The Case for the U.S.–Saudi Nuclear Agreement: Judge It on What's Actually In It
By Jay Tilden, Executive Director, Nuclear Energy and National Security Coalition
I spent 35 years at the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration, much of it on the nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and counterterrorism side of the house. What that career taught me is how often the initial reporting of an event, development or an agreement is incomplete and often wrong, that the difference between the rumor and the ground truth turns out to be enormous. This certainly will apply to what this nuclear cooperation agreement is rumored to contain and what it actually contains. So before this debate hardens any further, it's worth slowing down on the argument doing the most work against this agreement: the idea that anything short of the 2009 U.S.–UAE "gold standard" represents a failure or a complete abandonment of our commitment to nonproliferation.
The gold standard was never on the table with Saudi Arabia and holding this agreement to it anyway isn't a nonproliferation strategy. It's a way of guaranteeing the U.S. has no role at all.
The UAE model — a complete, binding renunciation of enrichment and reprocessing — was an act of sacrifice and statesmanship by Abu Dhabi, is a real accomplishment, and it's fair to admire them for it. But treating it as the only acceptable benchmark ignores something U.S. negotiators across three administrations have run into directly: outside of Taiwan, no government has ever accepted that condition, and it isn't a negotiating posture that's likely to change. This is partly due to the fact that there is nothing standard about the “gold standard”. Of the 26 U.S. 123 Agreements with 50 countries, plus Taiwan and the IAEA, the more apt description is the “gold exception,” with only the UAE and Taiwan signing on to those explicit binding restrictions. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia was never going to legally restrict themselves from pursuing enrichment as long as Iran continues to pursue its own enrichment capability. That's not a hypothetical concern layered on top of this agreement — it predates it, and it has been the central sticking point in every round of U.S.–Saudi nuclear talks going back to the first Trump administration and continuing through the Biden administration. None of those negotiations produced a legally binding zero-enrichment commitment, for the same reason this one likely won't: it was never a condition Saudi Arabia was going to accept, from any U.S. administration, as the price of cooperation.
That matters because it changes what the real alternative to this agreement actually is. It was never "this agreement" versus "a Saudi program built to the gold standard, ahem, exception." Saudi Arabia's civil nuclear ambitions are not contingent on U.S. participation. The Kingdom has made it clear it intends to develop a civil nuclear program with or without American involvement. So the real choice on the table is between a Saudi nuclear program with American companies, American technologies, American reporting requirements, and American and international institutional oversight embedded in it for the next 80 to 100 years — or a Saudi nuclear program possibly built by Russia or China, neither of which would ask for anything close to the safeguards, transparency, or nonproliferation obligations that come standard with U.S. cooperation. Measuring this agreement against an idealized outcome that was never actually achievable, while ignoring the far less favorable outcome that's actually available if the U.S. steps back, isn't rigor. It's a way of talking ourselves out of the better of the two realistic options.
This is the case my colleague Daniel Poneman — NENSC's co-chair, and someone who spent years overseeing agreements exactly like this one as Deputy Secretary of Energy — made in the New York Times recently: the loudest critics of this deal have the underlying calculus backwards. Engagement, not absence, is what actually advances American nonproliferation goals. The Center for the National Interest has made a related point: stepping back from this agreement doesn't make Saudi Arabia's nuclear ambitions disappear — it just cedes the ground to competitors with far less interest in nonproliferation, while costing the United States commercial and strategic leverage in the process.
None of this is an argument for waving the agreement through without scrutiny — quite the opposite. It's an argument for giving Congress' review process the room to do exactly what it's designed to do. Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act provides a 90-day window precisely so that elected officials can evaluate a nuclear cooperation agreement on its actual terms, not on early reporting or informed guesswork. Reporting so far suggests the safeguards in this agreement meet or exceed those found in a standard Section 123 agreement. If that holds up once the text is available, it deserves to be evaluated on that basis. If specific provisions raise legitimate concerns once they're visible, that's precisely the kind of question the review period exists to surface and address.
We support that process fully, and we'd encourage anyone forming a view right now to hold it loosely until the actual text, and any supplemental arrangements, are in hand. When it is, NENSC stands ready to help members of Congress, their staff, and the press work through this agreement on the merits, on what it actually says. That's the debate worth having.
Jay Tilden is Executive Director of the Nuclear Energy and National Security Coalition (NENSC), an independent, bipartisan organization of national security experts focused on U.S. nuclear energy policy.