No Peace With Atoms

from the Boston Globe editorial:

MOHAMED ELBARADEI, who won the Nobel Peace Prize [Friday], was on point when he said the Nobel Committee was recognizing the problems of the nuclear age as much as his International Atomic Energy Agency's efforts to solve them. The prize underlined ''the urgency of addressing the dangers we face: nuclear proliferation, nuclear armaments, and nuclear terrorism," said ElBaradei.

There can hardly be any quibbling with the intent of the Nobel Committee's choice. And if that choice is tinged with undertones of chastising President Bush for his scorn of the IAEA in the run-up to the Iraq war, it is part of the committee's mission to take sides for the cause of peace.

Similarly political messages were sent when the prize was given to the Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi for her defense of prisoners of conscience and to the Kenyan champion of ecologically sustainable development Wangari Maathai for mobilizing ''poor women to plant 30 million trees."

The committee members are no less justified in using their platform to present a timely brief for the principle of multilateralism. In a statement yesterday, ElBaradei spelled out this principle explicitly: ''It has always been my belief," he said, ''that the road to international peace and security lies through multilateralism -- the collective search by people of all racial, religious, ethnic, and national backgrounds to find a common ground based not on intimidation or rivalry but on understanding and human solidarity." This is an ideal worth honoring.

Nonetheless, the IAEA is being recognized more for what it is meant to accomplish than for what it has accomplished.

Yet more troubling is a contradiction at the core of the IAEA's twofold mission: to promote civil nuclear energy while stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. Every nation that set out to become a nuclear power during the life of the IAEA -- Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Iran -- did so under the guise of developing peaceful nuclear energy. With energy prices soaring and plans for new nuclear power plants sprouting around the world, the time has come to reconsider the optimistic mission of an agency that came into being with the name ''Atoms for Peace."

If the Nobel Peace Prize helps crystallize a reconsideration of the problematic symbiosis between nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons, it will have performed a great service for mankind.