ElBaradei: Not enough access
Photo: AFP
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Tuesday that the agency's failure to detect nuclear arms work showed his inspectors lacked authority to pre-empt proliferators.
explain allegations of secret nuclear arms research and its refusal to grant inspectors access to military-affiliated sites and officials they deem relevant.
His remark was telling because an investigation of Iran by the agency has stalled over Tehran's failure to
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ElBaradei said the crux of the problem was that some countries under investigation, the latest being Syria, had failed to ratify an agency protocol permitting short-notice IAEA visits to sites not declared to be nuclear to ensure no bomb-related work was going on at secret locations.
"Our legal authority is very limited. With Iraq, we discovered that unless we have the Additional Protocol in place, we will not really be able to discover undeclared activities," he said on the sidelines of the agency's annual 145-nation General Conference in Vienna.
"Our experience is that any proliferators will not really go for declared diverted activities (that would quickly reveal them as violators of the Non-Proliferation Treaty), they will go for completely clandestine undeclared activities," he said.
Diplomats claim the key to resolving current IAEA inquiries into Iran and Syria is extra access to sites not declared to be nuclear. Tehran and Damascus have both ruled this out, arguing that such sites involve their conventional military and so lie outside the IAEA's writ.
The United States and Western allies have criticized Iran and Syria in the IAEA debate, accusing both of stonewalling UN investigators and demanding unfettered cooperation.
But ElBaradei claimed the seven known nuclear weapons powers were setting a bad example to non-nuclear-armed states by clinging to doomsday arsenals as the pillar of their security instead of dismantling them according to NPT commitments.
"How can I go with a straight face to the non-nuclear weapons states and tell them these weapons are no good for you, when the nuclear weapons states continue to modernize and say we absolutely need nuclear weapons?" he said.