by Dr. James M. Dorsey
Dropping restrictions on Saudi enrichment could not only fuel the Saudi-Iranian rivalry that has wreaked havoc across the region, but also encourage other recipients of US nuclear technology to demand similar rights.
Nuclear power plant cooling towers, image via Wikimedia Commons
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 712, January 10, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Talks aimed
at transferring US nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia serve as an
indicator of where the Saudi-Iranian rivalry is heading as well as the
strength of the informal Saudi-Israeli alliance against Iran. The
possible transfer could spark a new arms race in the Middle East and
constitutes one explanation why Saudi responses to President Donald J.
Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel were muted and
limited to rhetorical statements.
President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was perhaps most challenging for the
Saudis, who, as custodians of Islam’s two holiest cities, would have
been expected to play a leading role in protecting the status of the
city that is home to the faith’s third holiest site. Yet Saudi Arabia
sent its foreign minister, Adel al Jubeir, to the summit of Islamic countries in
Istanbul that recognized East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine
rather than the king, the crown prince, or another senior member of the
ruling family.
The difficulty for the Saudis is not only their
close cooperation with Israel, their willingness to hint in public at
what was long a secret relationship, and their position as the closest
friend the US has in the Arab world – a friend who reportedly was
willing to endorse a US Israeli-Palestinian peace plan in the making that would fail to meet the minimum demanded by Palestinians and Arab public opinion.
With Trump backing Saudi efforts to counter
Iranian influence in a swath of land stretching from Asia to the
Atlantic coast of Africa despite mounting US criticism of the kingdom’s
conduct of its military intervention in Yemen, Riyadh has a vested
interest in maintaining its close ties to Washington. While Riyadh has
been put in an awkward position by Trump’s declaration, international
condemnation of the move has also increased Saudi leverage.
Trump’s support for Saudi Arabia as well as his
transactional approach to foreign policy, which aims to further US
business interests, holds out the promise of tipping the Middle East’s
military balance of power in favor of the kingdom.
In the president’s latest effort, his
administration is weighing allowing Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium as
part of a deal that would ensure that bids by Westinghouse Electric Co. and other US companies to
build nuclear reactors in the kingdom are successful. Past US
reluctance to endorse Saudi enrichment and reprocessing of uranium has
put purveyors of US nuclear technology at a disadvantage.
Saudi Arabia agreed with the US in
2008 not to pursue enrichment and reprocessing but has since backed
away from that pledge. “They wouldn’t commit, and it was a sticking
point,” said Max Bergmann, a former special assistant to the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Testifying to Congress in November, Christopher Ford,
the US National Security Council’s senior director for weapons of mass
destruction and counterproliferation, refused to commit the Trump
administration to the US restrictions. The restrictions are “not a legal
requirement. It is a desired outcome,” Ford said. He added that the
2015 international agreement with Iran, which severely restricts the
Islamic Republic’s nuclear program for at least a decade, made it more
difficult for the US to insist on limiting other countries’ enrichment
capabilities.
Saudi Arabia plans to construct 16 nuclear power
reactors by 2030 at a cost of an estimated $100 billion. Officially,
Saudi Arabia sees nuclear power as a way of freeing up more oil for
export in a country that has witnessed dramatic increases in domestic
consumption, as well as contributing to the diversification of its
economy. It would also enhance the kingdom’s efforts to ensure parity
with Iran in terms of its ability to enrich uranium and its quest to be
the Middle East’s long-term, dominant power.
Saudi Arabia has large uranium deposits of its
own. In preparation for requesting bids for its nuclear program, Saudi
Arabia in October asked the US, France, South Korea, Russia, and China
for preliminary information. In recent years, the kingdom has concluded a
number of nuclear-related understandings not only with the US but with China, France, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, and Argentina.
