A U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that could eventually allow uranium enrichment on Saudi soil risks repeating the mistakes of America’s nuclear partnership with Iran half a century ago, a leading nonproliferation expert told MBN. Henry D. Sokolski, founder and executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said the agreement, signed in July, keeps open a path to making nuclear fuel that the kingdom has no economic need for.
Washington has spent years trying to keep enrichment out of Iran’s hands.
“It’s a bomb option,” Sokolski said in an interview with Leila Bazzi, editor-in-chief of MBN.
“And the obvious is, we’re bugging out of the region, people are wondering what we’re willing to do, and we leave a bomb option on the table for the Saudis,” he said. “You’ve got to have a Ph.D. to deny the obvious.” Sokolski recently co-wrote an article with Yoel Guzansky, who heads the Gulf Studies program at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, asking whether Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program could outlive the government that built it.
Echoes of the shah
Sokolski said the parallels with Iran are “striking.” In 1957, as part of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative, the United States signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with the shah’s government without holding congressional hearings.
“We backed the shah. We brought all of his nuclear scientists here, trained them at places like MIT, sent them back, got them all geared up, and then lo and behold, the government gave way to the Revolutionary Guard. And now we’re bombing that program,” he said.
The Saudi agreement, he said, has also moved forward without hearings, which he blamed on the Republican majorities in the House and Senate failing to exercise oversight.
“When branches of government refuse to do their primary or essential mission, which is oversight in the case of the legislative branch, it kind of spells trouble,” he said.
‘A regime resiliency assessment’
The bigger question, he said, is Saudi Arabia’s resiliency as a regime.
“Are we staring down the barrel of a regime that’s going to be taken over by, you know, fundamentalists?” he asked, adding: “Are we going to be bombing the facilities in Saudi Arabia 10 years from now?”
He proposed adding a “regime resiliency assessment” to the safeguards and nonproliferation reviews Washington already conducts before sharing nuclear technology.
His second concern was physical security. The United States, he said, has no “design basis threat” — the safety standards for nuclear plants — for nuclear facilities located in war zones.
“The threat that we are preparing for here in the States is basically a bunch of people with machine guns and ski masks,” he said. “But what about the drones? What about missiles? What about all the things that we’ve seen happen in Ukraine, Iran and UAE?”
“It’s a war zone,” he said of Saudi Arabia. “It’s not ‘sort of’ a war zone. It’s a war zone.”
The China and Russia argument
But doesn’t the agreement keep Saudi Arabia close to the United States and keep China and Russia out? Bazzi asked.
No, he said, and added that it makes Russia and China more likely to offer enrichment capability. Neither Beijing nor Moscow has formally offered to make fuel for another country or support fuel-making on its soil.
“They’ve been pretty good about that,” he said.
Bazzi noted that Saudi Arabia has a defense pact with Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons. That’s no reason to loosen restrictions on Riyadh, he said.
“This suggests paying attention — carefully,” he said. Washington should spell out its limits clearly.
The inspections gap
In 2009, the United Arab Emirates gave up enrichment and accepted surprise inspections, Bazzi said. Saudi Arabia did neither. She said supporters of the Saudi nuclear deal have proposed a “black box” arrangement in which Americans run the enrichment plant and Saudis never see inside.
Sokolski said a refusal to let the International Atomic Energy Agency inspect beyond declared sites is a warning sign. “It’s a leading indicator that somebody has something to hide,” he said.
‘A nuclear duck’
The question hanging over the entire discussion is why a country with some of the cheapest oil and gas and abundant sunshine on Earth wants a reactor at all.
Sokolski said he saw no economic case for nuclear energy, let alone for domestic fuel production.
“This is a little bit like you and I saying, you know, we have two cars in our backyard; wouldn’t it be nice if we had our own fuel-making capacity, with a big cracking plant in the backyard?” he replied. “The rejoinder would be, no, it’s really cost-effective to go to the gas station. We probably should know why they want it.”
He added: “I always say if something walks and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. I’d say this is a duck — a nuclear duck.”
And other governments in the region would seek a similar deal, he said. The UAE and perhaps one or two other countries, he said, have agreements entitling them to seek similar generous terms. He said he expects Egypt, Turkey and the Emirates to ask for the same.
Bazzi noted that President Donald Trump has said there would be no enrichment and no deal unless Saudi Arabia recognizes Israel, conditions that do not appear in the agreement’s text.
Sokolski said Congress is unlikely to block the deal outright and that a resolution of disapproval, which would stop the agreement from taking effect, had little chance of winning enough Republican votes.
But this year’s fight should be treated as “the first round,” he said. When the new Congress convenes next year, he said, it could try again with legislation putting conditions on how the deal is carried out.
Trump might veto that, Sokolski said. But to keep lawmakers from voting for any restrictions, he suggested, the administration could promise to conduct a study, and studies tend to drag on.
“You study enough things, and all of a sudden a two-year study becomes a three-year study,” he said. “If it becomes a three-year study — oops, it’s 2029, and there might be a new administration.”
Longtime skeptic
If not this deal, then an agreement that supplied Saudi Arabia with reactors but not the means to make its own fuel would be a better deal, he said. Reactors would answer the kingdom’s stated energy arguments.
“Why do you need to make the fuel?” he asked. “They don’t have very good arguments for that.”
His advice for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is simple: “You have in your natural gas and your geothermal windows on the future. Open them. … Be attentive to your people’s future rather than trying to hedge security bets that will end badly for you.”
A bomb, he argued, would not make the kingdom safer. “Even Israel’s had a hell of a time with it,” he said. “They got the bomb, but it didn’t protect them against missile attacks, that’s for sure.”
