The UN nuclear watchdog is so poorly financed that it might be unable to deal with a future atomic accident and no longer has top-grade equipment to detect covert activity, its director has warned.
"If an accident were to happen tomorrow, we would be hard-pressed to carry out core functions. This is a reality," Mohamed ElBaradei told a closed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors meeting earlier this month.
His uncommonly sharp comments came as the international community struggles to cope with nuclear proliferation risks such as Iran, which the West fears is covertly try to build atom bombs, and Communist North Korea, which has a fragile deal with five powers to dismantle its nuclear arms programme.
Iran says it needs nuclear power to generate electricity, but it has stonewalled investigations by the UN watchdog IAEA into the full scope and nature of its uranium enrichment.
"(Our) safeguards function is being eroded over time," ElBaradei warned the IAEA's 35-nation board at the end of a inconclusive debate on the agency's 2008 budget, according to a written copy of his remarks leaked to Reuters.
The IAEA asked for a 2 percent increase but major contributors-industrialised nations-have opposed this, aiming for zero real growth, citing their own budget constraints or arguing the agency could do its work more efficiently with resources it now has.
A new budgetary challenge for the Vienna-based IAEA will be the imminent inspector mission to North Korea to verify its promised nuclear disarmament.
"I have to tell you that the proposed budget does not by any stretch of the imagination meet our basic, essential requirements. I need to make the implications clear for you," ElBaradei said.
"I do not want in the future to see a clandestine nuclear weapon programme in some place, or a safety accident in another, that we have failed to pre-empt because we did not take the measures that were needed as we saw in the case of the weapons programme in Iraq and the (nuclear disaster) at Chernobyl."
A key aspect of IAEA investigations in Iran has been testing of traces of highly enriched-bomb-grade-uranium to assess their origin but the work often must be farmed out to non-IAEA laboratories due to shortcomings in agency equipment. "Today we cannot consistently do environmental sampling analysis ourselves due to the unreliability of an instrument that is 28 years old," ElBaradei said.
"The budget essentially is a political statement," he said. "The basic question is: what kind of agency do you want to have? You can easily have a mediocre agency. Or you can have an effective (one) capable of carrying out functions assigned to it (and) crucial to development and security, indeed to survival."
The agency's 2007 regular budget is $382 million, which IAEA officials have called a bargain in the UN system. But diplomats said countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany, as well as most of the nations of the G77, a group which represents 132 developing nations, advocated no increase to the budget beyond the inflation rate. "Most countries do not have the finances to afford an increase," said a senior industrialised nation diplomat.
"True there are new needs, but the right remedy is not just to increase the budget ... Rather, we have to prioritise and make applications more efficient."
The IAEA must formally adopt its 2008 budget at its broad General Conference assembly in September. The agency board could meet in special session next month to bridge disputes over the package with the agency Secretariat.