international community was losing patience ”with the nature” of Iran’s programme and that he hoped outstanding issues would be resolved before he was due to present his next report, in March. On Saturday, in response to ElBaradei’s comments, Aghazadeh said: ”Iran is also losing its patience with them.”
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to ElBaradei and the IAEA to honour the organisation’s non-proliferation efforts and to mark the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. — Guardian Unlimited Â