And
what if Saudi Arabia were
building nuclear weapons?
By JONATHAN
POWER
June 27, 2001
LONDON - In any body politic there will be a group of
powerful people who, if not in the inner circle of the
president or prime minister, can win access to it at
regular intervals. Security is their profession and they
can be met at discrete academic conferences where they
tend to stand out as rather earnest, if sombre, figures.
It is they who bend the ear of those in authority,
consistent in their solicitations even as governments
change, arguing that their country will only have true
security if they possess a nuclear deterrent and that if
their advice is not heeded one day there will be an enemy
who will take advantage of their country's
naiveté.
One of these I knew reasonable well, the erudite and
charming nuclear physicist, the late Dr Munir Khan, one
the fathers of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, who, it was said
- although no proof was ever forthcoming - had used his
previous position as a high official in the International
Atomic Energy Agency to build clandestine contacts for
Pakistan's bomb makers.
The late Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden for many
years, told me of how he had to "de-fang" the nuclear
bomb establishment that was well under way with its plans
when he came to power. It is not easy to roll back the
nuclear lobby even when one is prime minister - there is
always the danger, if you don't take the scientists along
with you, that they, believing they love the country more
than the prime minister does, will conduct their future
researches clandestinely or, if not in secret, under the
guise of using it for "peaceful purposes" and await for
the political currents to turn in their favour.
This is in essence what happened in India. A new
authoritative study, "The Politics of Nuclear Weapons
in India and Pakistan" (Praeger) written by Haider
Nizamani makes clear that their nuclear programmes did
not originate in response to specific security problems.
They were born in visions of national identity.
Adversaries were not the cause. Rather, they had to be
found. This explains India's remarkable decision to put
its bomb development on ice after its successful
"peaceful" nuclear test in 1974. The "threat" from China
had gone quiet and Pakistan, for all the acrimony, did
not seem a real threat.
Only in the 1990s, by arguing that China with its
nuclear weapons was becoming an enemy, were the bomb
advocates able to win the ear of the politicians and
alterative voices were gradually marginalized as
"unpatriotic". One of the pivotal figures was the
strategic thinker K. Subrahmanyam who by sheer doggedness
transformed a minority opinion into a mainstream
assumption. His calculation, correct as it turned out, is
once a certain threshold has been crossed popular
opinion, invariably nationalistic, will succumb to the
call of patriotism.
With the rise of the Hindu-nationalist party, the BJP,
the bomb became inevitable. The move by America, Russia,
Britain and France to win support for the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty probably backfired because it compelled
India to choose between its old rhetoric of world-wide
nuclear disarmament and its growing taste for
nationalistic bravado.
We now see the same process afoot in Saudi Arabia. A
dozen years ago in this column I tried to draw attention
to Saudi Arabia's purchase of Chinese CSS-2 rockets. I
wrote then that there could be no question these had not
been purchased for conventional military activity, as
they were unnecessarily powerful and, moreover,
inaccurate with a normal explosive warhead. Their sole
purpose was to carry a nuclear weapon.
For years, western nuclear powers have connived to
keep this, if not secret, quiet. Saudi Arabia has been a
strategic ally, most important and long-standing, in the
oil business but relatively recently in the containment
of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As successive administrations
in Washington have viewed it, discretion has been the
better part of valour, even though one of the targets
would be the Middle East's other nuclear power,
Israel.
An article by Richard Russell in the current issue of
Survival, the quarterly of the influential
International Institute for Strategic Studies, argues
that whilst Saudi Arabia has not yet put nuclear warheads
on these rockets it is probably only a matter of time
before it does. Self-serving security issues are far more
important in such decision-making that "an innate
friendship" with the U.S.
Although the U.S. more than responded to Iraq's
invasion of neighbouring Kuwait, would they do so a
second or third time? For the desert kingdom with its
small population and army but huge territory, nuclear
weapons appear a sensible option. At the same time they
would make the country less dependent on the stationing
of U.S forces on its soil, which enrages the powerful
fundamentalist lobby.
After Washington belatedly discovered the purchase of
the CSS-2 from China, 31 Senators called on the Reagan
Administration to suspend American arms sales to Saudi
Arabia. But the Saudis were not intimidated. Requests by
Washington to inspect the missiles have been refused.
As Israel long has, Saudi Arabia will always deny the
intention to build a nuclear armoury, not least so as not
to publicly embarrass Washington. But common sense and
much circumstantial evidence suggest that this is the way
it will go. It is not the so-called "rogues" who pose the
threat of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation; it is some
of the Western powers' "nearest and dearest".
What is Washington going to do about that?
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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