Revolutionary Friends

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The Libyan Revolution took place on September 1^st 1969, when Ghadaffi and eleven other young army officers overthrow the monarch in a bloodless coup.

One of the first actions of the RCC (Revolutionary Command Council) was to send a delegation to Beijing to establish relations with China. Mao-Tse Tung didn’t know much about Libya but he arranged for the delegation to meet with Premier Chou-En-Lai.

According to the friend of a friend of one of the delegates, the meeting went something like this.

Chou: Welcome to the People’s Republic of China.

Delegate: I bring greetings from the Libyan Revolutionary Council, your comrades who are now the government of Libya.

Chou: That’s very nice.

Delegate: We have come to ask for assistance from our Chinese revolutionary brothers.

Chou: Well, I don’t know. We might be able to give you a bit of a hand. For example, Chairman Mao has written a little red book that might give you some useful tips on being revolutionaries. So what do you need?

Delegate: We would like to buy an atom bomb.

Chou: Sorry?

Delegate: We would like to buy an atom bomb.

Chou: Sorry but no can do, I’m afraid, comrade. Our atom bombs are not for sale. We made them for our own use. Now we do export other things. We have a nice line in plastic toy animals, for example.

Delegate: No, no. We need an atom bomb. You have plenty of them. So please sell us one. Just one. Just a small one. We only want it to frighten the Israelis with.

The delegation left China, empty-handed, shortly afterwards.

You can’t make this stuff up!

Historical Note:

The motivation for the Libyan attempt to obtain an atom bomb was, of course, the fact that the Israelis already had a well-developed nuclear weapons programme. This programme, carried out with the help of the French, began in 1958 and resulted in the production of several atom bombs a year from 1967-68 onwards.