[lbo-talk] Saudis may be mulling nuke acquisition

Jonathan Schwarz jonathan.schwarz2 at verizon.net
Sat Sep 20 07:17:22 PDT 2003


On Saturday, September 20, 2003, at 07:41 AM, grantlee at iinet.net.au wrote:


> Saudis may be mulling atomic acquisition
>
> [A very interesting article from the Daily Star in Lebanon. At the end
> is a
> reference to the Saudis supposedly funding Saddam's nuke program.]
>
> Saudis may be mlling atomic acquisition
> Gulf power balance prompts policy rethink
>
> [...]
>
> The Saudis denied Sultan's visit indicated the kingdom sought nuclear
> weapons, but there were suspicions Riyadh was mulling the nuclear arms
> option back in the 1980s. These were fueled in 1994, when a senior
> Saudi
> diplomat, Mohammed Khilewi, who sought political asylum in the US,
> alleged
> Riyadh had pumped billions of dollars into Saddam Hussein's clandestine
> nuclear program. He also claimed the Saudis had tried to buy nuclear
> research reactors from China and a US firm in 1989 under a secret
> effort to
> develop nuclear weapons.

A 1994 article in the New Yorker by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn said that Khilewi's claims were correct -- and that Saudi Arabia's actions were taken with the knowledge and approval of the Reagan administration:

"According to a former high-ranking American diplomat, the C.I.A. was fully apprised. "I knew about it," the diplomat says matter-of-factly, "and so did they." A senior White House official, asked about the Saudi government's involvement and American complicity, told us, "They did spend billions on the Iraqis. It was a different world. We were ready to overlook a lot of things the Saudis were doing for the Iraqis. It's consistent with all the other terrible things we did at the time"—to shore up Saddam."

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?011015fr_archive01

According to the Cockburns, there's basically never been any follow up on what they wrote in the US media. But really, why would there be? It's not like Iraq or its weapons of mass destruction or Saudi Arabia have been in the news recently.



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