Science Quote by Mohamed ElBaradei

The line lands with the weary precision of someone who has spent years watching idealistic treaties collide with hard national interest. ElBaradei is talking about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty universe, where “everybody” is less a victory lap than a reminder that the remaining holdouts are not logistical oversights; they are geopolitical decisions. By naming India, Pakistan, and Israel in one breath, he collapses three very different security stories into a single category: states for whom nuclear capability is not a bargaining chip but a foundational piece of strategic identity.

The key phrase is “simply providing them an incentive, in terms of technology.” That “simply” is doing most of the work. It undercuts the technocratic fantasy that proliferation can be solved with a better deal, a sweeter civil-nuclear package, a smarter transfer arrangement. ElBaradei’s subtext is blunt: when a country sees the bomb as insurance against annihilation, prestige, or regional imbalance, your carrots look like coupons. He’s also quietly rebuking the diplomatic habit of treating nuclear restraint as a market transaction, as if the right tech access can purchase existential confidence.

Context matters: as IAEA Director General, ElBaradei sat at the fault line between verification (the world he can measure) and motive (the world he can only infer). This sentence is a boundary-setting move. It tells policymakers to stop expecting elegant technocratic fixes for problems rooted in asymmetric security, unresolved conflicts, and the unequal “rules” of a system where some states are recognized nuclear powers and others are punished for trying.