The nonproliferation conundrum of GWB...
A couple of weeks ago I summarized here that Saudi Arabia was moving ahead with plans to do nuclear power and that there were some potential issues.
In July, after having read that some weighty nuclear industry companies were trying to dip their toes into Arabian sands, I talked this over with some people who know their way around Riyadh.
They related that Saudi officials they talk to spelled out that, yes, the kingdom is very interested in doing nuclear power, but, no, it isn’t prepared right now to copy what the UAE did in 2008 and commit itself to forego domestic uranium enrichment and reprocessing. The UAE did that in the fine print of its 123 agreement with the US, which by the way was nicely appraised by friends at CRS.
Given what the State Department has been saying about the importance of limiting enrichment and reprocessing activities under US 123 agreements especially with countries in the Middle East–including in the text of the US-UAE agreement itself—that was certainly interesting, and for my Carnegie piece I recorded that “Western diplomats say that Saudi Arabia is not prepared to conclude an agreement on the same terms as UAE.”
US government people didn’t tell me that directly, of course, but no one in an official capacity in Washington has since challenged that statement.
But there is a little back story.
While I was looking at this last month, some people in Riyadh who had been trying to work with the Saudi government to kick start its nuclear program, told me they had strongly suspected that the Saudis had gotten cold feet about giving up altogether on getting into the sensitive parts of the fuel cycle. They began to suspect that when some of Saudi Arabia’s budding European, Japanese, and U.S. nuclear “cooperators” started getting a push back in corridors of power in Washington. That happened, they suggested, after the “cooperators” indicated they wanted the US to make a deeper commitment to do nuclear cooperation with Saudi Arabia than the US currently right now sees fit.
When that proposition wasn’t too well-received, they then asked people they knew in USG agencies if perhaps there was a problem because Riyadh had told Washington it might in fact be interested in uranium enrichment. And so they politely asked USG people if such an interest on Saudi Arabia’s part was documented anywhere, and they were tersely told by USG contacts that that subject is…umm… classified.
When you get a response like that, it very often means you’re on to something.
Now, I can’t prove that Saudi Arabia has gone back on a previous understanding with the US not to enrich and reprocess, nor that it wants to enrich uranium, but I did find this:
- “Saudi Arabia and Bahrain signed separate MOUs on Nuclear Energy Cooperation with the US in May 2008. Both included the same commitments to forego domestic enrichment and reprocessing that the UAE had earlier put forward in its policy white paper.”
and then this:
- Poyry, a Finnish power industry consulting company, has been tapped by Saudi Arabia to, among other things nuclear, look into the feasibility and prospects of enriching uranium there, according to two named executives in a Reuters interview.
Saudi Arabia is not the kind of place you dial up and get answers in a hurry, but if that country is looking into uranium enrichment, is that in fact a big deal?
Well, don’t forget that we already had a little bit of Sturm und Drang on Capitol Hill this month over what the US might or might not let Vietnam do under a future nuclear cooperation agreement with Hanoi after the State Department underscored that these days it seems to be more worried about the Middle East than about South East Asia.
(What you hear on C Street and thereabouts is that the “problem” with Vietnam is a red herring someone in Congress put on the grill this summer. Because if you look carefully at the US-UAE agreement, they’ll tell you, you’ll see it’s modeled on the US agreement with Egypt, and what’s more the US-UAE documents spell out plainly that the Middle East—but not South East Asia or Vietnam—is the part of the world for which the US-UAE agreement is meant to be a model).
In any event Saudi’s apparent interest in uranium processing seems to have disturbed some people at a blog site connected to NEI, the US nuclear industry’s most powerful lobby organization. Nuclear power plant vendors don’t want to see a potential market with a lot of money vanish like a mirage in the desert because a potential public relations showstopper like this appears on the horizon.
