nuclear-news

“This could be a very big contract. This administration is all about contracts,” said Hussein Ibish, a resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “And there is a big market here that U.S. companies can get in on. The question is if the U.S. will decide, in the end, to go through with an official agreement or not.”

That pursuit raised concerns at the time among professional staff inside the Departments of Energy, State, and Commerce. Those worries grew as it became clear that members of the administration had not engaged in regulatory and legal conversations about the export of such technology. Worse, the nuclear export plan was, in essence, the work of a single company. The firm, IP3, was connected to a pack of former generals, including then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and its proposal was “not a business plan,” one senior political official told investigators from the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, but rather “a scheme for these generals to make some money.” …….

A letter obtained by The Daily Beast shows how CEOs from six different energy companies, as well as members of IP3, courted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and pitched the idea of working together on a nuclear plan called the “Iron Bridge Program.” (Iron Bridge is an IP3 subsidiary that counted Flynn as one of its advisers.)

The letter, which was reportedly sent to MBS in January 2017, says the nuclear plan would “create long term government to government and commercial to commercial partnerships between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”………. https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-trump-keeps-pushing-deal-to-send-nuclear-tech-to-saudis