Saudi nuclear deal with US expected

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1:34Hello to you, I'm Sean Lay, talking to you from our studios in London, and this is NewsHour from the BBC World Service. We begin in the Middle East, and on Wednesday, Saudi Arabia and the United States are signing a deal which will allow the Saudis to develop a civilian nuclear programme. The Wall Street Journal has reported that US companies would construct a uranium enrichment facility for the government in Riyadh. Even as Washington threatens that its wave of attacks against Iran could be extended towards the nuclear sites America tried to destroy last year, it appears willing to see the emergence of another nuclear power in the Middle East.

2:12It raises the question why Saudi Arabia, the world's number one exporter of oil, which still has plenty of fossil fuel to exploit, desires a civil nuclear programme. The BBC's international editor is Jeremy Bowen. I asked him whether he was surprised by this deal.

2:27Dmytro Koziatynskyi:It's been in the works for actually quite a few years, the idea that the Saudis and the Americans would cooperate and the Americans would give them this kind of technology, of course, in return for very large sums of money. But it was meant to be, it was under Joe Biden, it was supposed to be one of the big sweeteners that came, that would come if the Saudis had normalized relations with the Israelis. And now all that went out of the window after the 7th of October, because the Saudis were, you know, they pulled way back from any normalization with the Israelis after that. And they're saying that there has to be progress, concrete progress towards a Palestinian state before they'd even contemplate that.

3:15Dmytro Koziatynskyi:Their own people are very, very against it. But Donald Trump separated it from that process of normalization and went ahead with the negotiations. It isn't clear why he thinks it's such a brilliant idea. There will be some very large contracts for American large companies. That's something that he tends to like. I think there's a sense as well in which they need to do something to repair relations with the Saudis. The Saudis are not at all happy that they have been in the firing line, along with their Gulf neighbours and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, in the Iran war, which, of course, started after the Americans and the Israelis had attacked Iran.

3:59Dmytro Koziatynskyi:And it's something so they are looking potentially elsewhere. The Saudis might have, say, gone to the Chinese. That's something the Americans would absolutely have hated and not countenance. So they have done this deal. But the concern about it that people have raised, not least the Israelis, is that it gives the Saudis, it seems anyway, the reporting is it gives the Saudis the capacity to enrich uranium, which is the issue which has made people so concerned about Iran's nuclear program, because the highly enriched uranium can be used to make a nuclear weapon. President Trump clearly sees a difference between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

4:41One country trusts the other, he does not. But I wonder how it's going to go down with some of those other Gulf countries you mentioned, where the US has, for example, restricted their ability to enrich uranium. I'm thinking of the UAE.

4:53Dmytro Koziatynskyi:Yeah, the UAE did a deal with Americans ages ago, about 15 years ago, in fact. But in that deal, there was a no enrichment clause. And there isn't one with the Saudis. There have been some divisions lately between the Saudis and the Emiratis. They've responded in different ways to the war. The Emiratis have very much doubled down on their relationship, security relationship especially, with the Israelis, because they had already normalized relations. The Saudis are rather different. So, yeah, I mean, I'm sure they won't like it. And also there are legitimate questions to be raised about the possibility of proliferation.

5:32Dmytro Koziatynskyi:maybe not now, but sometime in the future. Of course, these things, these plants will take many years to get up and running. But once you share the knowledge, the knowledge is shared. I mean, that's one thing they say about Iran. The fact is that however much they bomb their nuclear sites, however many nuclear scientists they kill, you cannot wipe the knowledge of how to do this stuff once they've worked out how to do it. You mentioned Israel. Has there yet been any official reaction to this? Not that I've seen in the last hour or two, but I've been doing a few other BBC style reporting things.

6:09Dmytro Koziatynskyi:But I think we can say because the Israelis are always concerned about anything that would give Arab countries any kind of edge over them. There has been for many years an agreement with the Americans that they will also that the Americans will always give more the more powerful technologies to the Israelis. and at a time when there are really serious fractures in the Washington-Israel relationship. I think that's something they will be concerned about. And just one brief last thought. Is there a sense in some ways America is sort of outsourcing its security role in the Middle East, perhaps trying to beef up an ally so it has to do less?

6:53Dmytro Koziatynskyi:I think there's concern that the Americans are absolutely all over the place in terms of what they want. and Trump has now said that they're going to hit one bridge or one power plant for every attack on the ship in the Strait of Hormuz. He said that on social media. Will they do it? Will they not do it? The thing is, the Americans are no longer predictable. And that's something which is highly destabilising. BBC's international editor, Jeremy Bowen. The world's nuclear nations are subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA. It's an organization you'll hear referred to in our next interview.

