IRELAND:Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will meet the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern and Environment Minister Dick Roche, this morning.
Dr ElBaradei travelled to Dublin to receive the honorary patronage of the University Philosophical Society at Trinity College Dublin last night. "I don't usually have time to think about philosophical concepts such as goodness and beauty," Dr ElBaradei told the packed debating chamber.
Development issues are "interconnected" with global security, Dr ElBaradei said. "We need to understand that poverty creates humiliation, that people in conflict often look for weapons of mass destruction . . . We have 2 billion people living on less than $2 (€1.52) a day, 850 million people go to bed hungry every night. 20,000 people, mainly children, die every day because of poverty. We spend $100 billion every year on development - less than 10 per cent of the $1.1 trillion we spend on weapons." In 2005, Dr ElBaradei was appointed to a third term as director general, despite US objections.
He has been a vociferous critic of the US invasion of Iraq, of US threats against Iran, and of the failure of nuclear powers to dismantle their own weapons stocks, as required by the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty.
"Fifteen years after the cold war, there are still 27,000 nuclear warheads," he said. "Short of an invasion by aliens, no one understands why. The US and Russia still deploy on a half-hour, hair-trigger mechanism. If that happens, half of civilisation could be destroyed." It was hypocritical for nuclear powers to preach at non-nuclear states, Dr ElBaradei said. "How does that logic fit, when you read in the newspapers that the United Kingdom is spending $200 billion to modernise its Trident submarines?"
A safe world must be based on the sanctity of human life, Dr ElBaradei continued.
"Between 50,000 and 600,000 innocent civilians have been killed in Iraq. Do we grieve for them the way we grieve for US and British soldiers? Of course not. And then we expect them to grieve for us."
Dr ElBaradei, an Egyptian Muslim, told the Biblical story of Cain killing Abel, then asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
"Until we realise that we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers, I don't think we'll have the sort of world we'd like to leave to our children," he concluded.
In tomorrow's Irish Times, Lara Marlowe talks to Dr ElBaradei about the Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes.