In an odd twist, Washington is now offering Saudi Arabia a pathway to the very nuclear activity – uranium enrichment – that has been the prime target of American bombing in Iran.
If Iran gets the bomb and the kingdom exploits its “peaceful” nuclear program and follows suit, Israel may be pressed but will hold its own. But that’s only if Riyadh gets the bomb. The US deal, however, as currently drafted, is a prescription for much wider proliferation which no one, including Israel, is likely to survive.
Why? Deterrence will fail as the number of parties deterred rises. And, make no mistake, once Washington greenlights nuclear fuel-making for Saudi Arabia, the spread won’t stop there.
First up is Iran, which insists it has an “inalienable” right to enrich uranium. The United States denies this, but conceded in its first understanding with Iran this June that if Tehran meets certain terms, it may exercise a “conditional” right.
The problem is, even if Iran’s enrichment activities are “safeguarded,” they still can be hijacked to make a bomb. That’s why critics demand that any final agreement prevents Iran from enriching, full stop. They’ve got a point. If the Saudi deal proceeds as drafted, Iran can rightly insist that it should have no less a right.
Second up is the United Arab Emirates. Under the nuclear cooperative agreement that the United States negotiated and finalized in 2009, the Emirates agreed to forswear enriching uranium and recycling plutonium – processes that can bring states within weeks of acquiring a nuclear bomb.
That agreement, however, had a proviso: if Washington offered any of the UAE’s neighbors more generous nuclear cooperation, Abu Dhabi could renegotiate the terms of its agreement. It threatened to do that in 2015 when the US allowed Tehran to continue to enrich uranium under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal).
Washington pushed back, noting that the Iran Deal wasn’t a formal nuclear cooperative agreement. Unfortunately, the US-Saudi deal is.
Then there are Egypt and Turkey. Both have large nuclear power plant construction projects underway. Both previously refused American requests to follow the UAE’s example and forswear making nuclear fuel.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his heir-apparent, Hakan Fidan, both have said that if other nations get nuclear weapons, Turkey should. It’s currently developing an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Washington and Riyadh downplay these worries. The Saudis demand America trust them. Meanwhile, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright insisted there is no nuclear proliferation danger, and that the current Saudi deal will “reinforce global nonproliferation standards.” It’s hard to see how.
The secretary’s pitch is a hard sell. For starters, Riyadh has refused to adopt International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections that would allow them to investigate undeclared nuclear sites. A total of 144 nations have accepted such inspections; Saudi Arabia has refused. Apparently, Riyadh is wary of outsiders checking on what it might be up to.
But Wright argued that there is a way to “blackbox” whatever uranium enrichment plant the US might build for the Saudis. Possession, though, is 90% of the law: whatever is built on Saudi soil can be seized by Saudis. The Saudis also could bait-and-switch, using the declared enrichment activity to obscure covert efforts. Pakistan might help the Saudis carry this out.
Opening the gates
All of this recommends holding the line against even a “little bit” of nuclear fuel-making in states that lack nuclear weapons. The White House counters that we must be realistic that it is better to be in the nuclear slave trade and control it than not. Riyadh, after all, has threatened to take their business to China or Russia – and they have absolutely no scruples.
Really?
The last country to offer nuclear fuel-making assistance to a non-nuclear weapons state wasn’t Russia or China. It was the US. It did this 60 years ago, when it helped India reprocess nuclear weapons-usable plutonium that in 1974 fueled a “peaceful nuclear explosive.”
Since then, no state – including the United States – has offered nuclear fuel-making assistance to any non-nuclear weapons state.
Pushing the current US-Saudi nuclear deal would reverse that standard and open the sluice gates to nuclear proliferation. This, in turn, would pose a threat not just to Israel, but the world.
In 2009, Washington renegotiated its agreement with the UAE and set the right standard of no fuel-making. It should do the same with Riyadh.
The author is the founder and the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) in Washington.
