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    President Trump recently said that his biggest priority with respect to Iran is preventing it from creating nuclear weapons. The President felt that it was important to keep that focus in view of the collapse of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran has announced that it will soon exceed the maximum number of centrifuges refining uranium that were allowed under the JCPOA. This will reduce the time that Iran will need to refine the uranium necessary to create nuclear weapons which some experts believe may now be a matter of a few months.
     This raises two important issues. First, if Iran actually moved forward with the development of nuclear weapons, it is likely that either the U.S. and/or Israel would turn to military action to stop Iran from succeeding. Such action could escalate into a regional war as Iran sends it proxy forces into battle against the U.S. and its allies.
     The second important issues is that an attempt on the part of Iran to develop nuclear weapons could initiate a cascade of nuclear proliferation across the Middle East. Saudi Arabia could be the first nation in the Middle East to embark on this path in response to an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
     Mohamed Bin Salman is the Saudi crown prince. He publicly said in 2018 that if Iran pursued a nuclear weapons program, Saudi Arabia would quickly develop their own nuclear weapons program. One possible approach to obtaining nuclear weapons would be for Saudi Arabia to buy a nuclear power reactor from a international supplier like South Korea. Then they could build a reprocessing plant that would produce enough weapons grade plutonium in five years to produce a nuclear bomb. Saudi Arabia might be reluctant to wait five years for their bomb when their goal is to have one as quickly as possible.
     There is another possible path to nuclear weapons that has been dubbed the Islambad option. It has been rumored that Saudi Arabia has helped Pakistan finance its nuclear weapons program. The rumor also says that Islamabad has promised to reciprocate by supplying nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have denied that there is any such agreement between them. However, it would be easy for Islamabad to deploy some of its nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia if Iran did develop its own nuclear weapons.
     If Pakistan did deploy nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia, there would be international alarm. On the other hand, such a move would allow Saudi Arabia to maintain the pretense of adherence to the international nuclear nonproliferation treaty. However, it might be that Pakistan would be reluctant to become embroiled in a nuclear standoff with Iran. If they are willing to take that risk, it could destabilize the geopolitical balance of the whole Middle East.
     If Saudi Arabia did acquire nuclear weapons either by building them or purchasing them from Pakistan, many nuclear experts believe that Turkey would quickly follow them. Last September, the Turkish President stated that he could not accept the position of Western nations that Turkey should not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. If Saudi Arabia does obtain nuclear weapons, it is possible that Turkey could become the second member of NATO to reject NATO’s nuclear umbrella and embark on its own nuclear weapons program.
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