Riyadh Redux. Six months ago I aired here some initial thinking aloud which was ongoing inside the US Executive Branch about whether to go forward with a bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement (a so-called 123 agreement) with Saudi Arabia.
Since then, there has been some further internal discussion of this issue. In the above post, I wrote that Saudi officials had made known to US counterparts they were not inclined to follow the UAE, which in 2009 negotiated a 123 agreement committing the UAE to forego uranium enrichment and reprocessing (E&R) of power reactor spent fuel. We weren’t exactly supposed to know that half a year ago, but it hasn’t been denied since, and I have even more reason to believe now that this was the case. At the political level, however, things have taken a whole different course, and the US nonproliferation-minded in droves have asserted that the terms for E&R expressed in the US-UAE agreement should be the yardstick for all future bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements. U.S.-Saudi Arms Deal Adds Helicopters, Swells to $60 Billion. US-Saudi Arms Deal Defended by Gates, Clinton.