There is no more frightening issue in international relations today than the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility that they will fall into the hands of aggressive dictators or terrorists. The man charged by the world community with averting this calamity is Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

An Egyptian diplomat with a doctorate in law from New York University, he was a member of the delegation that negotiated the peace settlement with Israel at Camp David in 1978. In 1991, he headed the UN inspection team that demolished Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program. Since 1997, he has headed the IAEA, an agency founded 40 years earlier at the instigation of President Dwight Eisenhower.