So what will the US eventually do in this case? If it’s true that Saudi Arabia is reneging on an MOU with the State Department that committed it not to enrich and reprocess—and is now engaging in “nuclear hedging” (an expression which is getting more and more popular among Middle East policy analysts these days, the closer Iran gets to weapons capability)—we could then speculate, assuming the US does want to negotiate a nuclear trade agreement with Saudi Arabia in the first place, about what would be the price the US might have to pay to get Riyadh to avoid trying to increase the U-235 isotopic concentration of any uranium they might someday own. Let’s also say that’s especially the case since Saudi officials have complained at length that George W. Bush beginning in 2003 directly contributed to Iran’s eclipsing Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf Arab states as the region’s rising power.
In Washington you occasionally hear people who might well know it suggest that Obama won’t go near a 123 agreement with Saudi Arabia so as not to ruffle the feathers of lawmakers who are closely watching for any sign that the US might do something which would detract from Israel’s security. That, however, doesn’t mean that the US shouldn’t negotiate a 123 agreement with Riyadh, you also hear in some quarters.
Why not? Because having a 123 agreement in place committing Saudi Arabia not to enrich uranium and separate plutonium would be better than having an agreement without this condition, and it may be better than having no agreement at all.
Should a US-Saudi agreement come to pass whereby Riyadh agrees not to enrich and reprocess, and should Saudi Arabia then instead built Japanese, Korean, or French reactors, the US-Saudi agreement would mean that any, say, Japanese or French nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia could not include uranium enrichment or reprocessing. Were Saudi Arabia on its own to set up an enrichment program somewhere on its vast empty territory, that would constitute a violation of its agreement with the US and result in suspension of any nuclear cooperation with US entities which follows from the 123 agreement.
Or would the Congress prefer we didn’t negotiate such an agreement with Saudi Arabia for some reason? One reason might be that, if we do that, it would tell the world we think Saudi Arabia is a good place to do nuclear business in. Internally, some USG people muddy the waters even more, arguing somehow that just because we have a 123 agreement with Saudi Arabia, that doesn’t mean we have to implement it.
In the meantime, the President so far has not requested the Department of State to negotiate a 123 agreement with Saudi Arabia.
Why not? The semi-official reason you will hear most frequently is that Obama wants to see how the UAE agreement is implemented first.
Is that really true? If it is, then King Abdullah will have to wait quite a while for his 123 agreement with the US, since the first of four PWRs which the UAE last year ordered from South Korea won’t be coming on line until maybe 2017.
What’s more likely, however, is that the USG won’t negotiate a 123 agreement with Saudi Arabia at least until Washington fixes its problem with Jordan.
Unlike Vietnam, Jordan is in the Middle East. What’s happening there? Well, in 2008 the US wanted to negotiate an agreement with the other King Abdullah—Jordan’s—under which Amman would not enrich or reprocess. But that plan didn’t factor in the Chairman of Jordan’s Atomic Energy Commission, Khalid Toukan (right).
Now it turns out that Dr Toukan is one of several MIT-trained nuclear engineers (another is Brazil’s centrifuge-builder Othon Pinheiro da Silva) who studied hard, digested Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” message, went back home, and are now dedicated to preventing the US Department of State from interfering with their countries’ NPT Article IV rights.
Dr Toukan will tell you, and anyone else prepared to listen, that it makes perfect sense for Jordan to keep its uranium-processing options open. That, for now, is holding up the 123 agreement with the US on terms which the US will consent to.
Dr Toukan says Jordan won’t give up its right to enrich. The US says, if you don’t, we won’t cooperate with you.
So is there a way out of this dilemma? Yes there is. Stay tuned.
But let’s return to Saudi Arabia’s interest in uranium enrichment.
If Saudi Arabia (or for that matter Jordan, or Vietnam) even wanted to enrich uranium, even under the terms of a 123 agreement which some people in Congress this month got all hot and bothered about, neither the US nor other current technology holders in the NPT are going to help them learn how to do it.
Back in 2004, Bush had proposed that we all ban the export of enrichment technology to any country that hadn’t already demonstrated that capability. Bush had his heart in the right place, but the result of his enthusiasm for global technology denial was a mini-stampede by a bunch of countries which concluded that, if they didn’t get cracking on setting up projects for uranium enrichment right away, then the US, Russia, Japan, and the Urenco triumvirate (Germany, Netherlands, U.K.) would make sure that they would never succeed.
