Saudi Arabia: The Nuclear Conundrum

Abstract

Rumors that Saudi Arabia has acquired or is intending to acquire nuclear weapons pose a conundrum. Clearly, Saudi Arabia possesses latent nuclear capability through its nuclear energy program.¹ Approaching this conundrum through the traditional route of denying a rogue state capability is redundant because the Saudis can afford to procure a weapon off-the-shelf and, thus, do not necessarily need to engage in a protracted indigenous nuclear weapon program. However, no solid evidence has yet appeared that Saudi Arabia has acquired nuclear weapons.² To the best knowledge of Western intelligence, Saudi Arabia has not been a nuclear-armed state since its accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on October 3, 1988.³ Saudi Arabia is also a proponent of a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone and is actively involved in the NPT 2005 Review Conference.⁴ Moreover, the Saudis have been good to the West. They used their surplus oil capacity to break the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargo in 1974, during the protracted Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), during the Gulf War (1990–1991) to make up for the loss of Iraqi and Kuwait oil, and, most recently, in September, 2001 by sending 9 million barrels of oil to the United States over a period of two weeks to stabilize the financial markets against inflation.Despite this act, in 2002, the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon, named Saudi Arabia as the key element in the spread of terrorism from the Arab world, saying that “it is central to the self-destruction of the Arab world and the chief vector of the Arab crisis and its outwardly directed aggression.” ⁵