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| Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud |
By Zachary Keck
Over at Defense One, Prince Turki Al Faisal, the former chief of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency and a member of the al-Saud royal family, has a commentary piece calling for the establishment of a weapons of mass destruction free zone (WMDFZ) in the Middle East region. The piece is based off a larger Harvard report he has written on the same subject.
Prince Turki is hardly the only one arguing for a WMDFZ for the region, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity in proposing one. Indeed, as he notes in the piece, the Arab states have been leading the charge for a Middle East WMDFZ for some time now.
Nonetheless, the messenger of the piece, as well as its timing, will no doubt reignite fears in the West that an Iranian nuclear weapon would spark a nuclear arms race in the volatile region.
This fear is nothing new. As I’ve noted elsewhere, since the dawn of the nuclear era the U.S. in particular has regularly feared that the world was approaching a nuclear tipping point. The fact that a nuclear cascade has failed to materialize has done little to dampen these fears.
Read the full story at The Diplomat