nuclear-news

Egypt, ElBaradei, and nuclear weapons

“…..Egypt’s gonna get one too, Just to use on you know who. —Tom Lehrer, “Who’s Next?”T

ElBaradei and Egypt’s Nuclear Future by Jeremy Bernstein |  The New York Review of Books, Jeremy Bernstein, 3 Feb 2011, The current turmoil in Egypt and the prospect of the collapse of Hosni Mubarak’s regime apart from everything else raise questions about the country’s nuclear program and where it might be headed. This is particularly interesting since a leading candidate to head the new opposition appears to be Mohammed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who has been critical of the Egyptian program in the past.

In March of 2005, ElBaradei issued an IAEA report saying that there were “matters of concern” involving the Egyptian nuclear program: the IAEA had found evidence that Egypt had failed to declare experiments it had been conducting involving, in “small amounts,” the separation of plutonium and uranium enrichment which can be done without a large enrichment facility. This was in violation of an IAEA safeguards agreement Egypt had signed in 1981. (Egypt’s two reactors and other nuclear facilities are run by the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Authority.)

Although Egypt is not counted among countries with the bomb, its nuclear weapons program began under Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954……
But now the Egyptian people are in the streets along with ElBaradei. If he is part of a new government that emerges, one hopes that his attitude towards nuclear proliferation will not change, though the Muslim Brotherhood—which is known to be hostile to Israel and which has in recent years called for Egypt to acquire a nuclear deterrent—could put new pressure on the government to pursue a bomb.

ElBaradei and Egypt’s Nuclear Future by Jeremy Bernstein | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books

February 2, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Egypt, weapons and war