United Press International December 22, 2003
Analysis: Gadhafi Scoured World for WMDs
By Martin Sieff
Where did Libya acquire the formidable weapons of mass destruction infrastructure it has now acknowledged and vowed to dismantle? Round up the usual suspects.
Western intelligence agencies and proliferation analysts have long monitored the outlines of the Libyan program. It developed in two stages: the first slow and orderly, the second chaotic but potentially far more dangerous.
The first phase of the Libyan program through the 1970s and 80s was defined by the international system of the Cold War. Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi was too mercurial, individualistic and predictable to be a trusted or permanent member of the Soviet bloc. But he was under its protection and received his first nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction capabilities from them.
Progress at first was slow reflecting under-populated, largely desert Libya's lack of industrial infrastructure or any significant scientifically trained elite. But Gadhafi ran the nation of less than 6 million people for 34 years up to now, and he kept plugging at it. By the 1980s, U.S. intelligence estimated he had finally produced no less than 100 tons of mustard gas and nerve agents. He bought large numbers of Scud missiles. He got the Soviets to build a 10-megawatt research nuclear reactor at Tajura.
And in 1974, Gadhafi even signed a nuclear cooperation treaty with Argentina to gain equipment and technical training. In 1976, France agreed to build a nuclear research plant there. In the late 1970s he played host to a group of German rocket scientists from the OTRAG Company quixotically seeking to challenge U.S.-Soviet missile dominance on the cheap.
However, none of these initiatives amounted to anything. Also, the Tajura reactor was under International Atomic Energy Authority safeguards and they appear to have worked well.
An analysis posted by GlobalSecurity.org concluded: "Over the year's Libya's nuclear program ahs suffered from mismanagement, lack of spare parts, and the reluctance of foreign suppliers to provide assistance, particularly since the U.N. embargo went into effect in 1992... Despite a 25-year effort to acquire or develop a nuclear weapon, Libya's program remained in the embryonic stage."
Over the past decade since the collapse of communism, the aging Gadhafi became increasingly isolated and viewed as a relic in the Arab world. For all his incandescent rhetoric of the 1970s, he never came close to making Libya a serious nuclear power. Instead, the first Islamic nuclear power was Pakistan, whose population of well over 140 million was more than 100 times Libya's. And the Pakistani program enjoyed serious input from Saudi Arabia.
But Gadhafi kept his dreams alive. He worked with cash-strapped North Korea to develop extended range Scud missiles. He hired former nuclear scientists from Eastern Europe to try and revive his long-moribund nuclear program. And most of all, he made common cause with the nations President George W. Bush famously defined as the "axis of evil." Together they were able to advance his nuclear dreams more in the past decade than the Soviets had done in almost a quarter century.
Gadhafi, Western intelligence sources say, relied on having key parts of its own nuclear weapons manufactured for it at remote Libya sites. Destitute North Korea counted on oil rich Libya to pay for its Scuds and some nuclear components. Gadhafi hosted Iranian and North Korean physicists and engineers at his underground nuclear development complex at the Kufra oasis.
Gadhafi was also able to avail himself of the proliferation of high tech know-how that has been the responsible international community's nightmare over the past decade and more. Anyone with a home personal computer of post-1995 power and software capabilities now have on their own desktop more computing power than either the U.S. or Soviet nuclear and space programs enjoyed up to the mid-1960s.
Gadhafi's quest for nuclear power went far further on the free market, thanks to the cheap and easily available new technology than it ever had with the expensive, ponderous and usually dud toys he had acquired from the Soviets during his first years in power.
The London Independent newspaper reported Sunday that a British team working with the Libyans had seen nuclear projects underway at more than 10 sites and that they included facilities for enriching uranium.
But in the end, it was the capitalist bottom line of the 21st century's new world economy that did in Gadhafi's dreams. The oil wealth he had relied upon for so long to fund his spendthrift dreams of destruction were outpaced by the ruinous effect of the U.S.-led economic sanctions that remorselessly squeezed the economy of his vast but under-populated land over the past decade.
In the end, his dreams of destruction proved only to be, like the despairing cry of Shakespeare's King Lear, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
© Copyright 2003, U.P.I.
