The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.'s atomic watchdog has discovered plutonium particles near an Egyptian nuclear facility and is trying to determine if they are evidence of a secret weapons program or simply the byproduct of peaceful research.
According to the Associated Press, diplomats warned against assuming Egypt might have violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by trying to separate plutonium to make nuclear weapons.
"From time to time these things pop up in places they should not be at," said a diplomat familiar with the investigations of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. "Most of the time, there is a reasonable answer."
The Associated Press hints that there may be a possibility that the head of the IAEA's, Mohamed ElBaradei may be shielding Egypt:
Cairo earlier this week denounced a French newspaper report linking Egypt to Libya's now-dismantled nuclear weapons program and suggesting the IAEA's Egyptian head, Mohamed ElBaradei, was protecting his country from scrutiny.
MegaPundit posts that if IAEA is covering up a clandestine Egyptian nuclear weapons program, it will be a bigger scandal than Oil-for-Food.
In a later post, MegaPundit analyzes other media reports and concludes that evidence is mounting that Egypt may have a program to develop nuclear weapons.
An Egyptian nuclear weapons program would be an extremely disturbing development. and North Korea are bad enough but if Egypt joins the club we may have to face the fact that nuclear proliferation can only be slowed, not prevented.
I don't think that nuclear poliferation was ever stopable. We might like to think that we could have stopped its spread but like anything else, once a certain critical mass of people have the info it's bound to get leaked.
I think that the only way to deal with the problem is a two-pronged approach. First, in the grand tradition of the Cold War, make sure that all entities with lots of expensive physical stuff to lose (i.e., countries, even poor ones) that attacking the US with nuclear weapons will result in the complete destruction of the offending country. Second, we must destroy the current batch of Terrorists and do all we can to prevent the next batch from developing.
None of this is meant to imply that we shouldn't try to stem the flow of nuclear material and info whenever possible, but the fact is that the genie has been out for so long that we've forgotten where we even left the dang bottle. Not a pretty picture, but it's reality.
Posted by: Tom | Sunday, November 07, 2004 at 01:15 PM