Last week, the Department of Energy announced that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart had signed a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement along with a bilateral safeguards pact. The former is commonly known as a 123 agreement because, under Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, it is subject to congressional review.
But before the required review process could take place, a wave of criticism from nuclear nonproliferation experts and conservative pundits led the administration to backtrack. By Thursday morning, President Donald Trump had knocked the deal into a cocked hat with a Truth Social post insisting the agreement would not entail the enrichment of nuclear material and would be “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”
Riyadh’s interest in energy diversification and nuclear energy in particular is not new. The Biden administration engaged in protracted discussions over its last two years on this and other issues as part of its effort to entice the kingdom into joining the Abraham Accords, a U.S.-brokered deal to normalize relations between Israel and a number of Arab states. Those discussions ultimately foundered on Saudi reluctance to adhere to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol (which expands the atomic inspection authorities to detect undeclared nuclear activities), potential restrictions on uranium enrichment, and Riyadh’s insistence that it would not normalize relations with Israel while Gaza remained occupied. Wright’s announcement last week appeared to drop the requirement that Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel, but the president’s post appears to have reinstated it. The Saudis, for their part, have indicated that the agreement was signed before the normalization prerequisite was added, leaving the pact in limbo.
The likely delay in the agreement’s implementation provides an opportunity to consider the broader implications of a nuclear cooperation agreement with Riyadh as dispassionately as one can. At the outset, it is important to note that the text of the deal has not been made public and that critics (and advocates) have been reacting to leaks in the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. Therefore, commentators should proceed with caution about the details until they are clearly spelled out. That is the gravamen of a lengthy X post by nuclear proliferation expert David Albright, in which he poses the question of whether the proposed deal is a “new approach to stop proliferation or a proliferation-prone mistake.” He notes that Saudi Arabia has long been considered a potential candidate country for nuclear proliferation, with its leaders vowing to pursue a bomb if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon (a position I heard articulated explicitly by King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s monarch until his death in 2015, when I visited the kingdom as a government official for defense cooperation meetings in 2006). Concerns about Riyadh’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon were recently reinforced by the conclusion of a mutual defense agreement between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, given the latter’s well-known record of promoting proliferation in North Korea, Libya, and Iran.
Albright, whose proliferation credentials are impressive, offers a framework for judging the deal once its text actually becomes available. The most controversial element, he notes, is the potential for Saudi uranium enrichment, given media reports indicating that “the agreement does not include an outright ban on uranium enrichment, but it does not include an outright provision [for enrichment] either.” But if an enrichment plant is built on Saudi soil, he adds, “it would reportedly be controlled by the United States and involve U.S. centrifuge technology.” To keep these capabilities out of Riyadh’s hands, “the plant should be run by U.S. personnel, cleared by U.S. clearance processes. Such a plant would be consistent with the view of no nationally controlled enrichment plants in the region.”
Moreover, Albright notes, the agreement reportedly stipulates that no enrichment plant would be built before the completion of a two-year study on the commercial viability of enrichment in Saudi Arabia—a prospect about which he is clearly skeptical. The outcome of the study may turn on whether enrichment is intended to solely meet Saudi needs or whether enriched material would be exported to serve other countries’ civilian nuclear power programs. Albright also addresses Saudi Arabia’s past reluctance to sign the IAEA Additional Protocol, and on that issue, he is unequivocal: U.S. bilateral inspection arrangements are not enough; Riyadh must agree to robust international monitoring.
On balance, Albright thinks U.S.-Saudi cooperation might be a superior alternative to the Saudis pursuing a nuclear program with another partner, like Pakistan. A cooperation agreement that gives the U.S. significant leverage over Saudi enrichment may be the least bad outcome.
Albright may, however, be overly sanguine here. While details remain scarce, there is good reason to be concerned that the deal would not only be a departure from longtime U.S. policy but also have the potential to upend the traditional U.S. strategic objective of attempting to slow, halt, and reverse the adoption of nuclear weapons. The U.S. might inadvertently make itself into a handmaiden for a nuclear proliferation cascade that would break a nonproliferation regime that is already under enormous stress from a range of geopolitical forces.
The deal as described in press accounts would mark a distinct departure from traditional U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia and nuclear power. As a Congressional Research Service review notes, “longstanding U.S. policy has linked a U.S.-Saudi 123 agreement to a requirement that the kingdom accept enhanced international safeguards and forgo pursuit of the most proliferation-sensitive nuclear facilities—those for enriching uranium or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium.” These undertakings would essentially block the two paths to a nuclear weapon.
They also are the essence of the “gold standard” 123 agreement that the U.S. reached with the United Arab Emirates in 2009. That agreement provided that the U.S. could terminate its nuclear cooperation with the UAE if the latter developed sensitive nuclear technology on its territory or engaged in enrichment or reprocessing activities. An agreed minute to the deal stipulated that its terms “shall be no less favorable in scope and effect” than U.S. cooperation with other Middle Eastern countries and provided for consultations, at Abu Dhabi’s instance, “regarding the possibility of amending” the agreement to provide “equally favorable terms.” This nuclear equivalent of most-favored-nation status means that proceeding with a Saudi agreement that allows for enrichment or eschews IAEA inspections could open the door to the UAE following suit.
For some years, Saudi officials have indicated that they wish to have access to the full nuclear fuel cycle and intend to use the kingdom’s ample uranium reserves to produce low-enriched uranium. Although Saudi Arabia has been a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for almost 40 years and has a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA, it has curtailed some of its cooperation with the watchdog agency in recent years. While the guardrails that Albright has suggested might assuage concerns about enrichment activity, it is not at all clear that such protections exist in the signed agreement. Nor would they (as he himself notes) mitigate concerns about IAEA inspections or soothe Emirati concerns about equal treatment, with potential knock-on effects with other countries in the region down the road.
