Saudi Arabia accused the international community on Tuesday of double standards over weapons programmes in the Middle East, saying nobody questioned Israel about its nuclear arms.
"There are issues of armaments that are never even brought to the fore," said Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal.
"We know Israel has atomic weapons. They have weapons of mass destruction and no question is asked about that," he told journalists while on a visit to the Swiss capital.
Israel is believed to have around 200 nuclear warheads, but the Jewish state's policy is not to discuss the issue.
Al-Faisal had been asked about concerns, expressed by US officials at the weekend, that China was still supplying missiles to Saudi Arabia that could be used to launch nuclear weapons.
He said that he did not know on what the reports were based or whether they were "truly representative" of the views of the US administration.
Saudi Arabia is a key US ally and has co-operated with Washington's "war on terror". But the relationship has often been tense, especially since it was revealed that most of the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 were Saudis.
In the mid-1980s, Riyadh secretly negotiated the $3 billion purchase of 50 to 60 Chinese CSS-2 missiles, with a range of 4,000 km (2,500 miles), US officials have said.
Riyadh and Beijing said the missiles delivered to Saudi Arabia had conventional warheads and rebuffed US requests to inspect them, the officials added.
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