OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- The secretive Nobel Committee met on Tuesday to pick the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize from a record field of 194 candidates with Egyptian-born anti-weapons campaigner Mohamed ElBaradei tipped as a favorite...

...Several experts said campaigners against the spread of weapons of mass destruction could be honored in 2004, perhaps the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its director general ElBaradei.

"I think the most likely winner is ElBaradei," said Espen Barth Eide, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

A prize to the IAEA and ElBaradei would be topical because of the organization's efforts to get Iran to freeze uranium enrichment activities and its work in North Korea and Iraq, he said.

A drawback for ElBaradei could be that the 2004 prize went to Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi. The committee might not want to shine its critical spotlight on Tehran again.

Stein Toennesson, head of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo agreed that the prize was likely to reward work against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction...

Experts said Hans Blix, ex-chief U.N. weapons inspector who worked with ElBaradei in Iraq in a vain search for weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.-led war in 2003, was unlikely to win partly because his work was too long ago.