On 22 July 2026, the US Department of Energy announced that Washington and Riyadh had signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement. It took the Middle East largely by surprise because it appeared to allow uranium enrichment, whilst dispensing with the international atomic watchdog’s snap inspection permissions.
Signed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi counterpart Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the US government called it the legal foundation for “a decades-long partnership worth billions of dollars,” advancing both economic and strategic goals, “including nuclear non-proliferation”.
The clause that alarmed Israel sits deeper in the text. Unlike America’s 2009 nuclear deal with the United Arab Emirates, which required Abu Dhabi to forgo both enrichment and reprocessing, this agreement omits the IAEA’s Additional Protocol permitting snap inspections, while opening a pathway for uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing on Saudi soil.
This is the nub of it: Saudi Arabia wants domestic enrichment. Saudi officials have long argued that if it is denied enrichment rights, it will turn to China or Russia instead, which apply looser non-proliferation standards. If it were simply about having nuclear energy, such a deal would have been signed decades ago, the US having been willing to offer nuclear cooperation under a ‘gold standard’ (a set of rules aimed at avoiding nuclear proliferation, which explicitly bans enrichment abroad).
What Washington and Riyadh negotiated is an agreement that does not quite meet this standard, although it does include undisclosed guarantees. According to reports, under the arrangement, any enrichment facility would nominally be built and operated by American companies in a ‘black box’ configuration under tight controls. If Washington declines to proceed, Riyadh is barred from pursuing enrichment independently, or with another partner, for ten years.
Saudi Arabia’s nuclear programme will be among the topics that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to cover in his upcoming visit to Washington. Although quiet about the deal in public, he is likely to want further details as to what has been agreed. He may even seek to discreetly influence it retroactively.
A bright red line
While Netanyahu kept his counsel, most Israelis did not. Officials reacted with what an N12 diplomatic correspondent described as a “great concern” over the intention to permit uranium enrichment on Saudi territory, a move seen as crossing a red line. Israel, which is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, worries about the possibility of an uncontrolled nuclear arms race in the region.
Although it does not view Saudi Arabia in the same way that it does Iran, Israel’s security establishment knows that there are many aspiring nuclear powers in the region, including Türkiye and Egypt, and that in the Middle East, yesterday’s friends can easily become today’s enemies. Enrichment capability, once established anywhere in the region, is treated as a strategically irreversible precedent.
A senior Israeli official familiar with the negotiations told Israel’s Channel 12 that enrichment on Saudi soil would be a danger to Israel’s security, adding: “The silence of Israel’s leadership is embarrassing, regardless of the normalisation question.” The remark referenced a longstanding Israeli aim of normalising relations with Riyadh. The same official called a civilian enrichment facility “a school for developing nuclear weapons,” describing it as “a bright red line”.