In other words, according to this view, Bush created a nonproliferation conundrum that before 2004 had never existed, especially since until then, the established enrichers in the NPT were not sharing their technology with anybody anyway.
The whole thing took on a life of its own, however, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group started drafting new rules for global enrichment and reprocessing trade. This debate heated up (or, as my Carnegie colleague James Acton might prefer, “hotted up”) after Bush in 2008 gave up on the idea of banning enrichment in newcomer countries, and the US joined in. But the issue appears to be going nowhere at the moment—see Elaine Grossman’s summary of this issue—and for a bunch of reasons I pointed out in another Carnegie piece, which I put out last week, I argued that, as nice as it would be to have a good agreement on new NSG guidelines for the export of enrichment and reprocessing items, we shouldn’t be in a hurry to come up with a document that has holes in it. With or without the new guidelines, it’s extremely likely that none of the existing technology holders in the NPT, all of which are in the NSG, will in the future agree to provide enrichment technology to Saudi Arabia outside of the “black box” paradigm we’ve seen since the early 1990s in Russian enrichment plants set up in China and in ETC-based enrichment plants under construction now in France and the US.
Given that prospect, it will be very interesting to learn what that Finnish consultant tells King Abdullah about the feasibility of Saudi Arabia enriching uranium someday.....
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/514-Donovan.pdf
http://hibbs.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/8/saudi-arabian-uranium-enrichment#commentshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symington_Amendment
....This is from an unpublished (unclassified) American government study of the subject. It states: "An actual Israeli support of the Saudi-Imamate causes probably began prior to any direct meetings between representatives of the two governments and the Yemeni Royalist movement...This study has been able to trace at least two locations of direct Saudi-Israeli meetings which began at two distinct phases in the Yemeni civil war. The first traceable set of meetings began in March of 1963 in India. Indian sources reported that an official of the Saudi Embassy in India, Ahmad Allalah Al-Qadi, began frequenting the Israeli consulate in Bombay. According to Arab (Egyptian) sources, Crown Prince Faisal ordered the Saudi official's meetings in reaction to the two Arab nationalist coups in Baghdad and Damascus in February and March 1963 that removed anti-Nasser governments from power in each state...The focus of the Israeli-Saudi talks were the prospects for Israel dropping arms for the Royalist tribal forces as well as Israel providing military intelligence regarding Egyptian army movements and capabilities to both the Saudis and Yemenis. Israeli and Yemeni representatives met directly, either upon their own initiative, or under Saudi auspices, during this period. An Imamate delegate visited Israel in March 1963 at the same time that the Saudi embassy official began visiting the Israeli consulate in Bombay...However, other Israeli sources disclosed that unmarked Israeli planes made over a dozen and perhaps as many as twenty flights from Djibouti to drop arms over Royalist areas in late 1962 and most of 1963. The second confirmed set of Saudi-Israeli meetings occurred in Europe and began in 1965. In a highly unusual manner, former Israeli ambassador to Great Britain (1965-1970) Aharon Remez, made mention of his, and other high Israeli officials, continuous contacts with "Arab leaders from Saudi Arabia and Jordan" in a 1983 newspaper interview. In neither the original Kol Ha'ir (August 12, 1983) newspaper article nor subsequent interview did the former ambassador reveal the contents of the meetings, except to say that "not much came out of these, but they were very eye opening." In all subsequent interviews Remez stated that he feared that it was still early early to talk about the meetings. However, other (military) sources, claim that AMAN, the Saudi Defense Ministry and the security branches of Iran, including SAVAK as well as the Iranian Ministry of Defense, were in constant contact with one another even following the Israeli victory in June 1967. One source asserts that Moshe Dayan was the key intermediary with the Saudi defense establishment who soon shifted their focus of concern toward other areas of the Arabian Peninsula, such as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen..." (pp. 23-25 from the unpublished, unclassified secret US government study).
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