Saudi Disad
EXT – Saudi Prolif Inevitable
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- A/T: Saudi Prolif – Incentive/Means
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EXT – Saudi Prolif InevitablePakistan will give Saudis the bomb The Nation, 2011 ("Pakistan and the Bomb: whose finger is on the button?" LEXIS, SRM) Pakistan may also continue to contribute to nuclear proliferation. There are persistent, but unverified, reports of an understanding between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for Islamabad to provide nuclear weapons to Riyadh if the Saudis feel threatened by a third party with nuclear weapons. Then Saudi defence minister and now also Crown Prince Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud visited Pakistan's laboratories amid great publicity in the late 1990s. Some sensationalist reports claim the Saudis keep aircraft permanently deployed in Pakistan to rush a bomb or two to Riyadh if needed. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia deny any secret deal, but rumours continue to surface as Iran moves closer to developing its own bomb. Saudis proliferating now because of Iran Front Page 2011 ("Saudis up the nuclear ante"http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/22/saudis-up-the-nuclear-ante/, SRM) Fearful that he will soon face a nuclear-armed Iran, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal recently warned that the Saudi Kingdom would have no choice but to develop its own nuclear weapons, a move he said would lead to “untold and possibly dramatic consequences.” While the Saudi’s have long voiced the strategic goal of a nuclear-free Middle East, they have also unequivocally stated that they won’t sit back and allow themselves to be the only nonnuclear nation in the region. So, the remarks by al-Faisal — a former Saudi intelligence official — simply echo that view, one espoused by Saudi King Abdullah in 2006 when he said that if Iran ever developed nuclear weapons, “everyone in the region would, including Saudi Arabia.” However, with Iran now edging ever closer to acquiring its own nuclear weapons, it appears the Saudis have actually begun laying the groundwork for a similar pursuit. For example, in April 2011, the Saudis purchased from China advanced ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. One of the missiles, the DF-21, can carry a 500kT nuclear warhead over 1,800 kilometers. A/T: Saudi Prolif – Incentive/MeansNo Saudi prolif - prefer nuclear energy Nucleonics Week 2010 ("Middle Eastern nuclear growth expected, but obstacles remain" LEXIS, SRM) The GCC countries are compliant with international conventions and have in the past all said they prefer not to enrich nuclear fuel, a key concession being sought by the US as a condition for 123 agreements, Rogner said. Saudi Arabia may be waiting to see how the UAE nuclear program develops before placing an order for its first nuclear power plant, Rogner said. In May, Naif bin Bandar Al-Sudairy, head of the Saudi delegation to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, said in a speech at the United Nations in New York that a new nuclear and renewable energy center would oversee peaceful uses of those energy sources. The center, known as the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy, "is mandated to supervise, monitor and control all usages of atomic energy and the resulting radioactive waste," Bandar Al-Sudairy said. No Saudi Prolif – pushing non-proliferation now BBC 2010 (April 14, "Saudi intelligence chief addresses nuclear security summit" LEXIS, SRM) Prince Miqrin said the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had submitted a report that highlighted its views on measures to make the Middle East a free zone from nuclear weapons, which conforms closely With this initiative of the Summit. 'This report of the Kingdom was issued as an official document of the Sixth Review Conference of States' Parties to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2000.' He said, 'In this regard, the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly confirmed the concerns raised in this report which are compatible with the relevant resolutions of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1974, and adopted at each session of the General Assembly by consensus since its 35th session in 1980, including the resolution which calls for declaring the Middle East and Arab Gulf region free from all weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons.' Saudis cant proliferate – no tech Front Page 2011 ("Saudis up the nuclear ante"http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/22/saudis-up-the-nuclear-ante/, SRM) Still, it should be noted that even if the Saudis are seriously intent on pursuing a nuclear weapons course, a myriad of obstacles abound. For starters, the Saudis have the money to build a nuclear weapons system, but they presently lack the technological capacity, in particular an absence of highly skilled technicians, engineers and scientists. As such, the final development of a nuclear weapon could take one to two decades. Saudi Arabia can’t and has no incentive to proliferate Lippman 2008 (Thomas, former