ElBaradei comments, 6 Feb 2009

Friday, 6 February 2009

Multinational nuclear fuel assurances and a stronger IAEA are key to efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons, IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei has said.

 

ElBaradei wrote that atomic bombs were "relics of the past" in a commentary published in the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, adding that "the only way to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading and ultimately being used is to abolish them."

 

The principle measure towards this would be firstly the resumption of disarmament talks between Russia and the USA. This could lead to a dramatic reduction in the number of warheads from today's 27,000. Commitments to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty would then seal off the production of new weapons material.

 

ElBaradei wrote that the major second step would be the establishment multinational control over the production of nuclear fuel with assurances of supply to all peaceful nations. This would mean that no country using nuclear power would need to develop new uranium enrichment and reprocessing facilities - which could potentially be misused for weapons material production.

 

There are already ten options under consideration for achieving this. They range from centralised facilities actually managed by the IAEA to collective guarantees from current commercial fuel cycle companies. All of them place the IAEA in key intermediary roles.

 

A third priority, ElBaradei wrote, is to "significantly improve" physical security of nuclear materials worldwide. He worried that nuclear materials trafficking, which has been recorded some 1500 times so far, could one day lead to a terrorist group gaining nuclear or radioactive materials.

 

In line with the extra work detailed above and its continuing job of ensuring no states establish secret weapons programs, the IAEA must be "substantially strengthened." ElBaradei recalled last year's high-level report on the agency's future and its conclusions that "budgets should be doubled by 2020" and $80 million was required immediately to "rebuild its dilapidated infrastructure," including the laboratories at Siebersdorf where samples crucial to world peace are actually analysed.

 

ElBaradei concluded with a call to nuclear weapons states under the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to "show they are serious about their 40-year-old legal commitment to scrap all nuclear weapons" by taking some of the steps he has outlined before the 2010 NPT Review Conference. "The division between nuclear weapon 'haves' and 'have nots' is not sustainable."

 

ElBaradei has served as director general of the IAEA since 1997 but is due to give up the office in Novermber this year. Yukiya Amano of Japan and Abdul Samad Minty of South Africa have been nominated to take over the post and a decision from the IAEA board is expected in the summer.