Accord will fuel nuclear race: US House speaker

WASHINGTON: The deal announced by world powers Tuesday reining in Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief will only “embolden” Tehran and trigger an atomic weapons race, House Speaker John Boehner said.
“Instead of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, this deal is likely to fuel a nuclear arms race around the world,” the Republican Boehner said in a statement, adding that US lawmakers will “review every detail of this agreement very closely.”
Boehner was joined by others in Congress expressing deep skepticism about the agreement, arguing that it gives too much leeway to Iran and does not definitively shut the door on Iran developing the bomb.
Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Barack Obama had approached the historic talks from a “flawed perspective: reaching the best deal acceptable to Iran, rather than actually advancing our national goal of ending Iran’s nuclear program.”
McConnell said Congress, which has 60 days to review the accord, will hold hearings on the deal, in particular to study the “concessions” that Iran was able to secure from the Obama administration.
And he expressed “grave concern” about Iran’s support of terrorism and its determination to expand its ballistic missile capabilities.
The Senate must now weigh why a nuclear agreement should result in reduced pressure on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, he said.
“The American people are going to repudiate this deal, and I believe Congress will kill the deal,” freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, who penned an explosive, hard-line letter in March to Iran’s leaders, said on MSNBC.