Peace prize sends the right message

The Nobel Committee's decision shows that it has seen world peace through the nuclear prism and highlighted its nonproliferation as the most challenging agenda of our times. Without question, the nuclear issue is the biggest bargaining chip in international politics. The countries which possess nuclear arms talk of balance of power having been achieved through such weapons working as a deterrent. At the same time, the advocates of nuclear nonproliferation who also include big new nuclear powers are convinced that the weapons can only push the world towards massive self-destruction. So, there is some double standard at work here.

Iran and North Korea are allegedly going in for uranium enrichment as a 'precursor to acquiring a bomb,' and the negotiations with these two countries have so far failed, as they refuse to bow to the international pressure for abandoning their nuclear programmes professedly conceived for peaceful purposes. As it is, the world has been at risk of experiencing more and more countries going nuke for quite some time past.

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Against this backdrop, the exponents of nuclear nonproliferation under the UN auspices have assumed a greater role than any time before. It won't be pointless here to mention that if the IAEA were allowed to work to the best of its ability in Iraq, while inspecting the suspected nuclear and chemical sites, and their findings from time to time were heeded, the war in Iraq could have been avoided. The IAEA kept saying that it had failed to trace any WMD, but the US ignored the message. And the Iraq war, as everybody knows, has created more problems than it has solved . It is causing incalculable misfortunate not only to the people of Iraq but that of the USA as well.

With the IAEA and ElBaradei coming under the spotlight with their winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the international community should take it as a reminder for containing the nuclear menace with a renewed sense of urgency.