Editor’s Note: Ludovica Castelli is Project Manager of the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium at the Istituto Affari Internazionali, where she also serves as Interim Managing Editor of The International Spectator. She holds a PhD from the University of Leicester, where she was part of the ERC-funded “Third Nuclear Age” project.

Nour Eid is a researcher at the Energy for Growth Hub and a consultant in Forensics and Integrity. She graduated with a master’s degree in International Security from Sciences Po Paris and wrote her thesis on the Saudi Nuclear Program. Prior to that, she worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency, within the department of Nuclear Energy. She also holds a bachelor’s degree from the American University of Beirut in Political Science and International Law.

By Middle East Program Team

On July 22, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement – a 123 agreement, after Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act – and a second instrument that the Energy Department described as a bilateral safeguards agreement.

Washington called the package the legal foundation of a “decades-long, multi-billion-dollar partnership.” A day later, however, President Donald Trump appeared to renegotiate it in public. In a Truth Social post, he wrote that there would be no enrichment of material, that the deal pertained only to non-military use, and that it was contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords and establishing formal diplomatic relations with Israel – a condition absent when the agreement was announced and one Riyadh has consistently said it cannot meet without a credible path to Palestinian statehood.

What effect a presidential social media post has on a signed bilateral instrument is unclear. The full text has not yet been made public, meaning that important questions regarding safeguards, implementation, and oversight remain unanswered.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the agreement would establish a thirty-year framework for civilian nuclear cooperation and would give U.S. companies a central role in building Saudi Arabia’s nuclear infrastructure. Rather than resolving the enrichment question, it defers it, by envisaging a two-year joint study examining whether enriching uranium inside Saudi Arabia would be commercially justified. If the study concludes that domestic enrichment is warranted, U.S. companies would construct an enrichment facility under a so-called “black box” arrangement, whereby Saudi Arabia would operate the facility without receiving access to the underlying sensitive technology.

Administration officials have argued that such an arrangement would allow the U.S. to retain influence over Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program while reducing proliferation risks. According to the reported terms, if Washington concludes that enrichment should not proceed, Saudi Arabia would not be permitted to pursue enrichment independently or with another foreign supplier for ten years.

The concept of a “black box” arrangement is not new, nor is its historical record straightforward. One precedent is the Eurodif consortium established in the 1970s. Before the Iranian revolution, the Shah invested in the French project to obtain enriched uranium without acquiring the technology. After the Shah was ousted, no fuel was delivered, and the dispute took more than a decade to resolve through financial compensation. The episode illustrates that while commercial ownership and technological control can be separated, political change may fundamentally alter the assumptions on which such arrangements are based.

The effectiveness of “black box” systems has also depended on institutional circumstances. URENCO’s multinational enrichment enterprise has long operated under a framework that protects sensitive technology while allowing joint commercial operation. At the same time, technological barriers are not always impermeable. Abdul Qadeer Khan obtained centrifuge designs while working with URENCO during the 1970s, designs that later contributed to Pakistan’s enrichment program and subsequently proliferated to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. These examples do not necessarily invalidate the concept of a “black box” arrangement, but suggest that effectiveness depends on robust governance, long-term institutional trust and sustained oversight.

Because the Saudi agreement has not yet been published, it is unclear how these provisions would be implemented or interact with existing international safeguards. The agreement is expected to be submitted to the U.S. Congress under the Atomic Energy Act’s Section 123 procedures, triggering a review period of 90 days of continuous session. Unless Congress adopts a joint resolution of disapproval by a two-thirds veto-proof majority, the agreement would enter into force.

Congress has repeatedly expressed a preference for stricter non-proliferation conditions in relation to Saudi Arabia. Since Fiscal Year 2020, successive appropriations legislation has conditioned Export-Import Bank support for nuclear exports on Riyadh concluding a Section 123 agreement that renounces enrichment and reprocessing while also implementing the Additional Protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Public reporting suggests that the new agreement may not fully reflect those preferences.

The agreement also invites comparison with broader U.S. non-proliferation policy, particularly regarding Iran. Most notably, the agreement was signed while the United States was conducting a military campaign against Iran aimed in part at denying Tehran domestic enrichment.

The war follows two decades of U.S. policy arguing that Iran should not retain unrestricted enrichment capabilities, given that the same technologies used to produce reactor fuel can also be used to produce weapons-grade uranium. During the negotiations that led to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Trump quit unilaterally in 2018, Iran accepted extensive monitoring measures, including provisional implementation of the Additional Protocol and other unprecedentedly intrusive verification arrangements. The agreement also imposed significant limits on enrichment, although many of its provisions were time limited. Critics of the JCPOA frequently argued that these restrictions delayed rather than permanently resolved proliferation concerns.

