Saudi Arabia ready to sign key nuclear safeguards pacts

Saudi Arabia said Wednesday that it was ready to sign key nuclear safeguards agreements, including a protocol which the UN nuclear watchdog is considering eliminating as it could help a country avoid inspections. Saudi Arabia sent a letter to the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "on March 9, 2005 attached to an authorisation from the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to sign the comprehensive safeguards agreements and the small quantities protocol," Saudi disarmament official Naif Bin Bandar Al-Sudairy said in a speech to a UN conference on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The safeguards agreement authorises the Vienna-based IAEA to inspect a country's nuclear facilities, under the NPT, which joins five nuclear-weapons states with 183 non-nuclear-weapons states.
Saudi Arabia is among the 27 NPT non-nuclear-weapons states which as of January had failed to sign comprehensive safeguards agreements.
IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the agency welcomed all countries agreeing to comprehensive safeguards.
But the small quantities protocol (SQP) that was designed to make things easier for the inspection process has proved to be a mistake as it leaves the IAEA with "only very limited means to evaluate any potential nuclear activities," according to a confidential IAEA report obtained by AFP.
A diplomat close to the IAEA said the SQP, offered since 1971, was out-of-date in an era marked by secret nuclear programs discovered in Iran, Libya and North Korea and where the bar is higher for suspicions of possible atomic activities.
Saudi Arabia, for instance, is not believed to be a direct non-proliferation threat but there have been reports that in a crisis it could use its financial clout to get nuclear technology, or even weapons, from abroad, or from countries it backs such as Pakistan which does have nuclear arms.
Saudi Arabia has said these reports are false.
The confidential report said the IAEA would be asked to consider at a meeting in June not allowing "the conclusion of any further SQP's."
The SQP allows NPT signatory states to be exempted from requirements to notify the IAEA of design information for certain facilities and of stocks of natural uranium up to 10 tons. This "small" amount is still enough to make enough enriched uranium to produce at least one atom bomb.