Middle East correspondent and a diplomatic and national security reporter for The Washington Post, "Nuclear Weapons and Saudi Strategy", http://www.susris.com/articles/2008/ioi/080209-lippman-nuclear.html) It is far from certain, however, that Saudi Arabia would wish to acquire its own nuclear arsenal or that it is capable of doing so. There are compelling reasons why Saudi Arabia would not undertake an effort to develop or acquire nuclear weapons, even in the unlikely event that Iran achieves a stockpile and uses this arsenal to threaten the Kingdom. Money is not an issue — if destitute North Korea can develop nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia surely has the resources to pursue such a program. In the fall of 2007, the Saudis reported a budget surplus of $77 billion, and with oil prices above $90 a barrel, Riyadh is flush with cash. But the acquisition or development of nuclear weapons would be provocative, destabilizing, controversial and extremely difficult for Saudi Arabia, and ultimately would likely weaken the kingdom rather than strengthen it. Such a course would be directly contrary to the Kingdom’s longstanding stated goal of making the entire Middle East a nuclear weapons free zone. According to Sultan bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, the Defense Minister and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons by their nature contravene the tenets of Islam. Pursuing nuclear weapons would be a flagrant violation of Saudi Arabia’s commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and would surely cause a serious breach with the United States. Saudi Arabia lacks the industrial and technological base to develop such weapons on its own. An attempt to acquire nuclear weapons by purchasing them, perhaps from Pakistan, would launch Saudi Arabia on a dangerously inflammatory trajectory that could destabilize the entire region, which Saudi Arabia’s leaders know would not be in their country’s best interests. The Saudis always prefer stability to turmoil. Saudi Arabia and the NPT Saudi Arabia, like Iran, is a signatory to the NPT and participates in the safeguard regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It signed the treaty only under duress, but its reluctance was not based on a desire to develop nuclear wepons. The Kingdom’s position was that it would be happy to join the NPT system when Israel did so. But then in 1988 it was virtually forced to sign the NPT because of intense pressure from the United States. A/T: Saudi Prolif – Iran Alt CauseIran, not the US, will be the deciding factor in Saudi proliferation Guzansky July 1st, 2011 (Yoel Guzansky is a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. He joined INSS after serving at Israel's National Security Council; "TEHRAN TESTS SAUDIS' NERVE ON NUKES", LEXIS, SRM) The Saudi strategy perhaps depends most of all on if and how Iran crosses the nuclear threshold. Should Iran not cross the nuclear threshold, Saudi Arabia may be able to turn a blind eye or aspire to become a threshold state itself. However, should it become certain Iran is a nuclear weapons state, Saudi Arabia would feel obligated to acquire similar capability. Former head of the Saudi intelligence service and ambassador to the US, Turki al-Faisal, stressed recently that if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon ``Saudi Arabia might feel pressure to acquire a nuclear deterrent of its own''. Earlier this month The Wall Street Journal reported another Saudi threat to go nuclear or ``to pursue policies that could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences'', should Iran do the same. Prolif: Not BadDeterrence prevents escalation in the middle east Feldman, 1995 (Shai, Senior Research Associate at Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies and Director of the Center’s Project on Security and Arms Control in the Middle East, “Middle East Nuclear Stability: The State of the Region and the State of the Debate,” Journal of International Affairs, 49:1, Summer) The uncertainty regarding current and future Middle East nuclear proliferation trends is compounded by even greater uncertainty regarding the likely effects of such proliferation should it take place.[18] In an earlier work, this writer portrayed the logic of nuclear deterrence from the perspective of a single small state seeking security and survival.[19] It was argued that effective deterrence requires-robust capabilities and considerable determination. Thus, the outcome of deterrent confrontations is determined by states' relative capacity to inflict punishment and their relative willingness to absorb such costs. Generally, and despite the clear constraints addressed below, nuclear weapons provide states with far more robust deterrence than conventional arms.