Why Did Trump Just Give Saudi Arabia the Fast Track to a Nuclear Weapon?

At the beginning of Donald Trump’s first term as U.S. President in 2017, a senior White House official commented off-the-record to OilPrice.com that: “We’re not going to put up with any more crap from the Saudis.” The comment had followed the end of the 2014-2016 Oil Price War that had seen the Kingdom rally its fellow OPEC members to ramp up their collective oil production in order to crash oil prices to cause the bankruptcy of as many American shale oil producers as possible, as analysed in depth in my latest book on the new global oil market order. The Saudis regarded the then-nascent U.S. shale sector as a potentially existential threat to its own oil sector, which provided around 90% of its total government revenues at the beginning of 2014. Due to the stunning reorganisation of the American shale producers into a meaner, leaner, lower-cost oil-producing machine, the U.S. won the Oil Price War, leaving Saudi Arabia and its OPEC brothers with hundreds of billions of dollars of lost revenue and fiscal deficits that would last for years. For the remainder of his first presidential term, Trump kept up the pressure on Saudi to keep oil prices within the ‘Trump Oil Price Range’, as also detailed in the book, regardless of the economic pressure this meant for the Kingdom and OPEC. He also reminded Saudi Arabia of the fragility of their position in the most unequivocal terms in 2018 when oil prices were rising above the Range, saying: “We protect Saudi Arabia. And I love the king, King Salman. But I said ‘King – we’re protecting you – you might not be there for two weeks without us - you have to pay for your military’.” So, why has the U.S. -- under Trump’s direct instructions -- just signed a landmark deal with the Kingdom that will allow it to develop a civilian nuclear power programme, which could more easily lead to the development of a nuclear weapon than any other similar deal made by the U.S. in recent years? Related: The Trade Routes Iran Cannot Afford to Lose “It’s not just the civilian nuclear programme that raises questions, although that’s bad enough from the Israeli perspective, but the terms of the deal make it far simpler for the Saudis to morph this into a nuclear weapons development programme and that will concern everyone,” the same Washington-based source exclusively told OilPrice.com last week. Indeed, Israel has historically regarded the prospect of its longstanding arch-enemy Saudi Arabia having even a straightforward civilian nuclear programme with horror. “The Israelis see this as the key first stage in a development ladder that might then move onto acquiring the mechanisms for enriching uranium, and then to increasing this up to the level for a nuclear warhead, and then to the acquisition of the kit required to deliver the warhead over distance via ballistic missiles,” said the Washington source. “But in this deal, Saudi Arabia leapfrogs the second rung of the ladder,” he added. In fact, this 30-year U.S.-Saudi Arabia Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Agreement marks a massive shift from previous U.S. policy in such deals, including the 2009 deal for the UAE. Most crucially, under the UAE deal, the country explicitly agreed to foreswear enriching uranium in-country, as well as reprocessing plutonium. Instead, the UAE imports its reactor fuel and returns the spent fuel, providing a completely non-weapons-capable blueprint, in what is regarded as the gold standard for non-proliferation of a civilian nuclear power programme into a nuclear weapons development one. As it stands, the deal for Saudi Arabia will allow in-country enrichment of uranium and will also not require it to adopt the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) strict ‘Additional Protocol’ that allows its inspectors to conduct snap, unannounced checks on any site they deem suspicious. The view that this deal is effectively a licence for Saudi Arabia to seamlessly shift gear from a civilian nuclear power programme into a nuclear weapons development programme is further bolstered by comments from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Back in 2018, he said that although his country did not want to acquire nuclear weapons: “Without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we would follow suit as soon as possible”. In this context, in 2013, Amos Yadlin, a former head of the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence Directorate, in Tel Aviv said that: “If Iran gets the [nuclear] bomb, the Saudis will not wait one month. They already paid for the bomb, they will go to Pakistan and bring what they need to bring.” According to a senior source who works closely with the European Union’s (E.U.) energy security complex, provided Saudi Arabia had the highly enriched uranium in place, all it would require from another country to turn it into a functioning nuclear weapon would be the ‘physics package’. This includes the triggering mechanism (high-explosive lenses and detonator firing sets), the neutron initiator (uranium deuteride-based, or external miniature particle accelerators), and the tamper and neutron reflector. If Saudi Arabia was able to source all this in a turnkey design and fully fabricated weapon components from Pakistan, or anywhere else, then it would not need to build out the accompanying metallurgical conversion infrastructure required to safely convert the uranium hexafluoride gas back into a solid fluorinated powder and then smelt it into the necessary metallic uranium hemispheres. In short -- with highly enriched uranium in place (that could be done in Saudi Arabia under the terms of the deal), and a willing ally such as Pakistan, or another -- the Kingdom could move very quickly to having a nuclear weapon, just as Yadlin said. Precisely why Trump thinks all this is a good idea becomes clearer when looking at other elements of the deal within a regional and global geopolitical context. In the agreement, there is a mandated two-year period for the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to determine if in-country enrichment within the Kingdom is ‘warranted and commercially viable’. If the answer is positive, the enrichment facility (or facilities) will be built by American firms under a black box arrangement, whereby the Saudi-driven uranium enrichment will occur under U.S. oversight, without Washington transferring the proprietary, underlying technology to the Kingdom. On the other side of the deal, if -- after the two-year consideration period -- the U.S. decides that in-country enrichment should not occur, then Saudi Arabia would be legally barred from pursuing it independently or partnering with another foreign power for 10 years. Ultimately, then, as a deal in and of itself over and above broader global security concerns, it has several advantages for the U.S. First, there is the money: potentially hundreds of billions of dollars over time in infrastructure contracts for American firms. Second, as examined earlier by OilPrice.com over several years, it effectively precludes Saudi Arabia from entering into similar nuclear deals with China or Russia that would also not mandate strict non-proliferation safeguards. Third, it creates the ‘Damoclean Sword’ of a U.S.-controlled nuclear weapons threat to Iran on Tehran’s doorstep to ‘encourage’ positive future outcomes from the regime. And fourth and finally, it firmly brings Saudi Arabia back into the U.S.’s sphere of influence, so setting the foundation for a new phase in the rollout of further ‘Abraham Accords’ across the region, as analysed in my latest book on the new global oil market order. By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com