Mohamed ElBaradei's Nobel Message

In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo last Saturday, Dr. ElBaradei spoke of the need to give his agency new tools to deal with countries, like Iran, that exploit their legal right to experiment with civilian nuclear technologies to master all the steps necessary to build nuclear bombs. But he also stressed the importance of global nonproliferation efforts, including the need for the established nuclear powers to make sharper reductions in their cold war arsenals. He noted that there were still about 27,000 nuclear warheads lying around, many of them on hair-trigger alert. An overwhelming majority are located in Russia or the United States.