7:30Pavel Podvik is director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project. He's based in Geneva, Switzerland. From there, I asked him first how this US-Saudi deal fits into the existing international architecture, notably the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT. Saudi Arabia is party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. and as any party to the treaty, it has the right to develop some nuclear technologies, build nuclear facilities and have nuclear materials, as long as all the materials are in peaceful use. That's the condition that is set by the Non-Polyiferation Treaty. So how does this agreement with the United States, how does that fit in?

8:16This is the standard agreement that the United States signs with various countries. That is a requirement of the U.S. domestic law. And it specifies conditions, what the country can or cannot do regarding the materials or technologies that it may receive from the United States. And it can also set other conditions, for example, restrict certain activities in the country, as was done, for example, with the United Arab Emirates, where this kind of agreement included the provision that the UAE would not be developing its own enrichment or reprocessing technologies and build facilities. But it's largely up to the United States what to include in that agreement.

9:11Again, there are some domestic requirements. And it's also up to the partner to accept that agreement and accept the possibility of working with the United States or not to accept it. Right. On the example of the UAE, are the Americans imposing the same restrictions on Saudi Arabia? No, they are not. And in fact, the agreement appears to be rather permissive in that it does not require, for example, Saudi Arabia to sign what is known as additional protocol to the agreement on safeguards. And that additional protocol would give the agency the right to fairly intrusive rights to inspect the nuclear program to make sure that all material that is in the state is in peaceful use.

10:06So the agreement doesn't do that, doesn't require that. Although a lower kind of a basic safeguards will be in place, it's not something that the United States could waive. and also the agreement does not apparently limit in any way the development of enrichment or processing technologies or facilities in Saudi Arabia. Right, and we need to be clear about this. If you can enrich to the level required to power a nuclear reactor for energy purposes, there's nothing to stop you in theory being able to enrich to the much higher level that would allow you, if you wanted to, to build a nuclear weapon?

10:51Yes, the same technology and the same facilities, for the most part, can be used to produce so-called low-enriched uranium that is used in nuclear power reactors. And the same facilities can be used to enrich uranium to higher levels all the way up to what is known as weapon-grade uranium, probably more than 90 % although there is no strict line there but at the same time if the facility is under safeguards then the agency will see that you are doing and apparently there is some time to respond. President Trump when he was objecting to the nuclear deal the JCPOA that was done between the Obama administration and a number of European countries and Iran argued that once you concede the ability to enrich uranium, there's nothing to stop you going to a nuclear weapons potential.

11:53And that was one of the reasons he didn't like the JCPOA. Are you at all surprised that the Americans have decided that isn't a reason to prevent Saudi Arabia from being able to enrich? I am surprised. And in fact, the JCPOA, the agreement with Iran, was even more stringent than the additional protocol. There were additional requirements there. And still, there were people who were arguing that that's not enough. So you can imagine that there will be critics of the current deal, which, again, would leave this latent capability to produce weapon-grade material. And yes, that's quite a turn from the United States part.

12:38Is this in the end a political judgment that unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia is a trusted ally to Washington, and therefore they don't see a potential problem with Saudi Arabia because they think they can trust them in the way they don't think they can trust the Iranians? Well, there is that too. But at the same time, there is also the political calculation that giving Saudi Arabia this kind of a latent capability that is similar to that that existed in Iran and may still exist there is kind of a balancing act in a way. So it is a political gesture that, yes, it does signal that the United States trusts Saudi Arabia, but it also signals that it wants Saudi Arabia to be on its side.

13:31So it's, yes, it is definitely a political calculation. That was Pavel Podvik, who is director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, talking to NewsHour on the BBC World Service.

13:52Coming up, Austria's opened a police station in the house where Adolf Hitler was born in the 1880s to prevent it from becoming a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage. Some say the choice isn't appropriate. In every political system, the police have to maintain law and order. In a functioning democracy, this is not a problem. Police are needed. But in a repressive society, more so in a dictatorship, the police can easily become a means of violent repression, I would say. Hitler's Nazi regime is a good example. Lawmakers in both the United States and Israel express unease about a proposed nuclear deal between Washington and Saudi Arabia.

14:31There are protests outside the New York courthouse where former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is due to appear. And the European Union has sharply reduce what it deems to be the acceptable level of a forever chemical found widely in European drinking water.

