Trump’s Saudi nuclear deal is dangerous. Just ask Marco Rubio.

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The authors are co-chairs of the bicameral Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group.

There was a time when Marco Rubio understood that handing Saudi Arabia the technology to produce nuclear weapons was a terrible idea.

As a U.S. senator during President Donald Trump’s first term — serving alongside two of us — Rubio declared that America should “suspend all talks” with Saudi Arabia on a nuclear agreement until the kingdom accepted what nuclear nonproliferation experts consider “gold standard” provisions: a commitment to forgo producing weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, backed by the toughest international inspections.

Trump is giving Saudi Arabia what it wants while demanding almost nothing in return.

He was right. In fact, in 2019 then-Sen. Rubio and Sen. Ed Markey introduced bipartisan legislation requiring those protections. In the years since, Markey and Sen. Jeff Merkley reintroduced that legislation in the Senate, and all four of us have worked to advance those principles.

Meanwhile, Rubio became secretary of state — and he apparently abandoned those principles, helping Trump pursue one of the most reckless nuclear deals in U.S. history.

This deal is the starting gun for a Middle East nuclear arms race. Congress must reject it.

The deal reportedly allows Saudi Arabia to produce weapons-grade uranium and plutonium — the essential ingredients for nuclear weapons. Yet it does not require the agreement to include the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol, the strongest international inspection standard.

If the president were serious about preventing Saudi Arabia from acquiring nuclear weapons, he would insist on the gold standard. If Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman truly had no interest in a bomb, he would gladly accept it.

Neither is happening.

Instead, Trump is giving Saudi Arabia what it wants while demanding almost nothing in return. Although the president has now conditioned the deal on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, that new linkage reportedly appears nowhere in the text of the agreement. And it does nothing to address the agreement’s glaring omission of gold standard restrictions.

The consequences of this nonproliferation failure will not stop with Saudi Arabia.

We know exactly why Salman wants these capabilities, and it’s not so that the oil-rich kingdom can develop civilian nuclear power. He said it aloud in 2018: “If Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

So why won’t Trump and Rubio, at a minimum, demand the strongest safeguards?

Maybe we should ask Jared Kushner, who accepted a $2 billion investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund after leaving the White House at the end of the first Trump administration. Maybe we should ask Westinghouse Electric, which stands to make tens of billions of dollars if this agreement moves forward. As The New York Times reported this week, Westinghouse’s majority owner “is a frequent business partner with Newmark, the real-estate firm run and owned in part by the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.”

“There is no evidence at this point that Mr. Trump’s friends or family helped orchestrate the Saudi nuclear deal,” the Times noted. But the pattern is painfully familiar: Another Trump initiative hurts America’s national security while benefiting the financial interests of his family and political allies.

That is corruption dressed up as diplomacy.

The consequences of this nonproliferation failure will not stop with Saudi Arabia. If Riyadh gains the capability to produce bomb fuel, why would, say, Egypt stand aside? Why would Turkey, or any other country in the region? The result will be an intensifying nuclear competition in a region currently on the verge of a wider war.

Trump launched that unwinnable war against Iran claiming it was necessary to stop Tehran from enriching uranium. Yet his administration is now preparing to give Saudi Arabia access to the very technologies it says Iran must never possess. That contradiction doesn’t make America stronger. It makes American policy impossible to take seriously and undermines any chance of reaching a durable agreement with Iran. If Saudi Arabia can enrich uranium without the strongest inspections, Tehran will demand the same treatment. Trump is weakening his own negotiating position while increasing the odds of regional nuclear proliferation.

History has shown us that nuclear arms races do not make nations safer. They make accidents more likely, miscalculation more deadly and wars more catastrophic.

None of this was inevitable. The 2015 Iran nuclear agreement placed meaningful, verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. International inspectors confirmed that it was working. Trump abandoned it anyway — not because it had failed, but because it was President Barack Obama’s achievement. The predictable result was an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program and a far more dangerous Middle East.

Now the president risks making an already dangerous situation catastrophic. He is creating the conditions for more nuclear weapons, more instability and more danger.

For decades, leaders of both parties understood that the fewer countries with the ability to build nuclear weapons, the safer the United States and the world would be. Trump is abandoning that principle.

History has shown us that nuclear arms races do not make nations safer. They make accidents more likely, miscalculation more deadly and wars more catastrophic. Trump claims to oppose nuclear proliferation. The Saudi nuclear deal tells a very different story. Neither America nor the world can afford his recklessness. Congress must stop this dangerous agreement before it triggers a new nuclear arms race in the Middle East.