On Saudi Arabia's collaboration with Atomic Energy

6/14/2005

Saudi Arabia vowed to collaborate with the International Agency for Atomic Energy and stressed it does not own any nuclear installations or recators.

In a statement on the wake of a meeting for the council of the trustees of the agency in Vienna, a source at the Saudi foreign ministry said that his country wants to confirm permanent care to abide by what was stated in the international treaties to this effect, foremost being the NPT ( Nuclear Non proliferation Treaty) and the appendix treaty including the protocols of small amounts.

Diplomats at the agency's trustees council indicated that Saudi Arabia said it is ready to permit the agency to carry out additional inspection operations exceeding this protocol in order to ease down fears to that it might be hiding anything.

The Saudi commitment came at a time when Washington and the European Union and Australia started pressure on Saudi Arabia to force it to open the way for the inspectors of the agency to carry out precise inspection operations in its nuclear installations.

Diplomats in the agency said that the European Union and Australia will start within the current week a diplomatic move in Vienna and Riyadh, demanding the Saudi kingdom not to sign a protocol permiting a limited inspection for its nuclear installations, as Saudi Arabia intends to do.

A diplomatic source stressed that the European and Australian sides will ask Riyadh for issuing a "good intention statement towards the agency permitting its inspectors to carry out inspection operations they find necessary and will ask the American representative to the agency to ask the same thing from Saudi Arabia." Washington had actually asked Riyadh to expand in the inspection operations earlier.

Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is considered one of the major countries in the Middle East and that it has only one program for nuclear research and does not constitute a danger for the dissemination of nuclear weapons, there are fears that Riyadh will choose if a crisis erupts in the region, to buy technology that allows the production of a nuclear bomb from countries like Pakistan which owns nuclear weapons, which is supported by Saudi Arabia financially. For its part, Saudi Arabia announced that these fears are groundless.

Meantime, a Saudi advisor in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, denied his country's intention to own any sort of the mass destruction weapons. He considered certain reports which talk about Saudi Arabia's attempt to get nuclear technology from Pakistan as incorrect.

Worth noting that Saudi Arabia's regional neighbor, Iran, is determined to move ahead with its civil nuclear program without accepting the restrictions that the US is trying to impose on it, restrictions that outside the bounds of the NPT.