The Saudis want an agreement on US nuclear power. Can we trust them not to build a bomb?


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This insistence is what triggered the Iranian nuclear crisis. Over the years, several countries have demonstrated that it is possible to turn allegedly civilian programs into fuel sources for bombs, and thus into nuclear warheads and military powers. Israel recently released an archive of documents, stolen in Tehran in January, to prove that the Iranian government has been cheating the world for years.

The Saudis, meanwhile, had no equivalent facilities. They promised to get them.

"All that the Iranians will build, we will do as well," warned Prince Turki al – Faisal, former head of the Saudi intelligence services, as the Obama administration sought to negotiate what would become the next day. 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran.

Under the covenant, Iran is running a small number of nuclear centrifuges, although it had to ship 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country. The Saudis feel that they need to be well positioned to join all the measures taken by Iran, but experts believe that it would take some time. "Nobody thinks the Saudis would be able to do it anytime soon," said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "They could not build a weapon plausibly without outside help."

The main challenge of the Trump administration is that it has declared that Iran can not trust any weapons manufacturing technology. Now, you have to decide to draw the same line for the Saudis.

The United States 'own actions may help to guide the Saudis' nuclear thinking. Now that the deal with Iran, negotiated with the world powers, is about to collapse after US withdrawal from Trump, analysts are worried that the Saudis will prepare to create their own nuclear program.

The kingdom has vast deposits of uranium and five nuclear research centers. Analysts said Saudi Arabia's atomic workforce was growing steadily and growing, even without nuclear fuel production.

Saudi leaders saw political openness when Mr. Trump was elected.

In the beginning, the administration spent a lot of time discussing ways in which Saudi Arabia and other Arab states could acquire nuclear reactors. Michael T. Flynn, who briefly served as Trump's national security adviser, backed a plan that would have allowed Moscow and Washington to cooperate in an agreement to supply reactors to Riyadh – but not the ability to produce its own atomic fuel.

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