ABSTRACT
The slow proliferation of weapons of mass destruction does, however, pose a growing risk of wars that could threaten the major population centers of Israel and its Arab neighbors, and even the existence of Israel and any Arab state that became involved in a large scale exchange using biological or nuclear weapons. The most important single fact reflected in the data is that Israel is the only state in the region that currently has nuclear weapons. Egypt has some long range missile capability, although it is unclear if such weapons have chemical warheads. Egypt has been capable of delivering chemical weapons since the late 1950s, and may have acquired British stocks of mustard gas that Britain failed to remove from inventories it deployed in the northern desert in World War II. Iraq has only a limited potential capability to recover its past ability to produce nuclear weapons.
