Sinister thoughts on Saudi nuclear quest
Energy deal aims raise questions over bomb ambitions. By David E Sanger and William J Broad
Before Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was implicated by the CIA in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, US intelligence agencies were trying to solve a separate mystery: Was the prince laying the groundwork for building an atomic bomb?
The 33-year-old heir to the Saudi throne had been overseeing a negotiation with the Energy Department and the State Department to get the United States to sell designs for nuclear power plants to the kingdom.
But there is a hitch: Saudi Arabia insists on producing its own nuclear fuel, even though it could buy it more cheaply abroad, according to US and Saudi officials. That raised concerns in Washington that the Saudis could divert their fuel into a covert weapons project — exactly what the United States and its allies feared Iran was doing before it reached the 2015 nuclear accord, which President Donald Trump has since abandoned.
Prince Mohammed set off alarms when he declared earlier this year, in the midst of the negotiation, that if Iran, Saudi Arabia’s fiercest rival, “developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” His negotiators stirred more worries by telling the Trump administration that Saudi Arabia would refuse to sign an agreement that would allow United Nations inspectors to look anywhere in the country for signs the Saudis might be working on a bomb, US officials said.
Asked in Congress last March about his secret negotiations with the Saudis, Energy Secretary Rick Perry dodged a question about whether the Trump administration would insist that the kingdom be banned from producing nuclear fuel.
Eight months later, the administration will not say where the negotiations stand. Now lurking behind the transaction is the question of whether a Saudi government that assassinated Khashoggi and repeatedly changed its story about the killing can be trusted with nuclear fuel and technology. Such fuel can be used for benign or military purposes: If uranium is enriched to 4% purity, it can fuel a power plant; at 90% it can be used for a bomb.
Privately, administration officials argue that if the US does not sell the nuclear equipment to the Saudis someone else will.
They stress that assuring the Saudis use a reactor designed by Westinghouse, the only US competitor for the deal, fits with Mr Trump’s insistence that jobs, oil and the strategic relationship between Riyadh and Washington are all far more important than the death of a Saudi dissident who was living, and writing newspaper columns, in the United States.
Under the rules that govern nuclear accords of this kind, Congress would have the opportunity to reject any agreement with Saudi Arabia, though the House and Senate would each need a veto-proof majority to stop Mr Trump’s plans.
“It is one thing to sell them planes, but another to sell them nukes, or the capacity to build them,” said Brad Sherman, a Democrat member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Following Khashoggi’s death, Mr Sherman has led the charge to change the law and make it harder for the Trump administration to reach a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. He described it as one of the most effective ways to punish Prince Mohammed.
“A country that can’t be trusted with a bone saw shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons,” Mr Sherman said, referring to Khashoggi’s brutal killing in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last month.
Nuclear experts said Prince Mohammed should have been disqualified from receiving nuclear help as soon as he raised the prospect of acquiring atomic weapons to counter Iran.
“We have never before contemplated, let alone concluded, a nuclear cooperation agreement with a country that was threatening to leave the nonproliferation treaty, even provisionally,” said William Tobey, a senior official in the Energy Department during the Bush administration who has testified about the risks of the agreement with Saudi Arabia.
He was referring to the crown prince’s threat to match any Iranian nuclear weapon — a step that would require the Saudis to either publicly abandon their commitments under the nonproliferation treaty or secretly race for the bomb.
The Trump administration declined to provide an update on the negotiations, which were intense enough that Mr Perry went to Riyadh in late 2017. Within the past several months, a senior State Department official engaged in further discussions over the deal in Europe.
The Saudi energy ministry said in a statement: “The Saudi government has repeatedly confirmed that every component of the Saudi atomic energy programme is strictly for civil and peaceful uses. The Saudi government has decided to move with this project not only to diversify energy sources but also to contribute to our economy. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly called for a Middle East free from all forms of nuclear weapons.”
Saudi Arabia has long displayed interest in acquiring, or helping allies acquire, the building blocks of a programme that could make weapons and protect the kingdom from potential threats — first Israel, then Iraq and Iran.
The Saudi government provided the financing for Pakistan to secretly build its own nuclear arms, the first “Sunni bomb”, as the Pakistani creators of the programme called it. That financial link has long left US intelligence officials wondering if there was a quid pro quo: If Saudi Arabia ever needed its own small arsenal, Pakistan could provide it — perhaps by moving Pakistani troops to Saudi territory.
The Saudis were also thinking of delivery systems. In 1988, the kingdom bought medium-range missiles from China that were designed to be fitted with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads, drawing protests from US officials.
Riyadh’s worries spiked in 2003 when it was revealed that Tehran had secretly built a vast underground plant for enriching uranium — a fuel for nuclear arms and reactors.
“Whatever the Iranians build, we will also build,” Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief, warned as the Obama administration sought to negotiate what became the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran.
Under that pact, Iran is spinning a small number of nuclear centrifuges, though it had to ship 97% of its nuclear fuel out of the country. The Saudis believe they need to be positioned to match Iran’s every move, though experts say it would take a while. “No one thinks the Saudis would be able to do this anytime soon,” said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
The core challenge for the Trump administration is that it has declared that Iran can never be trusted with any weapons-making technology. Now, it must decide whether to draw the same line for the Saudis.
The United States’ own actions may be helping to drive the Saudis’ nuclear thinking. Now that the Iran agreement, brokered with world powers, is on the edge of collapse after Mr Trump withdrew the United States, analysts are worried that the Saudis may be positioning themselves to create their own nuclear programme in response.
In its early days, the administration spent considerable time discussing ways Saudi Arabia could acquire nuclear reactors. Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Mr Trump’s national security adviser, backed a plan that would have let Moscow and Washington cooperate on a deal to supply Riyadh with reactors — but not the ability to make its own atomic fuel.
In February, Mr Perry led a delegation to London to discuss a pact that would ban fuel production, known as a 1-2-3 agreement, for at least 10 to 15 years.
The Saudi delegation was led by the energy minister, Khalid al-Falih, who resisted the proposal.
Nuclear experts said the kingdom wanted to build as many as 16 nuclear power plants over the next 20 to 25 years. Recently, it scaled back its initial plan to the construction of just two reactors. Westinghouse would provide the technology, but probably under a licence to South Korean manufacturers.
The crown prince made headlines in March by shifting the public discussion over Riyadh’s intentions from reactors to atomic bombs.
In a CBS News interview, he said that if Iran acquired nuclear arms, Saudi Arabia would quickly follow suit.
A country that can’t be trusted with a bone saw shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons. US HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE, BRAD SHERMAN