14:52This is Sean Lay with NewsHour live from the BBC studios in London. The US artificial research organisation OpenAI says AI models broke out of what was supposed to be a sealed testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face, a US company in the same field. The AI models then in effect stole the answers to a test they were due to be graded on. Is this a development we should be worried about or a clever bit of PR by OpenAI, which demonstrates how sophisticated its AI tools have become? Dr Henry Shevlin is a philosopher and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge. He also works for Google DeepMind, but he's been speaking to news out in a personal capacity.

15:32I asked him first what we should make of this news. Most simply, it's a demonstration of how fast these models are improving, including in quite sensitive domains like cyber warfare or cyber attacks. The reason they do these kinds of tests is because when models are released these days, if they fall into the wrong hands or they're used by bad actors, they can hack into people's computers, conduct large scale cyber attacks, potentially being used even by foreign governments or organised crime. So it's important to know what these models can do and what they can't do. And that's why we've got great institutions in the UK, like the AI Security Institute, which are world leaders at doing this.

16:11But companies also have to do it internally. And the fact that this model has more or less spontaneously taken its instructions so far, even going so far as to try and escape the sandbox it was locked in, I think that shows just how much these models have improved and how capable they now are. Is it also a way of OpenAI demonstrating to the public that actually this has happened? But the point is, look at how capable our AI models are. Look at how sophisticated they've become. Yes, there is definitely an element of positive PR here as well. I think it would be unfair to say this is the only reason that OpenAI would be disclosing something like this.

16:50It is important for models to share when there are new dangerous or potentially risky capabilities that emerge. But I'm sure there is an element of braggadocio in mentioning, by the way, our model is so powerful that it was able to escape its sandbox environment. The unease it will cause in some people listening, and I'm sure even some people in the field, is that this happened in the way it did happen. that if you have a model that effectively is in a, if you like, a black box, we don't quite know what's going on in that black box. And therefore, how can we be confident about the consequences of these developments?

17:26Two things I'd just quickly clarify. So on the one hand, we are actually getting a lot better at understanding, sort of reading the minds, sort of in scare quotes, of what AI systems are thinking and what they're doing. We've made a lot of progress there in the last few years. Now, this particular environment was supposed to be a closed environment. In short, the AI system wasn't supposed to have access to the Internet, etc., a very basic system for installing programs. And what's scary about this case is that it was able to escape, basically. So if you can imagine the student locked in the room doing the exam, they picked the lock and were able to break into the teacher's office and steal the exam notes.

18:03Now, that is striking and quite dramatic. It's happened, I think, only twice before, according to a sort of cybersecurity history. But the one thing I would emphasize is that in this case, the model was basically doing what it was told to. The model was told to complete these cyber attack exercises. And it just got a little bit more creative than the examiners were expecting. Yes. I mean, they apparently said its instructions were to do what it could do by any means necessary. And I wonder if that, you're an ethicist, that raises a concern about the programming that is given. Absolutely, yeah.

18:38I think this is a very legitimate criticism. So the case for these kinds of no safeguard testing is, well, the bad actors out there, the cyber criminals, they're not going to use safeguards. So if you want to do a realistic simulation of what it might be like for someone to misuse this software, if you impose too many safeguard restrictions, you're not getting a realistic test. That said, in this case, the system did actually end up interfering with the code of another company, in this case, Hugging Face. So there was a splashback on a third party in this case that was not ideal and maybe doesn't make for a fully ethical environment.

19:15So that is a proper legitimate criticism of this kind of extreme testing. Dr Henry Shevlin, philosopher and AI ethicist at Cambridge University. Well, in response to that news, the UK government has announced its AI security initiative is studying the incident. Government spokesman said leading AI systems cyber capabilities are advancing rapidly. UK's AI Security Institute is studying the behaviour seen in this incident, an AI system pursuing goals through unintended and unauthorised means as part of its world leading efforts to make frontier AI safe. Now, if you've ever wondered what noises chimpanzees make before they eat, here it comes.

20:00Sounds as if they can barely contain themselves. A new study involving chimps, which have a reputation for being aggressive, and bonobos, which are more peaceable, found that both use touch to reassure each other before stressful events, like eating food, which, as we all know, can provoke fights. And touch is not limited to apes. Humans use it to create trust in similar ways. I've been talking to Professor Zanna Clay, primatologist in the psychology department at Dharmy University in England in the UK. She's senior author of this study and she told me why they'd investigated this behaviour. We were interested in the role that friendly social contact plays in managing peacefulness and promoting cooperation and tolerance in our closest relatives.

