PARIS, Oct 7: Green activists voiced outrage after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, saying the UN watchdog had unwittingly helped the spread of atomic arms by promoting civilian nuclear power.

A French group, Sortir du Nucleaire (Get Out of Nuclear) said the IAEA should be scrapped because, by ‘promoting’ civilian nuclear power, it had given countries the means to build atomic bombs.

“The IAEA is hoodwinking the public by claiming that its inspections are preventing access to nuclear weapons by countries that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” Sortir du Nucleaire said in a press statement.

“India, Pakistan and Israel have joined the five ‘great powers’ (the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain) in having an unjustifiable right to possessing nuclear weapons and in not meeting their pledges on nuclear disarmament.

“Recent developments (Iran, North Korea etc) have confirmed the IAEA’s patent failure,” it said.

In Amsterdam, Greenpeace International spokesman Mike Townsley acknowledged that IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei had been ‘a voice of sanity’ in his advocacy of a nuclear-free Middle East.

But, Mr Townsley added, Mr ElBaradei was trapped by the IAEA’s ‘contradictory role, as nuclear policeman and nuclear salesman’.

The agency promoted nuclear energy and at the same time sought to prevent countries that use this technology from making nuclear bombs, he said.

In addition to their traditional worries about nuclear proliferation, environmentalists are concerned that the civilian nuclear industry — dealt a crippling blow by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster — is on the rise once more.

Nuclear power is becoming eagerly pursued in China and India to help meet surging energy needs at a time of expensive, vulnerable oil supplies.

And in Europe, some countries that vowed to scrap or freeze their nuclear power programmes are now discreetly looking at reviving them to meet their commitments on greenhouse-gas pollution from fossil fuels. —AFP