nuclear-news

Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia raises the prospect of US nuclear cooperation with the kingdom

By ASSOCIATED PRESS, Daily Mail, 10 May 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) – Saudi Arabia wants U.S. help developing its own civil nuclear program, and the Trump administration says it is “very excited” at the prospect. U.S.-Saudi cooperation in building reactors for nuclear power plants in the kingdom could shut the Chinese and Russians out of what could be a high-dollar partnership for the American nuclear industry.

Despite that eagerness, there are obstacles, including fears that helping the Saudis fulfill their long-standing desire to enrich their own uranium as part of that partnership would open new rounds of nuclear proliferation and competition. Saudi Arabia’s pursuit of a nuclear agreement is likely to play into the ever-evolving bargaining on regional security issues involving the U.S., Iran and Israel.

This coming week, Republican President Donald Trump will make his first trip to Saudi Arabia of his second term. Here´s a look at key issues involved in the Saudi request…………………………………………………………………………………………

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also is pushing to build up Saudi Arabia’s mining and processing of its own minerals. That includes Saudi reserves of uranium, a fuel for nuclear reactors.

For the Trump administration, any deal with Iran that lets Tehran keep its own nuclear program or continue its own enrichment could increase Saudi pressure for the same.

That’s even though Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have toned down their enmity toward Iran in recent years and are supporting the U.S. efforts to limit Iran´s nuclear program peacefully.

For the U.S., any technological help it gives the Saudis as they move toward building nuclear reactors would be a boon for American companies…………………………………..

“Without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we would follow suit as soon as possible,” Prince Mohammed said in 2018, at a time of higher tension between Arab states and Iran.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states stress better relations and diplomacy with Iran now. But Prince Mohammed’s comments – and other Saudi officials said similar – have left open the possibility that nuclear weapons are a strategic goal of the Saudis.

The Saudis long have pushed for the U.S. to build a uranium enrichment facility in the kingdom as part of any nuclear cooperation between the two countries. That facility could produce low-enriched uranium for civilian nuclear reactors. But without enough controls, it could also churn out highly enriched uranium for nuclear bombs.

Trump administration officials cite the Saudis’ desire to make use of their country´s uranium deposits. The kingdom has spent tens of millions of dollars, with Chinese assistance, to find and develop those deposits. But the uranium ore that it has identified so far would be “severely uneconomic” to develop, the intergovernmental Nuclear Energy Agency says.

It has been decades since there has been any state-sanctioned transfer of that kind of technology to a nonnuclear-weapon state, although a Pakistani-based black-market network provided enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea, Libya and possibly others about 20 years ago, Robert Einhorn noted for the Brookings Institute last year.

Allowing Saudi Arabia – or any other additional country – to host an enrichment facility would reverse long-standing U.S. policy. It could spur more nuclear proliferation among U.S. allies and rivals, Einhorn wrote………………………………….

After Wright’s trip, some Israelis expressed their opposition to allowing Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium, and Iran and Saudi Arabia are both carefully watching the other’s talks with the U.S. on their nuclear issues…………………………
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-14698407/Trumps-trip-Saudi-Arabia-raises-prospect-US-nuclear-cooperation-kingdom.html

May 12, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Saudi Arabia, USA