Text of letter from Greenpeace International Executive Director to the Financial Times re the IAEA receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
TWO SIDES OF THE SAME NUCLEAR COIN
Sir,
It was with surprise that we read the final line of your editorial "Nuclear peace prized" (October 8), which asked: "But would Greenpeace rather have no nuclear policeman at all?" Quite the reverse! As your editorial pointed out, the International Atomic Energy Agency's founding principles are "ambiguous" and open to abuse. Nowhere is this more clear than in its dual role of nuclear salesman and nuclear policeman.
It is the nuclear salesmen that Greenpeace would rather not have. The IAEA's nuclear policemen need to be free to work - to condemn and control clandestine nuclear programmes - uninhibited by the contradiction of their own proliferation pedlars who are obliged under the non-proliferation treaty to assist signatories in the development of civil nuclear programmes, which means assisting them to acquire the very technologies and materials of the military atom. This has clearly been the case for Iraq, North Korea and Iran where the IAEA brokered technology and expertise exchange from the Russian and western nuclear industries.
The 50-year-old "Atoms for Peace" Faustian bargain must once and for all be broken. There are not two types of nuclear technology and nuclear materials: Atoms for Peace and Atoms for War are two sides of the same coin.
It is our hope that Mohamed ElBaradei, strengthened in recent months by his victory over the unipolar view of the US and appointment to a third term as chief of the world's nuclear police, and now further strengthened as a Noble peace laureate, will seize the moment and push for the reform of the agency, removing its nuclear promotional role and instead focus all of its efforts on preventing nuclear proliferation.
There is no role in the 21st century for nuclear power. It is a dangerous source of proliferation, an inevitable target of terror; it is expensive and we still do not know how to dispose of the long-lived deadly nuclear wastes. Nor does it have any significant role in combating global warming. Greenpeace believes the twin threats of nuclear proliferation and global warming can be solved to a large degree by developing green and peaceful renewable energy sources.
Gerd Leipold, Executive Director,
Greenpeace International,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands