Nor, when those cases of proliferation have come to light, has Dr ElBaradei or the agency played a significant part in trying to get the regimes to desist. The stand-off between India and Pakistan after nuclear tests in 1998 was left to the US and Europe to tackle. In North Korea the IAEA has been sidelined as the US, China and Japan have taken the lead.

But it is Iran where the IAEA and Dr ElBaradei most need to justify their actions — or lack of them. In the past three years IAEA inspectors have repeatedly visited Iran to study the extent of its nuclear research. Dr ElBaradei’s quarterly reports to the IAEA board of directors have shown that Iran’s co-operation has been grudging, slow and sometimes incomplete. Inspectors have not found clear evidence of a weapons programme.

America’s quarrel with Dr ElBaradei is that these reports have been written in so measured a tone that they have not put much pressure on Iran.

British officials, who have been working with French and German counterparts, say that Dr ElBaradei has been less helpful than they wanted in trying to threaten Iran with referral to the UN Security Council. US officials have suggested that this is because he is Egyptian, Muslim and sympathetic to Islamic countries. European officials more often see his reserve as stemming from a distress at the failure of diplomacy that a referral would imply.

But certainly, in his public comments, Dr ElBaradei has sounded sympathetic to the aspirations of developing countries. He has attacked what he sees as double standards at the heart of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, by which acknowledged nuclear weapons powers seek to stop others getting them.

He has extensively promoted his own solution to the Iranian problem: to put uranium enrichment plants under shared, international ownership, so that everyone could rest assured that they were not used to make weapons-grade material.

It is a neat theoretical idea that has found no foothold in diplomatic reality. Dr ElBaradei’s defenders say that his critics wrongly blame him for problems that stem from the IAEA’s mixed mandate or their own muddled diplomacy. The twin roles of the IAEA have always given it an uncomfortable juggling act: to promote civil nuclear power but to deter the spread of weapons. Dr ElBaradei has argued that the agency must follow its remit in asking to inspect known sites. It cannot ask for impromtu inspections based on rumours. Even so, under his lead, the agency has widened the “additional protocol”, giving it the right to make more intrusive inspections of more countries. He has also been caustic about the weakness of some European diplomacy. He was critical of one “deal” with Iran that ducked the key question of how to define the suspension of controversial work, handing this to the IAEA.

That defence is fair, as far as it goes. But it still seems a tepid answer to the challenge thrown up by the record of the past eight years, in which the IAEA failed to detect many cases of proliferation and then struggled to find itself a role.

CROSS PURPOSES

‘There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites. Second, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990’

Dr ElBaradei to the UN March 7, 2003

‘We believe Saddam Hussein has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr ElBaradei frankly is wrong. If you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq is concerned, they consistently underestimated or missed what Saddam Hussein was doing’

Dick Cheney on NBC March 16, 2003