Mick Hartley

The Times editorial:

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) deserves a prize for bad judgment.

Bronwen Maddox elaborates:

Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei is a slap in the face for the US. That was perhaps the motivation; it is hard to see any other solid reason for giving the award to him, shared with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In the past eight years the agency and its director-general have failed to detect covert nuclear programmes in at least three countries — and failed to get diplomatic purchase on the problems when others have brought them to light. That does not amount to a contribution to world peace.

The single judgment that Dr ElBaradei has got right in his eight years at the IAEA is the one most provocative to the US: that Iraq, in 2003, had no significant nuclear programme.

But before the war, the US didn’t rate the Iraqi nuclear programme as a big threat, compared with that from chemical and biological weapons. It thought that the real nuclear threat lay in the future, in Saddam Hussein’s known interest in acquiring the capability.