July 2 (Bloomberg) -- Yukiya Amano, a Japanese diplomat and long-time proponent of nuclear disarmament, won the election to become the new Director General of the United Nations atomic agency, succeeding Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei.

Amano, 63, won in the last round of voting today at the International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Vienna. The Japanese diplomat was elected after one country on the IAEA’s 35-member board of governors abstained in the secret ballot, giving him the two-thirds majority needed to win, said Taous Feroukh, the agency’s Algerian chairwoman.

“Yukiya Amano was, from day one, the preferred choice of the United States and Europe,” Andreas Persbo, a senior researcher at the London-based Verification Research, Training and Information Center, said in an e-mail. “He is generally seen as a competent diplomat and good administrator.”

Amano is the first Asian elected to lead the IAEA, the body charged with preventing nuclear weapons proliferation and promoting peaceful atomic energy use. Japan is the second- biggest contributor to the IAEA budget.

“I am very pleased for this support,” Amano said in a statement to the media. “I will do my utmost to enhance the welfare of human beings, ensure sustainable development through the peaceful use of nuclear energy” and “prevent the threat of nuclear weapons.”

Amano, who had previously failed to win majority support in three meetings of the IAEA board, said he’d seek to build alliances with developing and industrialized countries before the agency’s annual general conference in September. The IAEA’s 144 members must approve the election.

Amano, a lawyer who graduated from Tokyo University, joined Japan’s Foreign Ministry in 1972. He has negotiated nuclear safeguards agreements and atomic bomb test-ban treaties.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Tirone in Vienna at jtirone@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 2, 2009 11:08 EDT