Benjamin Netanyahu

Speaking to the Jewish Agency Board of Governors on Monday, Feb. 11, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the following statements, released by the prime minister’s office, regarding Iran’s nuclear program:
• The development of nuclear weapons by Iran will change the balance of power irrevocably in the world. When people with unlimited ambitions of aggression get weapons of unlimited power, the demon is uncorked, and it’s happened before.
• It is the greatest mistake to assume that people will behave rationally when they’re fundamentally irrational and when you give them the power of mass death. Iran is seeking the power of mass death, and it’s enough to see what they’re doing now to realize what they’ll do then. What they are doing now is conducting a worldwide web of brazen, unabashed terror across a dozen countries.
• And they’re arming their poisoned tentacles of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah with tens of thousands of rockets and deadly weapons. They’re threatening not only the security of Israel but the security of every regime in the Middle East, and certainly the flow of oil from this region.
• Certainly their development of nuclear weapons will spark a nuclear arms race. It will make the Middle East a nuclear tinderbox. It will change the world.
• They’re getting closer to the red line that I had set at the UN. They’re building centrifuges that enrich the uranium needed to make nuclear bombs at three times the pace, so that they could cross that red line and get to a high enrichment of 90%-enriched uranium within a much shorter time.
• Sanctions alone will not stop the nuclear program of Iran. They have to be coupled with a robust, credible military threat. If they are not, there’s no chance to stop it. And if it doesn’t stop it that way, then it will have to be stopped another way.