Trump’s apparent willingness to ease US restrictions services his campaign promise to
revive and revitalize America’s nuclear industry and meet competition
from Russia and China. Saudi contracts are crucial for Westinghouse, a
nuclear technology pioneer whose expertise is used in more than half the
world’s nuclear power plants. Westinghouse declared bankruptcy in March
because of delays in two US projects.
A deal that would lift US restrictions in return
for acquiring US technology could enmesh Saudi Arabia in bitter domestic
political battles in Washington revolving around alleged Russian
interference in the US presidential election. Controversial Trump
campaign aide and short-lived national security advisor Michael Flynn sought
to convince Israel to accept the kingdom’s nuclear program as part of
his efforts to promote Russian nuclear interests in the Middle East.
Trump’s willingness, against the backdrop of
uncertainty about his readiness to uphold US adherence to the 2015
agreement with Iran, could unleash an arms race in the Middle East and
North Africa. Trump recently refused to certify to Congress that Iran
was compliant with the agreement.
Dropping restrictions on Saudi enrichment could
not only fuel the Saudi-Iranian rivalry that has wreaked havoc across
the region, but also encourage other recipients of US nuclear technology
to demand similar rights. The United Arab Emirates and Egypt have
accepted restrictions on enrichment in their nuclear deals with US
companies as long as those limitations were imposed on all countries in
the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia has long been suspected of having an
interest in ensuring that it would have the ability to develop a
military nuclear capability if ever deemed necessary. For decades, Saudi
cooperation with nuclear power Pakistan has been a source of
speculation about the kingdom’s ambition.
Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US, Husain
Haqqani, asserted that Saudi Arabia’s close ties to the Pakistani
military and intelligence during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in
the 1980s gave the kingdom arms’ length access to his country’s nuclear
capabilities.
“By the 1980s, the Saudi ambassador was a regular
guest of A[bdul] Q[adeer] Khan,” the controversial nuclear physicist and
metallurgical engineer who fathered Pakistan’s atomic bomb,” Haqqani
said in an interview.
Similarly, retired Pakistani Major General Feroz
Hassan Khan, the author of a semi-official history of Pakistan’s nuclear
program, has no doubt about the kingdom’s interest.
“Saudi Arabia provided generous financial support
to Pakistan that enabled the nuclear program to continue, especially
when the country was under sanctions,” Khan said in a separate
interview. Khan was referring to US sanctions imposed in 1998 because of
Pakistan’s development of a nuclear weapons capability. He noted that
at a time of economic crisis, Pakistan was, with Saudi help, able “to
pay premium prices for expensive technologies.”
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) said in a report earlier
this year that it had uncovered evidence that future Pakistani
“assistance would not involve Pakistan supplying Saudi Arabia with a
full nuclear weapon or weapons; however, Pakistan may assist in other
important ways, such as supplying sensitive equipment, materials, and
know-how used in enrichment or reprocessing.”
The report said it was unclear whether “Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia may be cooperating on sensitive nuclear technologies in
Pakistan. In an extreme case, Saudi Arabia may be financing, or will
finance, an unsafeguarded uranium enrichment facility in Pakistan for
later use, either in a civil or military program,” the report said.
The report concluded that the nuclear agreement
with Iran dubbed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) had “not
eliminated the kingdom’s desire for nuclear weapons capabilities and
even nuclear weapons … There is little reason to doubt that Saudi Arabia
will more actively seek nuclear weapons capabilities, motivated by its
concerns about the ending of the JCPOA’s major nuclear limitations
starting after year 10 of the deal or sooner if the deal fails,” the
report said.
Rather than embarking on a covert program, the
report predicted that Saudi Arabia would, for now, focus on building up
its civilian nuclear infrastructure as well as a robust nuclear
engineering and scientific workforce. This would allow the kingdom to
take command of all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle at some point in
the future.
“The current situation suggests that Saudi Arabia
now has both a high disincentive to pursue nuclear weapons in the short
term and a high motivation to pursue them over the long term,” the
Washington Institute said.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/us-saudi-nuclear-talks/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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