20:48So we did that by doing a controlled feeding experiment where we had groups of bonobos and chimpanzees living in sanctuaries in Africa where they were expecting food to arrive. And what we did was we controlled the amount of food that they would all get by throwing it into a bamboo half pipe, throwing that half pipe with peanuts in, into the enclosure. but five minutes before they got the food we rang an alarm bell so they knew the food was coming but it hadn't yet arrived so we had a very specific time period to look at how they were going to cope with that stressful anticipation and what kind of behaviors they did and then what the outcome was going to be and was it what you had expected or was it surprising in any way well both we were we we don't observe these kind of behaviors in the wild i spent a long time observing wild grey apes and before feeding time before food before someone discovers an exciting feeding tree a fruiting tree you get a lot of really excitement behavior not just aggression but you get a lot of touching stroking embracing even kissing but with no one had done it in this controlled way before and we hadn't compared it with the species and what we were surprised by was how similar these two different species are, despite having very different kind of social tendencies.

22:14And also we were surprised at how skilled the chimpanzees were in particular. Chimpanzees are known to be aggressive, but actually we showed that chimpanzees have a really special repertoire of behaviours that help them manage conflicts before they happen. I'm intrigued when you said a little earlier in the interview that this is one of our closest kind of evolutionary cousins. Do we also as humans exhibit this kind of behaviour, behaviour you see as reassuring rather than just arbitrary? Oh, absolutely. We see it all the time in day-to-day life. You see it on TV before stressful events, for example.

22:50Let's take the World Cup. Look at the spectators during a match. There's a lot of touching behaviour going on. I bet they weren't even aware of it half the time. Well, exactly. Look at the football players just before the huddle, before the match starts, or even at that penalty kick, you'll see a lot of touching, a lot of reassurance, a lot of hugging, embracing, patting on the back. It may not all resemble the same kinds of behaviours we see in apes, but a lot of it overlaps surprisingly to a large degree. And you might see it at home when you're about to have a stressful event. You might touch your partner's hand.

23:27All sorts of forms of reassurance we see at every level. Professor Zanna Clay at the University of Durham. See if you can spot that behaviour among your own friends. This is News Out, back in just a minute.

23:53How did a boycott Jimmy become a billionaire from posting videos? On Good Bad Billionaire, we're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr Beast, made his fortune. He's buried himself in a coffin for days. Counted to 100 ,000 on camera. And even recreated Squid Games, all in an attempt to go viral on the internet. But it all started when he gave a homeless man$10 ,000. So is he a philanthropist reshaping capitalism? Or is he just the king of the attention economy? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:28Welcome back to NewsHour. It's swelteringly hot in Tokyo this summer, with temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius in the Japanese capital. The authorities there are encouraging men to ditch the country's rather formal dress code, substituting instead shorts for a suit. But there's resistance, particularly from women, as the BBC's Tokyo correspondent Kurumi Mori explains. Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike first introduced this initiative in April. She's calling it Tokyo Cool Biz. She's hoping to expand on her signature cool down initiative, which she's now been doing almost every year. It's become this widely recognized kind of annual summer tradition.

25:07It's a way to get people, especially men, to dress down in the summers so that they can stay cool. We know that heat waves are getting worse every year. And the Japanese work culture is so that you expect them to be wearing, you know, long sleeve shirts, jackets and long pants. how noticeable is it when you travel around on the subway at this time of year that people are actually doing this that the guys you might normally see in suits are going to work in you know short sleeves or t-shirts and shorts i have seen a shift in men maybe going away from you know long sleeve button-down shirts to maybe like a short sleeve button-down shirt or polos but this shorts thing is kind of what's new we'll see how it goes many companies though are becoming more open to the idea than in the past.

25:55I was wondering what the sort of corporate response has been. Are companies encouraging this or is there a certain degree of reticence, particularly if you work in maybe a more traditional office environment? Yeah, you know, I think it's a bit too early to tell. I think everyone's kind of just looking around and seeing who's doing that, who's wearing shorts to the office, perhaps. But we do know that, you know, sectors that are more casual, like tech and maybe startups, we've seen you know men come in shorts in the summers and it hasn't really been a big deal similar to other other major cities but I think that when we're the traditional companies it we require you know a governor for example or initiative like this for people to start thinking that it's okay to dress down a bit in the summer.