Off to the nuclear arms race

The Middle East is off to a nuclear arms race. This week’s 30-year US-Saudi nuclear agreement that offers the kingdom a pathway to enriching uranium threatens to put the region’s foot on the gas pedal. Further fuelling the fire is the fact that the agreement is likely to harden Iranian insistence on its right to enrich uranium in negotiations with the United States. Moreover, the agreement could revive Turkish ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons and prompt Israel to formally acknowledge that it is, so far, the Middle East’s only nuclear power, an harden its rejection of calls for a nuclear-free Middle East. If anything, the agreement, coupled with the prospect of the United States selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, adds to differences between the United States and Israel over Iran and Israeli occupation of south Lebanon and parts of southern Syria. Finally, the US-Saudi agreement creates a dangerous precedent in which the United States replaces the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as the ultimate arbiter of whether a country, in this case Saudi Arabia, is refraining from enriching nuclear fuel to weapons-grade level.