WSJ Hypothetical Timeline If Saddam had stayed

ar-pharazon

Banned
So in 2010 the WSJ had a rather interesting article which speculated on the consequences of Saddam Hussein not being overthrown. In short it involved a lot of nuclear proliferation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703882304575465721991599994

The article is very interesting and somewhat dystopic in its explanations.

What if by 2015 Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and Syria had nuclear weapons.

With Libya, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria, working towards getting nuclear weapons.

With al-Qaeda having already gotten one or working on it.

How would this situation have affected wider world politics and middle eastern politics?
 
Excellent topic, but one that is almost impossible to respond to in this forum without accusation of political incorrectness or worse.

I'll have to pass.

Dynasoar
 
I can't read the article due to the paywall. Just by looking at the beginning, though, I don't believe it would have been a certainty that Saddam Hussein's Iraq could have pulled off a successful nuclear program of its own, like it appears to be implied in the article.
 

ar-pharazon

Banned
The article doesn't say there is a certainty. The argument is that Saddam would wait or seek to outlast the sanctions regime and then rush to the bomb.

From there everyone else in the region would spring to get it as well.
 
The article doesn't say there is a certainty. The argument is that Saddam would wait or seek to outlast the sanctions regime and then rush to the bomb.

From there everyone else in the region would spring to get it as well.

So, would all this extra expenditure needed to build the Bomb in all those countries, a non-negligible amount of money that would have to be saved by not funding something else that was paid for IOTL, and all the international trouble (sanctions by the US and the EU, etc) caused by the nuclear programs, bring about an even earlier Arab Spring or at least cause some other serious instability?
 

ar-pharazon

Banned
I'd think if everyone has the bomb then the Arab Spring would be butterflied.

The Iraqis get the bomb, the Iranians then get it, the Saudis get it, then the Turks and Egyptians get it, and then Libya and Morocco either get it or work towards it, and Sudan gets it, and then Syria moves towards it.

It would make the region far more tense-with all the powers either having the nukes or at least working towards them-a sort of multi sided standoff.
 
I'd think if everyone has the bomb then the Arab Spring would be butterflied.

The Iraqis get the bomb, the Iranians then get it, the Saudis get it, then the Turks and Egyptians get it, and then Libya and Morocco either get it or work towards it, and Sudan gets it, and then Syria moves towards it.

It would make the region far more tense-with all the powers either having the nukes or at least working towards them-a sort of multi sided standoff.

But surely there would be some sorts of costs the nuclear programs would incur for those countries, economic and political, both in domestic and foreign terms, and pretty noticeable ones at that?

All those nuclear programs would bring about a lot of butterflies and knock-on effects to the TL, even if not one actual nuke more than IOTL is built in the end.
 
Osirak Nuclear Reactor raid by, I believe, Israeli F-16 aircraft with F-15 top cover and several Iranian F-4s also present destroyed French supplied light water reactor capable of plutonium production in June 1981.

Several years before, Saddam had publicly expressed desire to develop nuclear weapons and had obtained both quantities of enriched uranium and an earlier plutonium breeder from France. Mysteriously, the first reactor blew up in its' shipping crates on a French dock. Iran staged an abortive raid on Osirak in 1980. Any doubt of my statements, check Wiki.

Dynasoar
 

Geon

Donor
An alternate history TL I read on another TL entitled Saddam's Revenge dealt with this possibility. Essentially Saddam takes all the research materials for his WMDs and hides them elsewhere - namely in Pakistan or some other friendly Muslim nation. He then performs a whole lot of scams to get hard currency to finance researchers subsidized by him in other countries. Saddam is able to claim total innocence until the time is right for these weapons to be deployed by another nation on his behalf (Pakistan). In addition he uses the hard currency he gets from his various scams to finance terrorist groups who will use these weapons (ISIS/AQ)
 

Anchises

Banned
sounds like a half assed justification for a load of spent money with not many returns.

This.

Saddam gravely miscalculated when he invaded Kuwait but he was no madman.

After the First Gulf War it was clear that the USA wouldn't have allowed Saddam to obtain nuclear weapons. And we have to keep in mind that Iraq was a burnt out Nation after fighting Iran and the USA.

It is not like Saddam could have simply "restarted" his completely gutted nuclear weapon programm and obtain a few bombs in a year.

Producing nukes is expensive and complicated and bound to produce evidence.

If Saddam would have really attempted to obtain nukes again we would have likely seen decisive economic or military action to prevent that. A few serious sanctions on top of what already was in place prior to the war.

My best guess as to what would have happened if Saddam had stayed:

He or his heirs are swept away by the Arab spring. Iraq becomes instable and plagued by sectarian violence.

Iran and Saudi Arabia would have probably used this just as IOTL.

The instability and the violence probanly would have been less severe than IOTL simply because some of the Baathist Elites would be left to actually run the state.
 
Anytime a publication does alternate history, they go with the theory that we live in the best of possible worlds and that therefore, as lousy as this world may be, change anything slightly and it actually turns out worse to much worse. JFK lives, you get this mashed potato monster of George Wallace nuclear Vietnam racism. Lincoln lives and its impeachment and racism. Avoiding Vietnam means a plague of butt monkeys. The latter is ridiculous as the rest of the pessimism when you get down to it.
 
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There is no chance in Hell anyone is letting Saddam have nukes. Israel alone would probably have launched a pre-emptive strike if they knew what was going on, let alone Iran, America etc. Shiites hated him. Kurds hated him. The Sunni Monarchs hated him. Israel hated him. He was literally the one political leader in the world to praise 9/11 - Khameini didn't, nor did Kim Jong-Il, nor did Arafat. When you go further to piss off America than those three, you're really in for it. At least North Korea didn't have a history of invading countries - Saddam didn't even have that to his name.

Iraq was not even a sovereign state in 2003. It had a no-fly zone over the Kurdish region, with an absolutely moribund army to match - it was internationally even more of a pariah than North Korea is now, sanctioned tighter than the coin slot of a piggy bank. The costs of taking Saddam out were trifling to the serious risk of a Nuclear Baathist Iraq. If Saddam announced he had nukes, he would have about twenty four hours to live, with twenty three of them already gone.
 
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