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8 May 2024

Will Saudi Arabia Get the Bomb?

Daniel Byman, Doreen Horschig, and Elizabeth Kos

Last year, less than a month before Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel changed everything, Israel and Saudi Arabia were negotiating an agreement to normalize ties. After decades of icy relations, Riyadh’s price for peace was admittedly high: in addition to U.S. security guarantees and at least token Israeli concessions on Palestinian sovereignty, Saudi negotiators were demanding access to civilian nuclear technology. Today, despite a fresh push by the Biden administration, such an agreement remains only a remote possibility. With the Israel-Hamas war raging on, even if Saudi officials were interested in talking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they would likely find it impossible to negotiate a lasting peace while Arab publics, including their own, are outraged at the humanitarian crisis Israel’s military campaign has created in Gaza. Although negotiations may never resume, they remain an important source of potential leverage in the U.S.-Israeli relationship—one that officials in Washington believe could not only help facilitate a cease-fire in Gaza but also induce broader Israeli concessions on Palestinian statehood.

As the United States thinks through how to promote stability in the Middle East, both during and after the war in Gaza, the issue of the Saudi nuclear program will loom large. If Washington hopes to dangle the carrot of Saudi normalization to motivate Israeli policy, it will need to consider Riyadh’s demands for civilian nuclear cooperation and defense requests—a development that could dramatically alter the regional security picture, particularly if Saudi Arabia could eventually want a weapons program, too. For now, the proposed Saudi nuclear program would involve civilian nuclear reactors managed under a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But Riyadh has historically voiced unease with even those standard limitations, and peaceful nuclear programs are often the first step toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Although Saudi Arabia does not yet have substantial nuclear infrastructure of its own, it is constructing a small nuclear research reactor on the outskirts of Riyadh and building ballistic missiles with China’s help.

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