Is Egypt ready to go nuclear?

Support for Saddam
Meantime, the CIA report on chemical weapons' support to Iraq indicates that the Egyptian arms industry was sophisticated enough to allow Cairo to help Baghdad to make “technological leaps” in the 1980s, as Arab Iraq was battling Persian Iran. 

The report is the first that publicly describes the extent of the support. In the early 1990s, Egypt declined to help the U.N. inspectors. In fact, say inspectors from the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), Egypt was the only major Iraqi arms supplier not to cooperate with the United Nations.

Some U.S. officials believe that if the Egyptians had turned over data about what they supplied to Saddam Hussein, it would show the advanced technical level of the Egyptian programs.

Now with the Iraqi archives open to the CIA, the extent of the Egyptian help, as well as Egypt’s own capabilities, have become public.  

The report, little noticed until the Associated Press wrote about it last week, stated that in 1981, after the outbreak of war with Iran, the Iraqi government paid Egypt $12 million "in return for assistance with production and storage of chemical weapons agents." The information was contained in a little-noticed annex of their Comprehensive Report, a 350,000-word document issued last October.

Specifically, the CIA noted that, “During the early years, Egyptian scientists provided consultation, technology, and oversight allowing rapid advances and technological leaps in weaponization. With the Iran-Iraq war well under way, Egypt assisted Iraq in CW production,” making modifications to rocket systems to permit the warheads to store chemical agents, sending Iraq specially modified rockets with plastic inserts ideal for chemical weapons disbursal, and even sending its own chemical weapons experts to assist in developing sarin munitions.

The final point is the best indicator of the Egyptian chemical weapons development, according to military experts.

Iraqi sarin production soared
Sarin is a nerve agent, one of the more advanced military chemicals in the world. Prior to the mid-1980s, Iraq's arsenal was limited to mustard gas and other disfiguring agents. Sarin was used extensively by Iraq to kill Kurdish dissidents in the north as well as Iranian soldiers in the south. 

And not long after the Egyptian scientists arrived in Iraq, sarin production soared.  From five tons in 1984, Iraqi sarin production rose to 209 tons in 1987 and 394 tons in 1988, the report says.

"We were aware from back in 1991 that there was a link between Iraq and Egypt on chemical weapons," Ron G. Manley of Britain, a former senior U.N. adviser on chemical weapons, told the Associated Press. He said the warhead inserts, an Egyptian design, were an early clue.

And as military historians note, Egypt has been willing to use chemical weapons, being along with Iraq and Iran the only nations in recent memory to employ them. In its intervention in the 1960s Yemen civil war, Egypt repeatedly used mustard gas bombs on royalist forces in the Arabian kingdom.

Cairo has, however, denied any involvement in Iraq's program. "Egypt had no relation whatsoever with Iraq in the field of chemical weapons,"  Embassy spokesman Hisham Elnakib said.  

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