On January 14, the Russian Foreign Ministry sent shock waves around the world when it released a statement saying that Moscow had reached a "basic agreement" with Damascus to build a nuclear reactor in Syria. The statement, posted on the Foreign Ministry web site just prior to the arrival of Syrian Vice-president Abdul Halim Khaddam in the Russian capital, said that the $2 billion nuclear facility would include a water desalinization unit and a power plant.

This news was not well-received abroad, coming on the heels of an announcement in December that Russia was speeding up construction of a nuclear reactor at Iran's Bushehr plant and considering the construction of a second.

After receiving a flurry of media inquiries the Foreign Ministry quickly removed it from the web site. On the same day, the Ministry of Atomic Industry (Minatom) said that it had not even conducted talks with the Syrians about an agreement, much less reached an accord on the construction of a reactor. "It is only Syria's wish," said its spokesman.¹ Later, Minatom was careful to add that, while no agreement had been reached, it could supply a reactor "in principle."² On January 16, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry belatedly denied that the construction of a reactor in Syria had even been discussed.³ During his visit to Russia days later, Israeli Housing and Construction Minister Natan Sharansky was told by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov that Moscow was "not even thinking about selling a nuclear reactor" to Syria.⁴

Some outside observers, such as Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, interpreted the conflicting statements from Moscow as evidence of a split between those who are sensitive to the political costs of the project and those who are motivated by financial gain. Minatom is eager to find work for thousands of unemployed nuclear scientists and engineers in Russia - and the tab for a full-fledged reactor contract is in the range of $1 billion. But it was not Minatom that released the statement, it was the Foreign Ministry - where cooler, more politically-sensitive heads supposedly prevail.

Sharansky is of the opinion that Russian officials are carrying on the nuclear talks with Damascus in hopes of enticing it to begin paying off the $12 billion debt to Moscow that Syria ran up during the Cold War. The January 15 Foreign Ministry statement is not the first time that an impending nuclear reactor sale to Syria has been announced by the Russians - or by the Syrians, for that matter (there have also been several conventional arms deals announced over the last decade that never came to fruition).

There is no question that the Syrians would dearly love to have a nuclear reactor, a seductive status symbol for any state aspiring to leadership of the Arab world. However, while Syria has developed a formidable chemical and biological weapons arsenal, it still lacks the technological infrastructure, scientific expertise, and financial resources needed to pursue a viable nuclear weapons program. For prestige purposes, however, the Syrians have tried to look the part.

In the decade following the establishment of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission (SAEC) in 1979, a succession of grandiose plans to build nuclear reactors with Soviet assistance were announced, but none were ever implemented. At the end of the Cold War, a nuclear research center 140 kilometers from Damascus was reportedly under construction, but work on the complex was suspended in 1992 for lack of funds.

Several months after joining the Gulf War coalition in 1991, the Syrians managed to scrape together enough cash to buy a tiny 30 kilowatt neutron source reactor and about a kilogram of highly-enriched uranium from China.⁵ This mini-reactor (less than one ten thousandth of the power of the Bushehr reactor under construction in Iran) does not produce enough fissionable material for military applications.

Argentina agreed to build a larger five megawatt research reactor in Syria, ostensibly to produce radioisotopes for medical purposes, but pulled out of the deal in 1991 under pressure from the United States. Talks were resumed in the mid-1990s, but in July 1995 Argentine Foreign Minister Guido Di Tella announced that his country would not provide Syria with a nuclear reactor until it had signed a peace treaty with Israel. Despite Argentina's reiteration of this pledge on several occasions in subsequent weeks, Syria announced the following month that Argentina remained committed to building the reactor.⁶ Indeed, despite periodic denials by Argentina, the Assad regime continued to claim that Argentina was selling it a reactor as late as December 1996, when Syrian officials declared following a meeting of the Inter-Arab Conference on Nuclear Energy in Damascus that "plans have not been changed despite international pressure to cancel them."⁷

In February 1998, Russia signed an agreement to cooperate with Syria in the peaceful use of nuclear energy and, five months later, the two sides reportedly agreed on a timetable for the construction of a 25 megawatt lightwater nuclear reactor. After months of delays, in May 1999, the director-general of the SAEC signed an agreement with Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Yevgeny Adamov providing for the construction of the reactor. "Now it is very important for us to start working on its implementation without delay," said Adamov at the signing.⁸ But implementation never got off the ground. Yet another nuclear cooperation agreement with Russia was signed in January 2000.

Although it does not appear that Russian construction of any nuclear facilities took place in Syria over the next few years, on October 9, 2002, US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton warned that Russian expertise and technology were benefiting Syria's nuclear and missile programs. Bolton's statement apparently took his colleagues at the State Department by surprise - at its daily press briefing the next day, Spokesman Richard A. Boucher was unable to offer an explanation for the warning. On October 11, when the question was asked again, Boucher stated cautiously that "broader access to the expertise of Russian entities could provide opportunities for Syria to expand its indigenous capabilities should it decide to pursue nuclear weapons."

Bolton's warning could mean that Syria is developing other aspects of its nuclear program with whatever Russian technological expertise it can afford, while awaiting the day that it procures a bona fide reactor. Most sites owned and operated by the SAEA are not subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Association. A fertilizer plant in Homs, for example, is rumored to be developing a process for the recovery of uranium from phosphoric acid. There were also reports in the early 1990s that Syria had sought to purchase large quantities of "yellowcake," a form of concentrated uranium ore suitable for enrichment, from Namibia.

Related Articles

Dany Shoham, Guile, Gas and Germs: Syria's Ultimate Weapons, Middle East Quarterly, Vol. 9 No. 3, Summer 2002.

Dany Shoham, Poisoned Missiles: Syria's Doomsday Deterrent, Middle East Quarterly, Vol. 9 No. 4, Fall 2002.

Notes

  ¹ Interfax news agency (Moscow) 15 January 2003.
  ² The Financial Times, 16 January 2003.
  ³ The Financial Times, 17 January 2003.
  ⁴ The Jerusalem Post, 20 January 2003.
  ⁵ Michael Eisenstadt, "Syria's Strategic Weapons," Jane's Intelligence Review, 1 April 1993.
  ⁶ United Press International, 21 August 1995.
  ⁷ Ambito Financiero, (Buenos Aires), 16 December 1996.
  ⁸ Itar-Tass News Agency, 19 May 1999.