Saudi Arabia has followed a different path. Riyadh has consistently resisted adopting the so-called “gold standard,” under which the United Arab Emirates renounced enrichment and reprocessing in 2009. Saudi Arabia rescinded its Small Quantities Protocol in 2024 and now implements a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA) with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) but has not brought the Additional Protocol into force, and the new agreement does not require it. Instead, Washington and Riyadh have reportedly negotiated a “bilateral safeguards agreement” that would apply only to facilities involved in sensitive nuclear cooperation. Although such a bespoke arrangement would still require approval by the IAEA Board of Governors and preserve some degree of Agency oversight, it risks undermining decades of efforts to promote the Additional Protocol as the global standard for strengthening safeguards and increasing confidence in peaceful nuclear activities.

The reported terms of the new agreement therefore raise questions about consistency. If Saudi Arabia is ultimately permitted to develop enrichment infrastructure under U.S. supervision, observers are likely to compare this approach with U.S. positions on enrichment elsewhere in the region. At the same time, the circumstances surrounding Iran’s program and US-Saudi relations differ in important respects. U.S. nuclear cooperation has never been determined solely by non-proliferation principles; strategic relationships, regional security considerations, and commercial interests have long influenced nuclear policy.

Saudi Arabia’s own rationale for pursuing civilian nuclear power has remained broadly consistent. Under Vision 2030, the Kingdom seeks to diversify its economy beyond oil dependence while meeting growing domestic electricity demand. Nuclear energy would allow a greater proportion of Saudi oil to be exported and provide a stable source of electricity alongside renewable energy. Saudi Arabia has also expressed interest in developing domestic uranium resources as part of a broader industrial strategy.

These objectives do not, however, necessarily require domestic enrichment. Civilian nuclear power programs routinely rely on imported nuclear fuel, and the UAE has demonstrated that such a model can support a large-scale reactor program. Moreover, there are currently no commercial fuel fabrication facilities in the Middle East. Even if uranium were enriched in Saudi Arabia, it would still need to be transported abroad to be manufactured into reactor fuel assemblies. From a purely technical perspective, therefore, domestic enrichment offers limited immediate advantages for a country at the beginning of its civilian nuclear work.

Control over the nuclear fuel cycle has long been associated with technological autonomy and national industrial capability. Possessing enrichment infrastructure also provides states with greater flexibility over future fuel supply. For that reason, debates surrounding enrichment have rarely been limited to economics.

The agreement should also be viewed within the wider context of the international nuclear industry. Following India’s 1974 nuclear test, concerns about proliferation led to the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and, in the United States, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978. The latter established the Section 123 framework, including Congressional review procedures. The legal mechanism now being used to approve cooperation with Saudi Arabia is therefore itself a product of an earlier effort to strengthen controls on the international transfer of nuclear technology.

Today’s policy environment presents a different challenge. One of the Trump administration’s stated objectives has been to revitalize the U.S. nuclear industry after a prolonged period during which Russian and Chinese companies have secured many of the world’s major reactor contracts. Saudi Arabia represents one of the few countries able to finance a large civilian nuclear program to support this objective. From Washington’s perspective, the agreement therefore serves commercial as well as strategic purposes by reinforcing bilateral ties while limiting opportunities for rival suppliers.

Commercial considerations and non-proliferation objectives, however, do not always point in the same direction. Since the 1970s, debates over civilian nuclear cooperation have repeatedly reflected the tension between expanding nuclear markets and limiting the spread of sensitive technologies.

Beyond proliferation, another issue that has received comparatively little attention is the physical security of nuclear infrastructure in an increasingly unstable regional environment. Recent conflicts have demonstrated that nuclear facilities are no longer insulated from military operations. Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has remained under Russian military occupation since 2022 and has experienced repeated losses of external power. More recently, Iranian nuclear facilities have been targeted along with the Barakah nuclear power plant in the UAE.

Expanding civilian nuclear infrastructure in the Gulf therefore raises questions that extend beyond safeguards and fuel-cycle technologies. It also requires consideration of how such facilities would be protected during periods of crisis, how nuclear material would be secured, and what mechanisms would govern emergency responses should regional tensions escalate.

One possible area for future consideration would be regional arrangements for protection of civilian nuclear facilities. Although the political circumstances differ considerably, the 1988 India-Pakistan Agreement on the Prohibition of Attack against Nuclear Installations and Facilities demonstrates that even states with longstanding security disputes can establish limited confidence-building measures in this area. Since the agreement entered into force in 1991, both countries have exchanged annual lists of their nuclear facilities despite repeated military crises.

Whether similar arrangements could emerge in the Gulf remains uncertain. Nevertheless, as civilian nuclear programs expand across the region, questions concerning the protection of nuclear infrastructure are likely to become increasingly important. The proposed US-Saudi agreement should therefore be understood not simply as a bilateral commercial arrangement, but as part of a broader evolution in regional nuclear governance.

The principal challenge is not whether Saudi Arabia should have access to civilian nuclear technology. Rather, it is whether the political, legal, and security arrangements governing that technology evolve alongside it. As nuclear infrastructure expands across the Gulf, questions of oversight, safeguards, and physical protection may prove just as significant as the technologies themselves.

Image: HRH Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman Al-Saud, Minister of Energy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, delivers his statement during the general debate at the regular session of the IAEA 66th General Conference. By Dean Calma / IAEA.