In Arab World, South Asia Arms Race Feeds Anger and Envy
Excerpts from NYT
June 1, 1998
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By DOUGLAS JEHL
CAIRO, Egypt -- The onset of a nuclear arms race in South Asia has rekindled a sense of deep frustration among Arabs over their own countries' impotence in the face of Israel's nuclear arsenal.
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Israel has never acknowledged that it has nuclear weapons, but experts estimate that it has an arsenal that could number as many as 200 such devices. That is a source of considerable bitterness within the Arab world, in part because no Arab country has acquired nuclear capability, but also because the West has seemed to acquiesce in the imbalance by omitting Israel from its calls for a halt to the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
In an official statement on Saturday, the United Arab Emirates complained that the international community had "encouraged the nuclear arms race" because it had "exempted Israel and left it outside the range of international inspection of its nuclear facilities."
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After Pakistan followed India last week in staging nuclear tests, the Egyptian foreign minister, Amr Moussa, renewed a call to designate the Middle East as a nuclear-free zone -- a step that would require Israel to destroy or surrender its nuclear arsenal.
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Arab leaders have watched in frustration for years as Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons has gone unpunished, even as the United States has imposed harsh sanctions on Libya, Iraq and Iran for their own efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
With the United States leading efforts to penalize India and Pakistan for going ahead with nuclear tests, the Arab leaders may see this as a time when their calls for evenhandedness might be better received.
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Pakistan, which has an elected government, and which "believes in political pluralism and freedom of opinion, succeeded in producing the first Islamic nuclear bomb," Atwan wrote, "whereas all our Arab regimes combined, including those ruled by military commanders, have failed to produce a single tank between them."
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