Chronicle of the Middle East and North Africa

Egypt’s Nuclear Program

Former President Hosni MubarakThough Egypt has long had the financial resources and technical expertise to build a reactor, at some time during the 1980s it all but suspended its nuclear program.

Though former President Hosni Mubarak in 2007 announced that his country would build power-generating reactors, progress in that direction appears to have been slow or non-existent. As a result, apart from some research laboratories, at present Egypt’s only nuclear facility is a single small reactor. It was provided by the Soviet Union during the 1950s and can only generate 2-5 kilowatts, which makes it all but irrelevant to the production of nuclear weapons. Egypt probably also has some ballistic missiles, but how many there are, and whether they can carry nuclear weapons, is not known.