Governments around the world sent congratulations to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its boss Mohamed ElBaradei. But among environmentalists and anti-nuclear campaigners, the response was a loud jeer for an agency they have long despised as a patsy.

Many said the IAEA's credibility had been destroyed by its dual role.

One of its tasks is to promote peaceful use of civilian nuclear power among countries that sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet it also has to police that technology -- while respecting national sovereignty -- to ensure it is not subverted for military use.

As a result of this contradiction, these critics said, the agency had been ignored, conned or sidelined for decades by nations desperate to build a Bomb.

"There are many reasons why it should not have received the Nobel Peace Prize," said Gerd Leipold, executive director of Greenpeace International.

"The IAEA has spent nearly 50 years proliferating the very technology and nuclear materials that have given many countries the ability to develop nuclear weapons, including Iraq, North Korea and Iran."

A French group, Sortir du Nucleaire (Get Out of Nuclear) noted that the IAEA had been unable to prevent India, Pakistan and Israel -- countries in tense regions with a history of recent war -- from joining Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States in the nuclear-armed club.

And the latest standoff embroiling Iran and North Korea, which face suspicions that they have nuclear-weapons ambitions, "has confirmed the IAEA's patent failure," it said.

George Monbiot, a radical author and commentator with the British daily The Guardian, said the 2005 prize to the IAEA and its boss "was a reward for failure in an age of rampant proliferation."

He saw a parallel with the controversial awarding of the 1973 Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. The former US secretary of state and national security advisor helped extend the Vietnam War to Laos and Cambodia before negotiating the conflict's end.

"The currency (of the Nobel Peace Prize) is beginning to be devalued," Monbiot said.

The response from Russian environmental groups was particularly virulent.

They were incensed at what they saw as the IAEA's complacency after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and its conclusions that the consequences had been exaggerated.

Another source of anger is at ElBaradei's plans, sketched in 2004, under which up to seven countries -- led by Russia -- would store nuclear waste from countries that could not store or recyle their own waste.

"The awarding of the Peace Prize to the IAEA is the biggest error in the history of the Nobel Committee," said Vladimir Sliviak of the ecology group Ecodefence.

"Never has the Nobel Peace Prize been given to such a compromised organisation, working for the proliferation of dual-use nuclear technologies."

The IAEA "is an inhuman organisation and is awarded a prize," environmentalist Alexei Yablokov said bitterly.

The Nobel jury has rewarded nuclear non-proliferation twice before in the past two decades, also on major anniversaries of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

In 1995, the coveted award was given to the Pugwash group and its founder Joseph Rotblat, and in 1985, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War received the prize.

In addition to their traditional worries about nuclear proliferation, environmentalists are concerned that the civilian nuclear industry -- dealt a crippling blow by Chernobyl -- is on the rise once more.

Nuclear power is being eagerly pursued in China and India to help meet surging energy needs at a time of expensive, vulnerable oil supplies.

And in Europe, some countries that vowed to scrap or freeze their nuclear power programmes are now discreetly looking at reviving them to meet their commitments on greenhouse-gas pollution from fossil fuels.

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