1) Scientific publications have NOTHING to do with the current discussion as they are irrelevant to KSA building a nuke.
North Korea produces 3 (that's right THREE) publications each year and it's ranked 215 in the world. This is worse than almost all countries in the world. However, they are a nuclear armed nation with the ability to deliver nukes using MRBMs.
Canada is number 7 with almost 80 000 publications and it's not a nuclear power nor does it have ballistic missiles etc...
2) The 43 percent rise is b/c KSA produced 3885 publications in 2009. Iran for example was well above 20000 in 2009 so even with a 12 percent increase, our absolute increase in number was still greater than KSA. With our 12 percent increase, we added around 4000 publications while KSA added well under 2000.
Again, look at my list. Which one is KSA able to achieve within the forseeable future? None is the answer. We all love our country, but you can't buy into every crap your leaders feed you. The opposite of you would be me believing that Iran is capable of producing 5th gen fighters because Nejad said so!!!!!
P.S. Here's my source for all the above numbers
SJR - International Science Ranking