Bob Beckel Quotes

While the United States has largely been missing in action from the diplomatic game, the European Union and Iran have been making progress at developing a formula that would lead to the suspension of Iran's nuclear enrichment program and the start of serious negotiations.

As a nuclear power - as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon - the United States has a moral responsibility to act.

The JCPOA can perhaps delay Iran's nuclear weapons program for a few years. Conversely, it has virtually guaranteed that Iran will have the freedom to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons at the end of the commitment.

While the agreement provides a level of constraint on Iran's nuclear weapons program, it confers legitimacy on their nuclear threshold status, an unprecedented shift for a country with so many entanglements.

I do not believe the efforts of the international community to stop Iran's nuclear program will bear fruit.

Throughout the 1990s, Israel and the United States devoted vast resources to weakening the nuclear links between Russia and Iran and applied enormous diplomatic pressure on Russia to cut off the relationship.

After a decade in public life working to stop Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons, I cannot support a deal giving Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief - in return for letting it maintain an advanced nuclear program and the infrastructure of a threshold nuclear state.

I think the Iranians are clearly determined to have a nuclear program. And we have to assume that with a nuclear program they have the capability and the will to create a nuclear weapon.

Today, India is a nuclear weapons state.

I argue that for every country to have an independent fuel cycle is the wrong way to go. Because any country which has a complete fuel cycle is a latent nuclear weapons country, in the sense that it is not far from making a nuclear weapon.

We are not afraid of nuclear weapons. The point is that if we had in fact wanted to build a nuclear bomb, we are brave enough to say that we want it. But we never do that.

In order to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear country you have to introduce a system of verification and inspection.

President Obama has made it clear that the United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Our bottom line, if you want to call it a red line, president's bottom line has been that Iran will not acquire a nuclear weapon and we will take no option off the table to ensure that it does not acquire a nuclear weapon, including the military option.

And also, we are providing, you know, a nuclear power plant in the north, two light water systems, so some 4 or 5 billion dollars we are providing to meet with North Korean requests on the condition North Korea will not produce a nuclear weapon.

I think the American people are very smart in understanding our country is very trustworthy with nuclear weapons. We've had them from the beginning. But they have also been critical for keeping the world more at peace than it would have been if it hadn't been for the American nuclear umbrella.

It is clear that the original idea of the Iranians [to produce nuclear weapons] has been stopped by this agreement.

I support the right of Iran and of any Arab country to have nuclear weapons. This is our right, brothers…. if any Arab country had nuclear weapons at any point in history, America and Israel would have never dared to do what they are doing to the entire Arab nation.

We keep our nuclear policy somewhat ambiguous because of national security.

Look: I don't want to live with a nuclear Iran. I would like to make it uncomfortable for them to seek it.

When India conducted nuclear tests in 1974, I wrote a letter to then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from Holland and offered my services for Pakistani nuclear programme.

2012 will be a critical year in the connection between Iran gaining nuclear power, changes in leadership, continuing pressure from the international community and events that happen unnaturally.

Our republic is a responsible nuclear state that, as we made clear before, will not use nuclear weapons first unless aggressive hostile forces use nuclear weapons to invade on our sovereignty.

Iran has every intention to build a nuclear weapon.

Iran can never get a nuclear weapon, and it never will as long as I have anything to say about it.