Riyadh: Saudi Arabia will be forced to develop a nuclear bomb if Iran does so, Mohammed bin Salman - the Kingdom's Crown Prince, said Thursday.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed made the statement to "CBS This Morning" co-host Norah O'Donnell in an interview set to air on Sunday March 18 ahead of his state-visit to the United States. In a preview of the interview posted by CBS online, the crown prince also likened Iran's supreme leader to Adolf Hitler during the rise of Nazi Germany.
“Because he wants to expand. He wants to create his own project in the Middle East very much like Hitler who wanted to expand at the time. Many countries around the world and in Europe did not realize how dangerous Hitler was until what happened, happened. I don't want to see the same events happening in the Middle East,” he told O'Donnell, according to Al Arabiya.
“Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible,” Prince Mohammed bin Salman told CBS in the interview, according to Reuters.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed's statement came amid reports of Iran's increasing meddling in the Middle East - something disapproved by even common Iranians."No one knows better than ordinary Iranians, who live under the regime’s lies and its iron fist, that the clerical dictators cannot correct themselves, and have only one aim — to spread their sectarian ideology", Camelia Entekhabifard, an Iranian-American journalist, wrote in a recent article.
"Opportunity after opportunity has been wasted, and today Iran is an isolated nation with no friends in the region or among the international community. Even the 2015 nuclear deal, which was supposed to improve relations with Iran’s Arab neighbors and open a new chapter in regional cooperation, turned out to be a false dawn", she wrote.
Other experst also feel that a nuclear-armed Iran would embolden Iran's aggressive foreign policy, resulting in greater confrontations with the international community. Iran already has a conventional weapons capability to hit U.S. and allied troops stationed in the Middle East and parts of Europe. If Tehran were allowed to develop nuclear weapons, this threat would increase dramatically.
Then there are others who feel that a nuclear Iran is more dangerous than even North Korea. "Iran's main goal for a nuclear deterrent would be as a token of guarantee to be able to continue wreaking havoc across the region with wild abandon. In fact, according to former officials of the Obama administration, the Iranian regime obtained the green light to continue its slaughter of the Syrian people before ceding its nuclear program. In this light, Iran's nuclear ambitions can't be perceived in isolation to its other threats, and that's what makes Iran's nuclear program different from that of North Korea", Shahriar Kia, a member of the Iranian opposition, wrote in an article.
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