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Why Saudi Arabia wants a ‘nuclear Aramco’.

Monash University, Ran Porat 16 June 23

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Riyadh at the beginning of June to bargain with the Saudis over a package of concessions to be granted to the kingdom in exchange for normalisation of relations with Israel.

Under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the Saudis reportedly asked the US to jointly create a “nuclear Aramco”, modelled after the kingdom’s oil and gas giant that has played such a large role in building the country’s substantial wealth

The idea is to rebrand Saudi Arabia as a civilian nuclear energy powerhouse, and worldwide exporter of nuclear products and technology, given the expected reduction in the usage of fossil fuel in coming decades as part of efforts to control climate change.

Yet there’s another aspect to the Saudi request. As part of this proposed nuclear project, the Saudis invited the Americans to jointly manufacture and monitor uranium enrichment capabilities – a must for the production of nuclear fuel used in power generating reactors.

Yet, the capacity to enrich uranium is also a crucial part of any nuclear weapons project. From that perspective, it seems that the Sunni kingdom likely aspires to create deterrence against its archrival, Shi’ite Iran, which is fast-approaching the status of a nuclear threshold country……………………………………………………..

The “nuclear Aramco” idea suggests a seismic shift in the Saudi nuclear policy, pushing towards the development of in-house independent atomic deterrence.

Saudi civil, and possibly also military, nuclear capabilities are still years away. Yet, the dangerous scenario of a nuclear-weapon zone stretching across Asia from North Korea, through China, via Pakistan and India, then Iran and finally Saudi Arabia (and on to Israel), suddenly looks closer than ever………………………

This scenario could be avoided if the Saudis could be made to feel safer against the Iranian threat, and could trust the international community to defuse Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

One path to achieving this is by increasing the pressures on Tehran in a true attempt to stop, and hopefully even reverse, Iran’s frantic and dangerous drive to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities…………………………….  https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2023/06/16/1385882/explainer-why-does-saudi-arabia-want-a-nuclear-aramco

June 18, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Saudi Arabia