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Prince Turki al-Faisal said nuclear deals with the US should allow Saudi Arabia the same autonomy as
World leaders have allowed Iran to develop a civilian nuclear program, and there is no good reason Saudi Arabia should not be able to do this too, a senior royal has said.
The country will enter talks with the United States for a nuclear cooperation pact in a matter of weeks.
US companies can usually only send nuclear technology to another country if there is an agreement with that state to rule out domestic uranium enrichment and the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.
The agreements are put into place to ensure the second country is not developing nuclear technology for use in warfare.
However Iran is still allowed to enrich domestic uranium, despite fears it could be used for military purposes, and even though economic sanctions were lifted on Iran in its 2015 nuclear deal.
And former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, said the ban should not be the case for his country either as it would put a halt to plans for the country to become self-sufficient in energy production.
Its plans to become self-sufficient include plans to build 17.6 GW of nuclear capacity by 2032 – the equivalent of about 16 reactors.
Prince Turki who no longer holds office in Saudi Arabia but remains politically influential, said: “It’s a sovereign issue. If you look at the agreement between the P5 + 1 with Iran, specifically it allows Iran to enrich.
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Prince Turki said the issue concerned Saudi Arabia’s ‘sovereignty’
“The world community that supports the nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran, told Iran ‘you can enrich’ – although the global non-proliferation treaty tells us all we can enrich.
“So the kingdom from that point of view will have the same right as the other members of the NPT, including Iran.”
The “P5 + 1” refers to the six nations that signed the deal with Iran: the US, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain.
However the presence of nuclear reactors in the region could make the Middle East more volatile.
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Iran-backed rebels in Yemen shot a missile at a Saudi palace earlier this week
Houthi rebels in Yemen claim to have recently shot a missile at a nuclear reactor in the United Arab Emirates, although it did not hit.
And the Yemeni rebels are also at war with Saudi Arabia, as Yemen’s civil war has increasingly become a proxy war between the Saudis and Iran.
Nuclear power plants could become a dangerous target for the Iran-backed rebels’ missile attacks.
Meanwhile a leading Middle East analyst has warned the region is set to become even more “unpredictable”.
The ongoing conflict, widely seen as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, could become even more volatile in the wake of a missile fired at Riyadh earlier this week.
The attempted attack, which was intercepted mid-air over the south of the Saudi capital, targeted Saudi leaders in a royal palace.
Previous attacks have led the Saudis to accuse Iran of acts of war, as Tehran has backed the Houthi rebels and is accused of supplying their missiles.
Marcus Chevenix, Middle East analyst at TS Lombard, said the Saudis’ conflict with Iran had become “unpredictable” as the conflict continued.
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Yemenis inspect the damage after a missile attack on rebel-held territory
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Yemenis inspect the damage after a missile attack on rebel-held territory
He told CNBC: “I really struggle to predict what’s going to happen next.
“This is the first time for a very long time that there hasn’t been an external arbiter in the Middle East who basically defines everyone’s diplomatic relationships.
“For a long time it was America and Russia, then it was just America and now there’s no one.
“So there’s a power vacuum and that power vacuum is pretty recent. The Iranians saw it first and Saudi Arabia has only really been engaging in this kind of rivalry for the last five years.”