A new report from London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) finds that from February of 2006 to January of last year at least 13 Middle East countries either began to consider producing nuclear power or restarted their own dormant nuclear programs. "Nuclear Programs in the Middle East: In the Shadow of Iran" concludes that the aim is to counter-balance Iran.
20 May 2008: Investor's Business Daily
WMD: The Mideast has long been "explosive," but more than a dozen countries there have now been emboldened to go nuclear. Further delays in stopping Iran's nuke program could turn it into an atomic Wild West.
Beyond the obvious consequences of allowing Islamofascist Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is a new concern: Other Middle East regimes will feel free to pursue their own nuclear programs.
A new report from London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) finds that from February of 2006 to January of last year at least 13 Middle East countries either began to consider producing nuclear power or restarted their own dormant nuclear programs. "Nuclear Programs in the Middle East: In the Shadow of Iran" concludes that the aim is to counter-balance Iran.
Egypt is reviving plans for nuclear power, a joint feasibility study is underway involving Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Algeria, meanwhile, with "one of the most advanced nuclear-science programs in the Arab world," as the IISS points out, has complained of "Western pressure to accept additional nonproliferation obligations." And Turkey plans to build up its already substantial nuclear infrastructure with new power plants.
So if you think the Middle East is volatile today just wait until that geopolitical powder keg is affixed with its own set of nuclear fuses.
One of the most interesting aspects of the British report was its doubtfulness of the ability of the terrorist client state of Syria to pursue a nuclear program in the aftermath of Israel destroying a covert nuclear weapons facility there last year. When a Middle East state knows there is a credible military obstacle to its going nuclear, it won't waste its resources trying to do so. But Tehran has every reason to believe there is no such obstacle to its own program.
So the belief that there will indeed be a nuclear-armed Iran in the not-so-distant future is setting its neighbors on the path toward "civilian" nuclear programs that can be converted to bomb production if the perceived need arises.
It is no less interesting to observe what little credence Iran's Muslim neighbors place in last fall's much-touted U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) contending that Tehran's nuclear weapons program had been inactive since 2003 — not to mention UN nuclear watchdog chief and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei's constant assurances for years now of the lack of "any concrete evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon," as he repeated again this week.
The Los Angeles Times reported last weekend that the head of analysis for U.S. intelligence agencies, Thomas Fingar, said that the NIE emphasized Iran's halting of warhead design work — not its continued efforts to enrich uranium, the most difficult aspect of making a bomb — because the warhead halt was the newest intelligence finding.
That doesn't sound too credible, and according to former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, our politicized spy agencies "wanted to forestall any possible military action by the Bush administration against Iran's nuclear program."
With time running out for the Bush Administration, forestalling such action — whether it be undertaken by America or Israel — seems to be risking a plague of weapons of mass destruction in the most dangerous part of the globe.
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