[20] First, a state equipped with nuclear weapons enjoys a nearly unlimited capability to inflict punishment, since the level of damage that can be caused by a small number of nuclear weapons is -- for all practical purposes -- unlimited. Nuclear weapons can cause significantly greater damage than conventional explosives, since the blast-weight ratio of nuclear devices is on the order of magnitude of a million times greater. Second, nuclear weapons leave far less room for misperceptions about the damage that can be caused. This is because a simple extrapolation from the widely-recognized horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to today's far larger-yield nuclear weapons leaves little doubt about the catastrophic effects of any use of nuclear arms. Indeed, these perceptions were merely reinforced by the nuclear disaster at Chemobyl -- the effects of which were very modest in comparison with the expected outcomes of a possible nuclear weapons exchange. Third, conventional deterrence is vulnerable to variations in the sensitivity to costs among different states. Indeed, conventional deterrence often fails because countries and regimes may be insensitive to the level of costs involved in the execution of the threat to use conventional forces. By contrast, the enormous damage that would be caused by nuclear weapons makes it easier to overcome the impact of these variations. Put simply, it is difficult to envisage a regime so insensitive to costs that it would ignore credible threats to inflict nuclear punishment. A/T: China AggressionChina is pursuing a peaceful entrance into the international order Heller 2003 (Eric Nathaniel, published international security author University of Illinois, “Power Projections of the People’s Republic of China: An Investigative Analysis of Defensive and Offensive Realism in Chinese Foreign Policy” https://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/bitstream/2142/34/1/HellerOP.pdf) However, realists also argue that a competitor will strive to emulate the policies and general characteristics of the state to which they aspire in order to be viewed as similar and non-threatening by the hegemon and international community.8 To support this argument is China’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the drive for admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Neither policy would seem to improve the security of China drastically; however, being a member of the WTO and hosting the Olympic Games bring economic implications and prestige—signs of a powerful nation on the rise. No longer would the PRC be viewed as a rogue power, engaged in diplomatic tiffs over Taiwan and a downed US Navy plane, but as a mainstream country capable of rivaling what is at times viewed as a heavy-handed United States. Great powers are rewarded if they appear both strong and potentially dangerous because states ally with the strongest and most threatening powers. No US-China conflict in the Middle East Luft and Korin 2004 (Gal, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, and Anne, director of policy and strategic planning at IAGS, “The Sino-Saudi Connection,” Commentary Magazine, http://www.iags.org/sinosaudi.htm) Of course, many other factors must be weighed in the balance. The Chinese may well find fishing in Middle Eastern waters to be a risky business, entailing high costs in relations with other powers, and in particular with the U.S. Already there are signs of growing disquiet in Washington over China's role in the Middle East. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group created by Congress to monitor relations between the two countries, issued a warning in 2002 over China's provision of "technology and components for weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems" to such Middle Eastern states as Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan. This was characterized as "an increasing threat to U.S. security interests." Significantly, the report took special notice of China's growing dependence on imported oil, calling it a "key driver" impelling relations with "terrorist-sponsoring governments" in the region. If such concerns continue to mount, China could find itself gaining in one region only to lose in another. The Chinese economy may be heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil, but it is also heavily dependent on trade with the U.S. The shelves of Wal-Mart alone account for 10 percent of China's exports to the U.S. and 1 percent of China's GDP. Whether and under what circumstances the U.S. would ever choose to exercise its leverage is another matter. Right now, any collision over Middle Eastern oil is more a potential than an actual threat. Besides, if predicting the future is risky at all times, the present moment makes the exercise almost foolhardy. That the Middle East is in an exceptionally volatile condition goes without saying. And as for China, its astonishing economic growth may yet turn out to be a bubble; if it pops, so will its high rates of energy consumption. Then, too, even if stellar economic growth continues, the Chinese may find attractive alternatives to oil: the country is extremely rich in coal and natural gas, and, since it has not yet invested heavily in an expensive petroleum infrastructure, it could develop ways to harness fuels produced from coal and biomass (both of which it has in abundance) and thus overcome its dependence on imported oil altogether. Download 196.65 Kb. Share with your friends:
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