Dick Cheney: Iran deal makes ‘actual use of nuclear weapons’ more likely

By Nick Gass

Former Vice President concerned with the results of the deal.

Not since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 70 years ago has the world been closer to the use of nuclear weapons, former Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. And when Iran winds up with nuclear weapons, Cheney said, it will compel others in the region to work toward getting their own.
As for the nuclear deal with Iran, Cheney called it “a lie” on the part of President Barack Obama to claimed that the accord would stop further nuclear proliferation.

“What Obama has done, has in effect sanctioned, the acquisition by Iran of nuclear capability. And it can be a few years down the road. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s a matter of months until we’re going to see a situation where other people feel they have to defend themselves by acquiring their own capability,” Cheney said. “And that will, in fact, I think put us to closer to use — actual use of nuclear weapons than we’ve been at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World W
Cheney added that nuclear ambitions in the region posed some of the biggest problems during his time in the White House, noting the 1981 Israeli destruction of an Iraqi nuclear reactor, the 1991 U.S. destruction of the Iraqi nuclear program during Operation Desert Storm and the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, which he said led to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi giving up his country’s nuclear program.
“I think that was one of the biggest problems that we had when we were in office, that we were concerned with about this nuclear proliferation. We’d seen the Iraqis in ‘81 with a nuclear reactor, the Israelis took it out. In ‘91, they had a second program, we took it out in Desert Storm. When we took down Saddam Hussein in ‘03, Qaddafi gave up his nuclear materials and that let us wrap up [Pakistani nuclear scientist] A.Q. Khan,” he said.

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