The terms of the emerging nuclear deal with Iran is causing so much concern in Saudi Arabia that influential advisors in the kingdom are growing increasingly vocal about their desire to create a nuclear deterrent of their own, The Wall Street Journal reported (Google link) today.
While Saudi Arabia has long advocated a nuclear-free Middle East, its leaders are doubtful that the completed accord on limiting Tehran’s nuclear program will stop Iran from becoming a threshold nuclear-weapons power when proposed restrictions on is number of centrifuges and uranium stockpiles expire in 10 years. They also aren’t willing to bet that the regime in Tehran will somehow become more moderate and responsible by then, a hope entertained by many in the West.
“Our leaders will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon while we don’t,” added Ibrahim al-Marie, a retired Saudi colonel and a security analyst in Riyadh. “If Iran declares a nuclear weapon, we can’t afford to wait 30 years more for our own—we should be able to declare ours within a week.”
In addition to the future nuclear threat presented by Iran, the Saudis have increased fears about aggression from Iran and its proxies, which will be fueled by the freeing up of billions of frozen Iranian assets.
Besides their fears of a nuclear Iran dominating the Middle East one day, they are fretting that the agreement would dramatically tilt the regional balance of power in Tehran’s favor already in the immediate future, especially once the removal of international sanctions revitalizes the Iranian economy and gives it access to more than $100 billion in frozen overseas assets. They also increasingly distrust the U.S., the traditional guarantor of Gulf security.
“Our allies aren’t listening to us, and this is what is making us extremely nervous,” Prince Faisal bin Saud bin Abdulmohsen, a scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, told the Journal. The prince added that the emerging ten year deal to limit Iran’s enrichment capacity “is not going to satiate anything” based on Iran’s track record of seeking a nuclear bomb.
In October 2013, former Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal declared that the development of an Iranian nuclear weapons “will make nuclear arms proliferation in the Middle East the norm.”
More recently, experts as diverse as Foreign Policy editor David Rothkopf, former International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director general Olli Heinonen, and former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have warned that the emerging nuclear deal between the West and Iran risked nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
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