As he faces the US-NATO onslaught in the weeks ahead, will Muammar Qaddafi conclude that he made a disastrous mistake when he gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003 in return for Bush administration promises of aid and improved relations?
An official from North Korea says he clearly did, and “it is now being fully exposed before the world that Libya’s ‘nuclear dismantlement,’ much touted by the U.S. in the past, turned out to be a mode of aggression, a way of coaxing the victim with sweet words to disarm itself and then to swallow it up by force.”
Qaddafi is not likely to agree with the North Koreans because he knows that, in reality, his nuclear program was not as far advanced as he had pretended, and he had lost confidence that it would ever succeed. As Mohammed ElBaradei, former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, observed, Libya’s nuclear effort was “in the very initial stages of development when it was discontinued” and was, in fact, beset by major technical difficulties. To be sure, Qaddafi tried to avoid these issues by buying parts for a uranium enrichment plant through the smuggling network that supplied only 15 percent of the required parts. As David Albright has shown in definitive detail, Libya did not have the technology needed to make the rest of the parts itself. Adding to Qaddafi’s disenchantment with his prospects for actually developing an operational nuclear capability was a compelling reality: he was in serious domestic trouble and badly needed the economic quid pro quos offered by the United States to stay in power. Economic distress had led to urban riots, two military coup attempts and an Islamist insurgency in the eastern provinces. Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, completely ignores the limited progress of the Libyan nuclear effort in his simplistic argument that Qaddafi, eyeing the fate of Iraq, acted out of fear of a U.S. invasion.
Saddam Hussein, as it turned out, tried to make it look like he had nuclear weapons that he did not actually have mainly to frighten off Iran in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war with its horrendous casualties. This in turn produced alarm in Washington and Tel Aviv and the unintended consequence of a U.S. invasion.
The Iran-Iraq war was clearly the critical factor that initially accelerated the development of the nascent Iranian nuclear weapons program. But I learned on three recent visits to Tehran from key foreign-ministry and think-tank experts that Iran is not yet committed to acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
An official from North Korea says he clearly did, and “it is now being fully exposed before the world that Libya’s ‘nuclear dismantlement,’ much touted by the U.S. in the past, turned out to be a mode of aggression, a way of coaxing the victim with sweet words to disarm itself and then to swallow it up by force.”
Qaddafi is not likely to agree with the North Koreans because he knows that, in reality, his nuclear program was not as far advanced as he had pretended, and he had lost confidence that it would ever succeed. As Mohammed ElBaradei, former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, observed, Libya’s nuclear effort was “in the very initial stages of development when it was discontinued” and was, in fact, beset by major technical difficulties. To be sure, Qaddafi tried to avoid these issues by buying parts for a uranium enrichment plant through the smuggling network that supplied only 15 percent of the required parts. As David Albright has shown in definitive detail, Libya did not have the technology needed to make the rest of the parts itself. Adding to Qaddafi’s disenchantment with his prospects for actually developing an operational nuclear capability was a compelling reality: he was in serious domestic trouble and badly needed the economic quid pro quos offered by the United States to stay in power. Economic distress had led to urban riots, two military coup attempts and an Islamist insurgency in the eastern provinces. Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, completely ignores the limited progress of the Libyan nuclear effort in his simplistic argument that Qaddafi, eyeing the fate of Iraq, acted out of fear of a U.S. invasion.
Saddam Hussein, as it turned out, tried to make it look like he had nuclear weapons that he did not actually have mainly to frighten off Iran in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war with its horrendous casualties. This in turn produced alarm in Washington and Tel Aviv and the unintended consequence of a U.S. invasion.
The Iran-Iraq war was clearly the critical factor that initially accelerated the development of the nascent Iranian nuclear weapons program. But I learned on three recent visits to Tehran from key foreign-ministry and think-tank experts that Iran is not yet committed to acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
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