How secure is GnuPG

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello,

I am new to GnuPG and I have a few questions.  Though I am a
mathematecian, I am not a cryptographer.  I only have passing knowledge of
cryptography.


1)  GnuPG cannot use the IDEA algorithm.

Does that incur any drop in security?
I assume tha the original PGP authors used IDEA because they felt that it
was the best.  Is GnuPG less secure?  or does it compensate in some way?


2)  RSA and factoring.

I have read that the author of qmail (a cryptographer) devised a
hypothetical machine which could use parallelism to improve factoring
speed.
Some have advised to only use 2048 bit RSA keys from now on.

How does this affect a default GnuPG setup?
When I setup GnuPG (v 1.0.6) the options only included DSA and ElGamal.
Does this mean that GnuPG does not use RSA by default?

Is ElGamal more secure than RSA right now?

Am I safe with my 1024 bit ElGamal key?


Thanks a lot,
Daniel.