A new book by Gerald Posner reports that “Saudi Arabia has devised a system “to protect itself from a possible invasion or internal attack” with a plan that is “composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs strategically placed at the Kingdom’s key oil ports, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore platforms, and backup facilities,” which, if activated, “would destroy the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom’s oil would be unusable to anyone.” An unattributed report at Ariana Huffington‘s Huffington Post says the “doomsday scenario” layed out in the book, Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-US Connection, is “based on National Security Agency electronic intercepts.” Posner reports that the plan, dubbed “Petro SE”, “was devised by the Saudis because of their overriding fear that if an internal revolt or external attack threatened the survival of the House of Saud, the U.S. and other Western powers might abandon them as the Shah of Iran was abandoned in 1979. Only by having in place a system that threatened to create crippling oil price increases, political instability and economic recessions did the royal family believe it could coerce Western military powers to keep them in power.”