Republicans quickly condemned the nuclear arms deal with Iran on Tuesday, but veteran conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, former senior adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, tells
Newsmax TV the agreement is "not the end of the world."
"Iran has the knowledge to build an atom bomb and they have the technical capacity.... They don't have the structures in place right now and they don't have the ingredients," Buchanan said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
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"And from what I have seen, I heard the president this morning … it looks like they got them blocked so that if Iran made a decision to build a bomb, they could not get sufficient uranium or plutonium for it for about a year and we would know about it in a matter of days, if not hours.
"So the president is correct when he says, look, the [military] option if Iran breaks out of this … is still right there on the table. You would have plenty of time to exercise it. So I do not take the view of a lot of Republicans and conservatives who say automatically, you know, this is really the end of the world."
The historic deal reached by United States and five other world powers will scale back Iran's nuclear program in exchange for severe economic sanctions against the Middle East nation being lifted. But many GOP presidential candidates and lawmakers believe the agreement is not worth the paper it's written on and will harm Israel.
Buchanan — author of
"The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority," published by Crown Forum — believes the deal will still go forward.
"I would say you take a good hard look at this treaty and see what the alternative is when it comes up at the Congress. My guess is the Congress will repudiate it, both Republican houses, and then my guess is that Obama will veto the resolution of disapproval and they will not override the president's veto," he said.
"Look, Iran … has always had the ability if it wanted to take the risk in say, 18 months or three years, to explode an atomic device. Why haven't they done so? … They [said], well we know how to do it now, but there's no need to do it.
"Why don't we trade the fact we're not going to do it now for a lifting of all these sanctions and bringing us back in the world and getting us connections with the Russians and Chinese and Europeans, and even the Americans? That's a far better deal than sitting on one or two atom bombs and being isolated in the Middle East with everybody else out to get an atom bomb in the neighborhood as well."
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