Global Security Newswire

Syria yesterday called on Israel to comply with an international resolution seeking a nuclear weapon-free Middle East, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Sept. 18).

The measure, passed last week by the International Atomic Energy Agency General Assembly, urges "all states in the region to accede" to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and to abandon nuclear weapons and military nuclear ambitions. Israel, which has not joined the pact, is widely presumed to possess the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.

"Syria stresses the need to commit Israel to comply with the resolution adopted by the IAEA ... regarding Israeli nuclear capabilities," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said.

Syria itself has been suspected of having nuclear-weapon aspirations. Israel in 2007 destroyed what was alleged to be a nuclear reactor, though Damascus asserted the site was a non-nuclear military installation (Slobodan Lekic, Associated Press I/Google News, Sept. 28).

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Friday that Israeli and Iranian nuclear-weapon activities could together drive other nations in the region to seek nuclear arms.

"One has to verify" the intention of Iran's nuclear work, he said: "Is it a peaceful nuclear effort or (if) it has an objective beyond," the official said.

"If it has an objective beyond, of course, Egypt very much objects to the introduction of nuclear weapons to this part of the world," Aboul Gheit said. "I hope that we would manage to verify that the Iranians are not going nuclear militarily."

"If we have, what we assume [is] a nuclear-capable Israel and if we see that Iran is also ... acquiring a nuclear capability, then we would have two players in that part of the world, one on the Mediterranean, Israel, and the other on the (Persian) Gulf," he said. "You would find that you have a land mass of Arab countries and Arab people that do not feel at ease with that setting. I would feel that the Turks would also be uneasy like a country like Egypt."

"The situation would be uneasy and it would trigger an arms race, no doubt about it," Gheit said. "Experience has taught us that you introduce one weapon, somebody else will try to acquire always that weapon."

"We were all ready to endorse the results" of last week's U.N. Security Council meeting on nonproliferation and disarmament, he added (see GSN, Sept. 24). "No one wants proliferation in this part of the world" (Associated Press II/Washington Post, Sept. 25).