Nobel yes, but will peace be the prize?
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director Mohamed ElBaradei - 60 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - recognises their efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.
While it may help boost confidence in international inspections as a means of avoiding armed conflict, the award has attracted its critics.
At the end of a week in which US President George W. Bush delivered a key speech on terrorism weighed down with September 11 rhetoric ahead of a constitutional referendum in Iraq that seems unlikely to bring peace any closer, the best we can hope for is that it can stand as a beacon of hope for a safer world.
Since the Chernobyl accident in 1986, the United Nations body has been responsible for promoting nuclear safety and handling mounting concern about nuclear weapons. More recently, the IAEA and Dr ElBaradei have played a central role in negotiations with Iran and North Korea. While both nations still pose a nuclear threat, the agency's efforts have brought the danger to the forefront of international awareness.
The increasing unpredictability of today's world has focused attention on nuclear security and, in reaction, Dr ElBaradei has moved the IAEA from a little-known technical agency into a high-profile organisation built to take a stand on proliferation issues.
But despite advances such as the nuclear test-ban treaty, the proliferation problem has worsened. India and Pakistan have joined Israel as nuclear powers that are not party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Tough negotiations lie ahead on North Korea's pledge to abandon all nuclear weapons and programmes and rejoin the NPT in return for nuclear energy, economic aid and security guarantees.
Iran is also facing the threat of referral to the UN Security Council unless it eases worries about its nuclear activities. These issues have put the IAEA and Dr ElBaradei on the spot. The 63-year-old Egyptian lawyer has often been the butt of insults. North Korea, for example, once called him the 'cat's paw' of the United States. Washington, on the other hand, was angered by his insistence that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, and accused him of leniency with Iraq.
Though he has made powerful enemies, this did not stop Dr ElBaradei winning a third term at the Vienna-based IAEA.
The Norwegian panel that selects the Nobel Peace Prize winner is no stranger to controversy. Previous winners have included former Palestinian Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat, then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Northern Ireland Protestant leader David Trimble, former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. This year's award is no exception, having already come under fire from anti-nuclear campaigners in Japan - who have been overlooked yet again - from a right-wing think-tank in the US and from Greenpeace.
Unlike other Nobel prizes, the peace prize is often political in nature and courts controversy. Human rights, conflict resolution and disarmament are, after all, matters of interpretation.
Another difference is that the awarding of the prize it is often tied to news events, as in the case of Dr Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, who won after they negotiated the Vietnam war peace accord, and of Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi after her National League for Democracy Party was stopped from taking power by the ruling junta after winning an election. Dr ElBaradei and the IAEA are the latest.
The Nobel peace prize was created by the man who invented dynamite. If this year's choice of winner helps defuse nuclear tension fears, it will be remembered long after others have been forgotten.
