The Iranian nuclear deal will prompt the Gulf states to pursue their own nuclear programs in response, a former member of Israel’s National Security Council predicted at a conference on Tuesday.
“The nuclear deal may set a worrisome standard in the region and a cascade of threshold nuclear states,” Yoel Guzansky, now a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), said Tuesday at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin Sadat Center. The deal makes it difficult for the United States and other global powers to deny other nations the same terms agree to with Iran. This will set off a “slow-motion nuclear arms race” in the Middle East, he predicted.
According to Guzansky, Saudi Arabia sees itself as having ten years to develop a nuclear program that would maintain its compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). While the Saudis don’t yet have nuclear power, they have plans to buy 16 civilians reactors and have scientists with the knowledge necessary for running a nuclear program, as well as close ties with Pakistan, which already has nuclear weapons and therefore expertise with nuclear technology. The United Arab Emirates is also building a nuclear power plant, with the cooperation of South Korea—though the Emirates don’t yet have a domestic base of scientists with the necessary knowledge.
Guzansky’s talk begins at 58:38 in the video embedded below and continues until 1:15:49.
In The Looming Global Nuclear Weapons Crisis, which was published in the January 2016 issue of The Tower Magazine, INSS senior research fellow Emily Landau argued that the Iran nuclear deal’s permissive proliferation standards could encourage other states, especially in the Middle East, to pursue their own nuclear programs.
All the provisions that were agreed to in the JCPOA [the formal acronym for the nuclear deal] were for a regime that has been deemed to have violated the NPT by working on a military nuclear program—a regime that denies all charges, and that is most likely still determined to achieve nuclear threshold status if not nuclear weapons. This means that a known cheater, which continues to deceive, was granted terms in the deal that not only do not fully address the added proliferation concerns that arise in this case, but that in some respects are better than what other states are offered, even though the latter are members of the NPT in good standing….
Other NPT member states—especially those in the Middle East—are already watching developments closely, and will no doubt continue to do so as the Iran case unfolds. These states will be reacting to the standards that have been carved out for Iran, and will regard them as creating new precedents in the field of nonproliferation whether the P5+1 [global negotiating powers] meant for this to happen or not, as seen in the case of the UAE.
Can nonproliferation standards be upheld via a diplomatic process when challenged by a very determined nuclear proliferator? Clearly this is not impossible, as the case of Libya underscores. Libya decided to give up its nuclear program, along with other weapons of mass destruction, in December 2003 after the pressure of years of sanctions—but also because it believed that it might be the target of a possible U.S. military assault. Massive pressure seems to be the essential key to successful bargaining with a determined proliferator that is undermining the NPT, and is especially effective when the international negotiators are intent on using that pressure as leverage at the bargaining table. But if the negotiators are not willing to push all levers of pressure, and to call the proliferator’s bluff when it threatens to walk, the result is inevitably something like the JCPOA: a deal that not only fails to ensure that Iran will remain non-nuclear, but dangerously relaxes nonproliferation standards established 45 years ago.
[Photo: BESA Center / livestream ]