In sum, between its apparent concessions on enrichment and temporary reversal of the Biden administration’s attempts to make a nuclear pact contingent on normalization with Israel, the Trump team’s deal has abandoned key policy objectives with little in the way of compromises from the Saudis. The president’s Truth Social post may block the agreement for now, but, given the inconstancy of his positions articulated via social media, this injunction could be lifted at any time.
Probing the Saudi nuclear agreement more deeply, it appears not only to upend 20 years of U.S. policy across four administrations—both Republican and Democratic—but also to compromise a key U.S. strategic objective reaching back to the dawn of the nuclear age. American statesmen, after the initial use of atomic bombs to force Japan’s surrender in 1945, have always been chary about other countries getting their hands on nuclear technology. The initial efforts at international nuclear arms control in 1945-46 foundered on precisely this issue, and America’s concerns were not exclusively directed at U.S. adversaries. Washington cut off British access to nuclear technology after the war’s conclusion (despite the fact that the initial development of nuclear weapons had been a joint wartime effort) and was notoriously unsympathetic to France’s nuclear advances.
As Johns Hopkins scholar Francis Gavin argued in 2015, the U.S. government has gone to “extraordinary lengths since the beginning of the nuclear age to inhibit — that is, to slow, halt, and reverse — the spread of nuclear weapons and, when unsuccessful, to mitigate the consequences.” The tools that Washington uses to accomplish this he calls “strategies of inhibition.”
American policymakers developed and adapted the tools of statecraft to execute this strategy because they feared the unconstrained spread of nuclear weapons to an unknown number of states would lead to an unstable world in which the odds of nuclear use were exponentially higher. RAND scholars at the end of the 1950s identified this as the “nth country problem,” which carried with it the threat of “catalytic” nuclear war.
In February 1963, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara provided President John F. Kennedy with his assessment of the dangers of the spread of nuclear weapons to other powers with or without a test ban treaty. Echoing many of the concerns expressed by the RAND experts, he noted that “the continued diffusion of nuclear weapons is clearly not in the interest of the US. Even if these weapons are not used, diffusion will make existing disputes more acute and will generate new ones. And although their use by a weak power will be irrational, such action cannot be ruled out.” Although some so-called realist scholars have argued for the benefits of additional nuclear proliferation on the basis that the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more world leaders will be deterred from using them, American policymakers have shared McNamara’s assessment since the 1960s.
Kennedy, shortly after receiving McNamara’s memo and just months before his tragic assassination, was asked at a press conference about the prospects for a nuclear test ban, and his response suggested that he had thoroughly assimilated McNamara’s argument: “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, 15 or 20.” But in 1968, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, negotiated the NPT and with it established the nonproliferation apparatus that has limited the number of nuclear weapons states to nine. That effort, in fact, marks the single greatest accomplishment of arms control in our time.
Despite its successes, that treaty regime has been under continuous stress. In the 1970s, Sweden, Australia, and South Korea all gave up their aspirations for nuclear weapons. In the 1980s, the Israeli raid on the Osirak reactor delayed an Iraqi nuclear program that was then further precluded by the first Gulf War and the Iraq War. India and Pakistan both tested nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, but they were never signatories to the treaty (nor was Israel, which maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity). The nuclear program of North Korea, a former NPT signatory, has bedeviled policymakers for 30 years, representing the most serious challenge to the viability of the treaty yet. And ongoing concerns about the Iranian nuclear program have revolved around the idea that an Iranian weapon would set off a “chain reaction” of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, upending the last major achievement of the effort to control nuclear weapons.
Saudi Arabia, of course, has been the linchpin of speculation about a “chain reaction” due to its understandable fears about the Iranian nuclear program. These fears help explain why Saudi leaders were quite content to see Operation Midnight Hammer’s strikes on the core elements of Iran’s program in June 2025. The Saudis have been less enthusiastic about the current round of warfare initiated by President Trump on February 28, 2026, particularly as Iranian retaliatory strikes target Saudi soil and amid the prospect of Houthi attacks on the kingdom’s infrastructure. In this context, it is not at all surprising that Saudi officials have supported the mediation efforts of Pakistan, Qatar, and others to end the fighting or that they would, in light of the U.S. failure to completely defend the kingdom from Iranian attacks, pursue a hedging strategy with regard to their own nuclear weapons capability.
Given Saudi apprehension about the course of the conflict and the potential of Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, it is also not astonishing that the Trump administration might see concessions on the nuclear issue as mollifying the kingdom. The irony, however, is that these concessions might very well prompt the kind of nuclear cascade that has animated fears over the Iranian program in the first place. As Andrea Stricker of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote of the Saudi deal, “We could quickly see Turkey, Egypt, potentially others like Qatar and Oman lining up for similar treatment.” In Stricker’s view, providing Riyadh with access to enrichment technology, even under conditions that deny Saudi personnel access, would also “risk Saudi espionage or seizure, potentially forcing a future president to destroy it.”
If the agreement ultimately does move forward, Congress should examine it with a fine-tooth comb, and if it is as flawed as current descriptions suggest, it should reject it with a veto-proof majority.
Although the issues surrounding the Saudi nuclear deal are mired in technical details, the broader policy and strategic implications are momentous. Proceeding with the agreement would open the door to the very nuclear cascade that American policymakers have tried for years to prevent by limiting or destroying the Iranian nuclear program. One can hope the president’s current posture of linking the deal to normalization with Israel will keep U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation from proceeding on the terms as we currently understand them. But even normalization with Israel will not fix the issues of enrichment and inspections that could well open a Pandora’s box of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, realizing six decades of policymakers’ fears.
Amb. Eric Edelman is a JINSA Distinguished Scholar and the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.
Read the original piece in The Dispatch.