Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei is a slap in the face for the United States.

That was surely the motivation; it is hard to see any other reasons for the award to him, shared with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In the past eight years, they have failed to detect covert nuclear programmes in at least three countries - and failed to get diplomatic purchase on the problems when others have finally brought them to light. That does not amount to a contribution to world peace.

The single judgment which ElBaradei has got right in his eight years as Director-General of the IAEA is the one most provocative to the US: that Iraq, in 2003, had no significant nuclear programme.

But to be fair to the US, it never put much weight on the Iraqi nuclear programme two years ago. It did believe that Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons posed an immediate threat, but thought the nuclear work was probably rudimentary. Any nuclear threat lay in the future, in Saddam Hussein’s known interest in acquiring the capability.

The IAEA’s "success" in not exaggerating the threat of Iraq in 2003 is compromised by the number of times it has missed a threat entirely: Saddam's nuclear programme before 1991, the Libyan and Iranian programmes and the "nuclear supermarket" run by A Q Khan, the Pakistani scientist.

It was also slow to sound the alarm about North Korea’s conversion of its civil nuclear power into a weapons programme.

The greatest recent incident of tension between nuclear powers - the stand-off between India and Pakistan after the 1998 nuclear tests - 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, together with South Korea and Russia.

Mr ElBaradei has argued that the agency can follow only its remit in asking to inspect known nuclear sites. It cannot ask for impromptu inspections, based on rumours.

He was scathing about one of the many versions of a "deal" between Iran and the European Union, which ducked the central question of defining the suspension of sensitive work, and handed this key problem to the IAEA.

Under his leadership, the agency has widened the scope of the "Additional Protocol", giving it the right to make more intrusive inspections of more countries.

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 diplomatic role.

Read the full version of this article in The Times tomorrow

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