No Need for Nuclear Arms, Laureate Says

The world should work to make nuclear weapons as universally condemned as slavery or genocide, U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Saturday after receiving the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

ElBaradei said in his acceptance speech that the world had 27,000 nuclear warheads and “to me, that is 27,000 warheads too many.”

“The hard part is how do we create an environment in which nuclear weapons -- like slavery or genocide -- are regarded as a taboo and a historical anomaly?” ElBaradei said.

Announced as laureates in October, ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency shared the prize for their work to prevent the spread of nuclear arms and promote the safe use of atomic power in a year marking the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

ElBaradei and IAEA Board of Governors Chairman Yukiya Amano of Japan received gold medals at Oslo City Hall to applause from about 1,000 guests.

Later, 10 laureates for medicine, physics, chemistry and economics gathered in Stockholm to receive their prizes from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf. British playwright Harold Pinter, the literature winner, was absent because of ill health.

The winners included Barry Marshall, who shared the 2005 medicine award with fellow Australian J. Robin Warren.

Marshall acted as a human guinea pig to prove his theory that a bacterium, not stress, caused stomach ulcers. He downed a brew that contained Helicobacter pylori, which he and Warren were sure caused ulcers. The theory was proved when Marshall became ill.

“It was slightly putrid,” Marshall said at a news conference last week. The discovery meant ulcer sufferers could be cured by a simple course of antibiotics.

The Nobel prizes, regarded as the world’s most prestigious accolades in science and literature, have been awarded since 1901. The 2005 prizes are worth $1.25 million each.