Nuclear Arms Race in Middle East

The failure of American foreign policy is barely realised. It has now emerged that six Arab nations are intending to develop a nuclear program. The countries involved are Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. It will be interesting to see how the Americans respond to such a program, particularly in relation to its main ally in the region. Saudi Arabia has long been linked with the United States and particularly the Bush administration.

As we well know, the majority of the attackers on September 11th were from Saudi Arabia (fifteen of the nineteen men), which begs the question: Why let a nation that harbors terrorists be allowed to embark on a nuclear program? If Iran having such a program is a threat to world security, surely a country heavily implicated in the atrocity of that day should be restricted from such developments. Of course, given the relationship between Bush and the Saudi royal family, it is highly unlikely that the administration would do anything in response to this turn of events. Given the recent rise in terrorist activity in the country, it is certainly a greater cause for concern than the recent activities in Iran. There is a very real chance that Saudi society could collapse at any moment and a group of real extremists (as opposed to the imagined threat of Iran) could truly threaten the security of the world.