OSLO, Dec. 10 - The world should stop treating the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea as isolated cases and instead deal with them in a common effort to eliminate poverty, organized crime and armed conflict, the director general of the United Nations" nuclear monitoring agency said Saturday in accepting the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

"More than 15 years after the end of the cold war, it is incomprehensible to many that the major nuclear weapon states operate with their arsenals on hair-trigger alert," Dr. ElBaradei, 63, said.

Despite some disarmament, he continued, the existence of 27,000 nuclear warheads in various hands around the world still hold the prospect of "the devastation of entire nations in a matter of minutes."

Feelings of insecurity and humiliation, exaggerated by today"s nuclear imbalance, are behind the spread of bomb-development programs at the national level, said Dr. ElBaradei, who has headed the International Atomic Energy Agency since 1997. No less dangerous, he added, are the presumed efforts of extremist groups to acquire nuclear materials. With goods, ideas and people moving more freely than ever, the containment of nuclear technology must be part of a broad global effort, he said.

"We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing bigger weapons or dispatching more troops," he said. "These threats require primarily multinational cooperation." Dr. ElBaradei said the manufacture and sale of nuclear fuel for power generation, which can also be enriched to make bombs, should be placed under multinational control, with his agency operating as a "reserve fuel bank" for accredited nations.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee divided the 2005 award between Dr. ElBaradei and the atomic energy agency as a whole. Dr. ElBaradei and Yukiya Amano, the agency"s board chairman, were awarded diplomas and medals in a colorful ceremony before more than 1,000 dignitaries at Oslo City Hall.

The committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjos, lauded Dr. ElBaradei and his agency for resisting "heavy pressure" in 2003 to fall in line with an American contention that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program despite the failure of the agency"s inspectors to find hard evidence. "As the world could see after the war in Iraq, the weapons that were not found proved not to have existed," Mr. Mjos said.

In what appeared to be an allusion to that episode, Dr. ElBaradei said: "Armed with the strength of our convictions, we will continue to speak truth to power, and we will continue to carry out our mandate with independence and objectivity."

For the Nobel committee, this year"s choice of winners was a return to basics after last year"s untraditional award to Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist whose tree-planting campaigns are only tangentially related to war and peace. When Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who helped develop dynamite, died in 1897, he left money in his will to honor someone each year "who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Dr. ElBaradei and the agency will split this year"s prize money of 10 million Swedish kroner (about $1.3 million) and have promised their shares to charitable causes.