Saudi Arabia is an Islamic theocracy, even if clerics do not run the place directly.
16 of the 19 mass-murdering hijackers on September 11, 2001 were Saudis.
Saudi Arabia began exporting Islamic ideology to the West some time in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Funding religious schools, teaching the Arabic language of the Koran, building mosques, dispatching fundamentalist preaching imams...
All the Islamic terror movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries were largely funded and encouraged - even if indirectly - by Saudi Arabia and the smaller Emirates like Kuwait and the Emirates.
If this has changed somewhat, it is to the credit of a modernizing ruler, Mohamed Bin Salman (MBS), who has ambitions to liberalize the country.
But how far can he go without alienating the deeply rooted religious ethos of the country, its powerful clergy and the religious establishment?
Brief episodes of "modernization" in very conservative countries have been known to happen. But they've generally failed at recruiting its people and its elite into the movement. For instance, Turkiye's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk forced his country to convert from an Arab-Eastern to a European-Western character some 100 years ago (banned the hijab, changed the Arabic script of the Turkish language into a Latin-alphabet-based script, etc.) and the country made headway into liberalism for a while, but has since regressed back into Islamism.
For all practical purposes, Saudi Arabia may be in the midst of such an attempt by MBS, but will it succeed? What chances are there for a falling out between the ruler and his conservative people? How long can he keep convincing them that liberating women will not lead to what they deem a copy of a "decadent" West?
True that Saudis have been made very fond of all (bad) things American: Driving gas guzzlers, eating fast food, succumbing to the violence served to them through American "culture" (Hollywood movies etc.).
And now, with the US having brandished an equally Islamist Iran as a scarecrow to compel the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs to keep tugging at Mother America's dress for protection, the Americans are proposing to sell Saudi Arabia nuclear power, supposedly for civilian purposes. We've heard that song before in countries with radically anti-Western cultures: Nuclear power begins civilian but eventually grows into military.
What if some day in the not-so-distant future, the regime in Saudi Arabia changes hands from a liberalizing MBS to someone more conservative and nostalgic of Islamist ideology? Could the world be pondering decades from now why did the US export its nuclear knowledge to the Saudis? Could the Saudi Arabia of today become the Iran of tomorrow?
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Does Saudi Arabia want to develop nuclear weapons? Here’s what history can tell us
Ibrahim Al-Marashi, IE University; California State University San Marcos
Sat, August 1, 2026
The US-Saudi nuclear deal was announced in the midst of what has, as of 2026, become America's Third Gulf War. The news broke just as Saudi Arabia and the US launched air raids against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, in retaliation for alleged drone attacks directed Saudi Arabia's oil facilities.
The future details of a deal – which would allow for exports of US civilian nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia – remain uncertain. However, past events raise the question of whether Riyadh would ever use such a program to eventually develop nuclear weapons.
A range of historical factors have discouraged nuclear proliferation in Saudi Arabia, but this has changed over the last decade with the rise of two leaders: Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, who came to the throne in 2015, and US President Donald Trump – both in his first term from 2016 to 2020, and during his second term and ongoing war against Iran.
In 2010, I wrote a chapter entitled "Saudi Petro-Nukes? Riyadh's Nuclear Intentions and Regime Survival Strategies". In it, I argued that, historically, Saudi Arabia had signalled no interest in a civilian nuclear program, let alone the possibility of developing a nuclear weapons program. This was because of two major factors: US pressure, and Saudi Arabia's position in the world economy.
US pressure
In 2003, on the eve of America's war to eliminate Iraq's alleged nuclear program, news emerged of Iran's clandestine nuclear facilities. Policymakers presumed that the Islamic Republic's program would spark a regional nuclear arms race, and that Saudi Arabia, its regional rival, would develop its own nuclear arsenal to deter Iran.
Saudi Arabia has long had the financial means to invest in a nuclear program, whether civilian or military. However, it lacked the domestic physical resources and scientific infrastructure to develop such weapons. It is also a signatory to the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
However, Saudi Arabia only signed the NPT after purchasing almost 50 CSS-2 missiles from China in 1988, when its previous request for a ballistic missile purchase from the United States had been rejected. Washington's ire over the Chinese missiles led to US pressure for Riyadh to sign and ratify the NPT, and to never seek nuclear warheads for the missiles.
This precedent has informed Saudi decision-making since then, with the assumption that the same American stance would dissuade Riyadh from pursuing nuclear weapons in the future.
In any case, since the second world war, implicit American security guarantees to Riyadh offered a far safer and more robust deterrent to external aggression than a nuclear arsenal ever could. However, wavering US support for its allies in Europe mean those guarantees may not be as iron-clad as they once were.
The economic factor
Saudi Arabia is a rentier petrostate dependent on oil revenues from a global market, and it is the world's swing producer of oil as part of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). This means it has economic relations with nearly every major world power, including the US, the EU, China, and Russia.
A Saudi nuclear program would have brought a volatile element into the equation that make it unattractive to the foreign investors that drove its growth.
This is in contrast to Iran, a country that, while also a petrostate, is more self-sufficient than Saudi Arabia. Iran has endured US sanctions since the 1979 Revolution, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) has even found ways to benefit under sanctions. As of 2026, the IRGC are now the de facto ruling elite, and dominate Iran's economy. Saudi Arabia's ruling elite, by contrast, has always had a vested interest in stable, dependable international trade.
In the past, a Saudi nuclear program would only have threatened the Kingdom's scrupulously internationalised economy, and its reputation for stability and pragmatism.
Muhammad bin Salman's nuclear ambitions
While Saudi Arabia has historically had little need to pursue nuclear weapons, events over the last ten years suggest that this position could change.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal signalled a US desire to coexist with Iran under the Obama administration. It was also the product of Saudi King Abdallah's pragmatic regional policy. When Abdallah died in 2015, he was succeeded by Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman – a very different leader who did not share his predecessor's practical outlook.
The Crown Prince almost immediately intervened in Yemen's civil war in 2015.
He also intensified the regional cold war with Iran. In March 2018, he publicly declared that Saudi Arabia would develop a nuclear bomb if Iran did. In November 2018, he announced a project to build the kingdom's first nuclear research reactor.
In January 2019, revelations of a missile-making facility in Saudi Arabia served as evidence of a critical first step that Saudi Arabia was seeking nuclear weapons. While not relating to nuclear weapons themselves, the missiles would give Riyadh the capability to manufacture a long-range delivery system for nuclear warheads.
In February 2019, the US Congress's House Oversight and Reform Committee released a report alleging that members of the Trump administration sought to expedite the transfer of American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, a possible law violation.
The report has since been taken down, but the officials involved included General Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump's national security adviser before being fired in February 2017, and Thomas Barrack, the chairman of Trump's inauguration committee, who is now Trump's envoy to Syria and Iraq.
Finally, in September 2019, two Saudi Aramco oil facilities, Abqaiq and Khurais, were attacked by a salvo of drones and cruise missiles, allegedly at the behest of Iran via militias in Iraq or Yemen. The Trump administration did nothing to prevent this attack, nor did it aid in any further punitive actions, leading Riyadh to question American security guarantees. The US withdrawing military support from its European partners will only deepen Saudi doubts.
All of this means that, in the aftermath of the 2026 war, Saudi Arabia will have a renewed interest in developing civilian – but not military – nuclear infrastructure as a latent deterrent against Iran.
Nevertheless, recent event show that such a program would not deter attacks by non-state actors – such as the Iraqi militias or Yemeni Houthis – that can attack the Kingdom. While these groups form part of Iran's Axis of Resistance, they allow the Islamic Republic to claim a vitally important degree of plausible deniability.
