How About A Bad Nuke Deal From Trump? Do You Expect A Good One?
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| Photo illustration by Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times |
Mr. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion.
The most significant nuclear development in the Middle East in a generation now sits in the hands of Congress.
The Trump administration this week presented its nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia to lawmakers for review, opening the door for the kingdom to enrich its own reactor fuel.
President Trump has not publicly released the complete text of the deal, so it’s difficult to assess whether it aligns with American security interests. Unquestionably, the most provocative aspect is the prospect of enrichment — even if for peaceful purposes at the outset — because it could hand Saudi Arabia the technical means to pursue a nuclear device.
If it does go through, the accord could trigger a cascading effect across the region that culminates in a dangerous arms race. Washington should expect partners like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Turkey to demand similar terms for programs of their own, threatening to reverse decades of U.S. nonproliferation efforts.
It now falls to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee to stop that from happening. Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act requires the committees to review such accords, colloquially called 123 Agreements. Congress then decides whether to let a deal proceed or reject it within 90 days while in session to halt it from moving forward.
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Lawmakers should say no to this one.
Not only does the prospective deal complicate relationships with allies, it also brings the most elusive goal of the president’s war with Iran to the fore: a decisive resolution of Tehran’s nuclear program and retrieving all its highly enriched uranium. If Iran’s pathway to the bomb is not cut off completely, Saudi Arabia, its archrival, would be even more certain to develop a weapons program of its own, making the nuclear deal more dangerous.
In 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia said his nation would “without a doubt” pursue a nuclear weapon if Iran does. Ernest Moniz, a physicist who oversaw the U.S. nuclear complex as energy secretary in the Obama administration, said that Iran’s estimated 970-pound stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, most of which is now believed to be buried under rubble inside a tunnel complex in Isfahan, already provides Riyadh with the incentive to push ahead.
“The half ton of enriched uranium is directly usable in a bunch of nuclear bombs,” Mr. Moniz said. “While true that it is not quite weapons-grade, it’s a fallacy to think that you need weapons-grade material to make a bomb. In fact, the Hiroshima bomb did not have weapons-grade uranium, nor was it tested.”
Even if Congress does not stop this agreement, it’s still not guaranteed to move ahead. A day after announcing the accord, Mr. Trump conditioned its terms on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, a move the kingdom has refused to make until Israel agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state. Even if a diplomatic solution is found to that thorny issue, the agreement is subject to a two-year technical study on the development of a manufacturing plan for the reactors, fuel and other nuclear-related materials. All this would take time, of course, and would not come to fruition until the end of Mr. Trump’s term.
For now, Saudi Arabia is far from becoming a nuclear state. The kingdom says it has no intention to build a nuclear weapon, and even if the deal went into force tomorrow and the other hurdles were cleared, it would take several years to develop the capacity for the infrastructure, establish the technical know-how and manufacture the fuel for one.
That’s not to say that Saudi Arabia does not have a right to nuclear power. But Mr. Trump is not publicly insisting on its acceptance of the so-called gold standard, involving International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. Under a core tenet of those terms, which more than 140 other countries abide by, the agency’s inspectors have access to verify that nuclear energy facilities are not secretly used to produce weapons-grade material. Sidestepping this essential element of nonproliferation agreements sets a dangerous precedent not only for the United States but also for Russia and China, which could be emboldened to reach similar agreements in the future.
“Other nuclear technology exporters will be incentivized to cut deals with their friends as well, abandoning strict I.A.E.A. safeguard inspections in favor of vague promises not to cheat,” said Scott Sagan, a professor and nuclear expert at Stanford University. “President Reagan used to say that when making arms control agreements with the Russians we should always ‘trust but verify.’ With the Saudis, President Trump seems to be placing too much faith in ‘trust’ and not enough in ‘verify.’”
Saudi Arabia has long sought to control the nuclear fuel cycle from start to finish, a process that involves enriching uranium for nuclear reactors at the front end, then reprocessing fuel rods after they’re spent to extract unused uranium and plutonium. The risk is that if the United States grants this wish, the kingdom would have centrifuges that can, theoretically, enrich uranium up to weapons grade. Reprocessing plants used for waste disposal can separate reactor-produced plutonium, which can also be used in nuclear bombs.
Should Saudi Arabia get the green light on enrichment or reprocessing, it will likely prompt neighboring countries to demand the same terms and provoke renegotiation requests with nations like the United Arab Emirates and South Korea on existing nuclear agreements. It loosens the proliferation safety net that’s been tightly wound for decades. “It’s really concerning,” said Scott Roecker, a vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group dedicated to reducing the spread of nuclear weapons. “Without strong nonproliferation requirements, it will set a new starting point for negotiations with nations seeking nuclear energy.”
The new precedent will be set as Mr. Trump is aggressively pushing nuclear technology exports in a broader attempt to revitalize the American nuclear industry. In May 2025, he signed an executive order instructing the State Department to pursue at least 20 new 123 Agreements around the globe.
The deal under consideration today says U.S. companies will have a central role selling nuclear reactors to the Saudis over a 30-year period, a potential windfall worth billions of dollars for the industry. It has the added benefit of stiff-arming Russia, China or another foreign supplier from forging deals with Riyadh that would be outside of Washington’s control. Saudi Arabia could import uranium from the United States, but a two-year study will decide whether it makes economic sense to produce their own nuclear material or purchase it.
Mr. Trump doesn’t have a good track record of negotiating nuclear deals. He abandoned the Obama-era Joint Plan of Action with Iran in 2018, which he still has not replaced. His 2018 dĂ©tente with North Korea fell apart a year later with no meaningful resolution. In February, he allowed the last major nuclear arms control pact between the United States and Russia to expire despite Moscow’s stated willingness to collaborate on an extension.
Congress must try to avoid another blow to the era of nonproliferation that’s contained the global number of nuclear powers to just nine. It’s a staggering accomplishment; in 1963, President John F. Kennedy said he could envision “a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations” have nuclear weapons within a decade.
The agreement with Saudi Arabia should not reopen the possibility of that prediction becoming true in the 21st century.
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