Tests Renew Fear of Nuclear Arms Race in Mideast

CAIRO —  When India detonated five nuclear devices this month, Washington was not the only one caught off guard: Shock waves reverberated through the Middle East, and some now fear that the nuclear arms race in South Asia could spread to the world’s most volatile region.

The idea that a developing nation such as India could safely defy the United States--and world sentiment--by acquiring and testing nuclear weapons thrilled many Arab intellectuals.

In Israel, the nuclear tests by India, followed tit for tat Thursday and Saturday by Pakistan’s, renewed fears that it is only a matter of time before Iran or another Israeli foe in the Middle East obtains a nuclear bomb.

“We are particularly concerned about the possibility that such weapons could reach the hands of the regimes in Iran and Iraq,” said David Bar-Illan, a senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “This could cause a total destabilization of the region and jeopardize world peace.”

Now that India and Pakistan have shown the way, there will be “a certain pressure on some of the [Arab] governments of the Middle East to go nuclear,” said Walid Kaziha, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo.

“I think many people now are questioning: Why are we [the Arabs] in such a weak position vis-a-vis the Israelis?” Kaziha said. “Shouldn’t we have a deterrent capability the way Indians now have it vis-a-vis the Chinese?”

Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa issued an urgent warning Thursday about the nuclear imbalance that exists in the Middle East, where only Israel is presumed to possess nuclear weapons.

“The security of the Middle East today requires the execution of President Hosni Mubarak’s initiative to ban all weapons of mass destruction from the area,” he said.

Otherwise, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that Egypt and other Arab countries have signed “is at risk of being blown with the wind,” Moussa said.

So far, Arab governments and the Arab League are emphasizing the goal of getting Israel to relinquish its nuclear weapons.

“We would like to mobilize Israel to sign up and put all of its weapons under international supervision, and finally to dispose of these weapons and adhere to our project,” said Mohammed Zakaria Ismail, the Arab League’s assistant secretary-general.

But some writers are starting to raise the topic of whether the Arab world should join the nuclear club.

The United States and its friends should not be allowed to say who may or may not have such weapons, commentator Mahmoud Abdelmoneim Murad said in the Egyptian government’s Al Akhbar newspaper.

“The Arab countries surrounding Israel have a right to test and own nuclear weapons,” he asserted, “since Israel owns a large number of warheads.”

Israel’s arsenal, developed in the 1960s and ‘70s, has been estimated by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London at up to 100 warheads that can be delivered by bombers or put onto missiles with a strike range of 950 miles.

After Israel, Iran is presumed to be the next Middle Eastern country with nuclear ambitions. It has long been accused by the United States and Israel of trying to secretly acquire nuclear weapons with help from Russian technology.

The nuclear tests by Iran’s neighbor Pakistan could further spur the Iranians to press ahead, Israeli analysts have argued.

If Iran succeeds, it is then presumed that Iraq, Iran’s traditional enemy, or another Arab country could feel compelled to go nuclear as a counterweight.

The Pakistani testing “illustrates how fragile the situation is,” former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres told the French news agency Agence France-Presse. “It is urgent to make peace, because time is not on Israel’s side.”

“Apparently, it is just a question of time before Iran goes nuclear, and only some unexpected development could prevent such an eventuality,” Zeev Schiff, senior military affairs correspondent for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, wrote after the Indian tests. “Nor is it at all clear whether the Americans would be ready to use force in order to block Iran’s progress.”

Israel did not publicly criticize either India or Pakistan in the wake of their tests. It has friendly relations with India but not with Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country closely aligned with the Arab world. When Pakistan staged its test, the headline in the Israeli daily Maariv called it the “Islamic Bomb.”

On the other hand, there are suspicions in the Arab world that Israel helped India to get its bomb, charges that India denied in a statement Thursday.

The one Arab country known to have come close to acquiring nuclear weaponry, Iraq, has been thwarted twice: first in 1981, when Israeli jets bombed a nuclear plant near Baghdad; and then after its defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when U.N. arms control inspectors determined that the Iraqis were only a year or two away from building a crude nuclear device.

Under that war’s terms of surrender, Iraq was compelled to destroy its nuclear arms capacity and all other weapons of mass destruction, and to refrain from trying to build such weapons again.

After seven years, U.N. weapons monitors say that Iraq has substantially disarmed itself but that it still has not fully met all of the cease-fire obligations.

In the past, the U.S. has accused Algeria and Libya of trying to obtain nuclear weapons technology. Algeria is believed to have abandoned its efforts, while Libya has been hindered by the international sanctions in force against it.

Who in the Middle East might be thinking of acquiring nuclear weapons in the next several years? Besides the obvious candidates of Iran, Iraq and Libya, political scientist Kaziha pointed to Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia as possibilities.

“The sheer fact that Israel has gone nuclear a long, long time ago and Egypt has not, I imagine, weighs heavily on the mind of any military strategist in Egypt,” he said.

“There is no great secret behind the achievement of scientific progress,” commentator Fahmi Howeidy wrote in Asharq al-Awsat, the leading Saudi daily, citing India’s example. “Third World countries can attain it if they apply themselves diligently and seriously.”

Although Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, relations have been in a spiral since the 1996 election of Netanyahu, who Arabs believe has backtracked on the Jewish state’s commitments to the Palestinians under 1993 peace accords.

If an arms race does get started, Israeli military commentator Ron Ben-Ishay suggested, Israel may have to follow India’s example and openly demonstrate its nuclear capacity.

“The idea behind this option [is] that if Israel can prove to Iran or Iraq that it could erase a great number of its population, it will bring back the deterrence ability,” Ben-Ishay wrote in the daily Yediot Aharonot.

One widely expressed Arab viewpoint is that the United States would have better luck selling its views on nonproliferation if it did not have what is perceived in the Arab world as a glaring double standard: It acts as if nuclear weapons are a danger in Arab hands but are all right for Israel to possess.

Arab countries will be sensitive to whether Washington is evenhanded in its criticism of Pakistan and India, one Egyptian official said. Many suspect that Pakistan will be punished more harshly because of what they perceive as an anti-Islamic bias in the West.

Some Arabs, in fact, are enthusiastic about Pakistan’s push to develop nuclear weapons.

“A nuclear Pakistan is a strategic ally of the Arabs and a support for them against Israel, which the West strives to keep perpetually strong while keeping us permanently backward,” wrote commentator Adnan Boumutie in Akhbar al-Khalij.

A respected columnist for Egypt’s semiofficial Al Ahram newspaper, Salama Ahmed Salama, implied that the Arab countries had made a mistake in signing the nonproliferation treaty.

In today’s world, he said, “nuclear capacity has become the guaranteed deterrent to defend national rights and the right of self-determination.”

Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.