House Democrat calls for congressional hearings on Trump administration’s nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia – US politics live | US foreign policy

On its face, the nuclear cooperation agreement, commonly known as a 123 agreement (after the relevant section of the US Atomic Energy Act) signed on Wednesday by the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia looks similar to an agreement signed in 2009 by the Obama administration and the United Arab Emirates.

However, until we see the text, it is not clear if the deals are alike in one key way: whether or not the Saudis have agreed, as the UAE did, to safeguards that would block the kingdom from developing nuclear weapons.

In the UAE deal, first negotiated during the Bush administration, and then reworked and signed by the Obama administration on 21 May, the Emirates agreed to accept the International Atomic Energy Agency’s so-called “additional protocol”, which allows the agency to verify the peaceful use of all nuclear material, and affirmed its commitment “to pursue a renunciation of the development of domestic enrichment and reprocessing capabilities in favor of long-term commitments for the secure external supply of nuclear fuel”.

“In signing this Agreement, the UAE has demonstrated its commitment to develop civil nuclear energy responsibly, in full conformity with its nonproliferation commitments and obligations,” the Obama state department wrote in a 2009 fact sheet. “Among those is the UAE’s commitment not to pursue enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) within its territory, representing a marked contrast to Iran which has failed to comply with its international obligations.”

Initial reports on the terms of the Trump administration’s deal with Saudi Arabia suggest that it could allow for uranium enrichment in Saudi Arabia, opening a potential pathway to the production of nuclear weapons in the kingdom.

“The deal breaks from the ‘gold standard’ of nonproliferation, which would prohibit domestic uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board argued on Wednesday, under the headline: “Saudi Nuclear Enrichment Is a Mistake”.

The Journal’s editors went on to suggest that Trump’s Saudi nuclear deal will have weaker safeguards than the Bush-Obama UAE nuclear deal:

The next best way to prevent nuclear proliferation is with inspections and monitoring, but the Trump deal weakens those, too. The tried-and-true method is the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol. The United Arab Emirates signed up for it, along with the gold standard of no domestic enrichment, as a condition of its 2009 nuclear deal negotiated largely with George W. Bush. But now the Saudis have been allowed to reject the Additional Protocol and receive U.S. support all the same.

The Trump Administration says it has devised a bilateral safeguards agreement of its own. But we doubt the Saudis rejected the standard protocol in favor of even stricter inspections. They are bound to be weaker, establishing the precedent that each U.S. ally can push for its own preferential monitoring.