28 MARCH-APRIL 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The 123 Agreements Known as “123 Agreements,” these pacts are negotiated by the State Department, with concurrence from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and submitted to Congress for review, after which they come into force if Congress doesn’t act to disapprove them. We presently have 26 of these agreements in place with 50 countries. Insisting on high nonproliferation standards is most critical, of course, when dealing with countries that don’t already have nuclear weapons, and U.S. administrations have historically tried to negotiate protections that are as stringent as possible. Exactly what standards are possible to agree on beyond the statutory minimum set by the Atomic Energy Act will naturally vary with the circumstances. The provisions set forth in the 123 Agreement reached with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2009, for instance, included the UAE’s acceptance of state-of-the-art IAEA inspection authorities under the IAEA Additional Protocol as well as its promise not to develop uranium enrichment or plutonium processing technology. Such terms have become known as the “Gold Standard” for 123 Agreements, because under them, the partner country doesn’t just accept the most effective sort of IAEA inspections to help prevent illicit nuclear weapons work but also flatly forswears developing or acquiring fissile material production capabilities that could in the future be diverted to the production of material for such weapons. But it’s not always possible to secure such promises. When I ran the State Department bureau that negotiates these agreements, the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, we tried repeatedly to get “Gold Standard” provisions into a U.S.-Saudi 123 Agreement, but the Saudis refused to accept the Additional Protocol and to forswear producing their own fissile material. Press coverage of the recent U.S.-Saudi deal, the Joint Declaration on the Completion of Negotiations on Civil Nuclear Cooperation, nowhere mentions either of these issues, so one can probably assume that the second Trump administration decided not to insist on such provisions. Indeed, the focus of the recent deal, establishing what the White House describes as a “decades-long, multibillion-dollar nuclear energy partnership with the Kingdom,” suggests that, if anything, the new agreement may encourage Saudi development of fissile material production. In its analysis of the new agreement, for example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes that Saudi Arabia’s “uranium reserves uniquely position the kingdom to develop the nuclear fuel cycle, supporting its domestic energy strategy while opening the door to potential exports to the United States” to reduce our worrying dependence on Russia for nuclear fuel. Managing Trade-Offs Managing the trade-offs inherent in negotiating such agreements is always challenging. While it’s obviously better from a nonproliferation perspective to get “Gold Standard” provisions, America’s competitors in the market for civil-nuclear technology are less scrupulous about making such demands, which undercuts U.S. negotiating leverage. Nevertheless, even the baseline nonproliferation protections of the statutory minimum standards for 123 Agreements are still better than having no standards (and no 123 Agreement) in place at all—and it’s also the case that nonproliferation is not the only value that U.S. negotiators may legitimately pursue. In addition to the incentives to promote commerce that represent the “usual” values that must be balanced in such negotiations vis-à-vis nonproliferation, for instance, the recently announced U.S.-Saudi deal focuses on improving American energy and supply chain security. Those are hardly trivial concerns either, underlining the importance of 123 Agreements as instruments of statecraft and loci for complex arbitrage between competing policy objectives that are all important. Nor does the diplomatic challenge lie only in negotiating with non-nuclear-weapon states. We also have 123 Agreements with some nuclear weapon possessors, the details of which are very important. While preventing new nuclear weapons development clearly isn’t an issue with such partners, it still matters what they do with the civil-nuclear technology the United States provides them. And, as I discovered when last in office at the State Department, it is sometimes necessary to change course in our technology diplomacy as problems arise. The Obama administration reached a new agreement with China in 2015, for example, that became a problem because it turned out that China was illicitly repurposing Western nuclear software design codes to support the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) naval nuclear propulsion program. (U.S. nuclear reactor technology should absolutely not be used to help the PLA build ballistic missile submarines and aircraft carriers!) Even before the Obama administration decided to share more civil-nuclear technology with China, in fact, hackers from the PLA had stolen technical and design information on U.S. nuclear reactor designs from the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and were thereafter indicted by the Obama administration in 2014. For some reason, this was not considered an obstacle to the new 123 Agreement negotiated in 2015.
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