Gentelmen, Start Your Engines:

So it seems that Iran's efforts to bum rush the Nuclear Club and lie/kick its way in have inspired another player to reconsider its longtime position regarding nuclear technology.

Let's run through a worst-case scenario if any Middle East country were to test a nuclear detonate device.

1. Most likely candidate is, I think obviously, Iran. And though experts and intelligence agencies disagree on precisely what timeline is most likely accurate for such an occurence, most agree that unless we do something soon, it will happen.

2. Saudi Arabia will feel the threat from a nuclear Iran - the two states have been competing for years to be viewed as the authoritative Islamic leader of the Muslim world - Iran, though Sunni, has bolstered its street cred through a campaign of direct and public confrontation with the United States. KSA, as keeper of Islam's holy sites, has been spreading its radical Sunni wahabi theology courtesy of its immense petro-wealth. Lacking an indigenous nuclear capability, it is not unlikely that Saudi Arabia will attempt to "lease" or otherwise "borrow" or flat out "buy" nuclear arms from Pakistan or north Korea. An alternative, though in my opinion far less likely, option would be to sign a mutual defense pact with the West, and thereby stepping underneath the Western nuclear umbrella. Professing my ignorance of KSA foreign policy, I will go out on a limb and also suggest the potential that Russia or China could be considered a partner for such a pact - especially given those states need for hard currency or energy.

3. As the excerpt from MEMRI below indicates, Egypt - once leader of secular pan-Arab nationalism, home of the Al-Azhar institution, and longtime political center of the Arab/Muslim world - will not look kindly on Saudi moves to obtain nuclear weapons (as listed above) and seek either an indigenous capability or follow similar alternative tracks to the suggested options for KSA above.

4. Will Libya continue to abide by its renunciation of nukes? I would not put it past them to consider a covert restart of its attempts to develop nuclear technologies. This would prove tough, but given Iran's success at hiding its programs, it should not be discounted.

5. Pakistan and India are unlikely to perceive a nuclear Iran as anything but an existential threat, and resume testing and beef up their respective nuclear arsenals.

6. Iran in possession of nuclear weapons is unlikely to be content with this and do nothing else. Tehran will almost certainly use this capability to become far more aggressive in Iraq, taking advantage of the chaos in Iraq to create a sort of client regime a la Syria in Lebanon. Though this is a long term prediction, in the near term, a nuclear Iran would use its resources to attempt to fuel the Iraqi insurgency until the U.S. left, then proclaim the defeat of the last super-power, bolstering its radical networks and throwing egg in the face of the West, while assuming an even larger regional role.

7. Given Iran's ties to Hezbollah (patron state), and that group's global reach - extending even into our own Western Hemisphere (see here, here, here, here, and here for a few references on the subject)- a nuclear terrorist attack would be more likely and real a possibility than ever before.


MEMRI: Special Dispatch-Egypt

September 26, 2006

No. 1299

Egyptian President Mubarak: "We Must Take Greater Advantage of New... Energy Sources, Including Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy": Renewed Debate in Egypt on Egyptian Nuclear Program for Peaceful Purposes

To view this Special Dispatch in HTML, visit: http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD129906

Statements by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his son Gamal Mubarak at the annual conference of the ruling NDP party sparked renewed debate in Egypt on Egypt's nuclear program for peaceful purposes. Immediately following the conference, Egypt's Supreme Energy Council convened to discuss the nuclear issue.

In 2003, MEMRI published a three-part Inquiry and Analysis reviewing the public debate on the development of nuclear energy in Egypt during 1998-2003.