Motherboard reports:

President Trump has pulled America out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama-era treaty aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

“If I allowed this deal to stand, there would soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East,” Trump said in a televised statement. “It’s clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and root structure of the current arrangement.”

The Iran Deal eased economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for international oversight of its various domestic uranium enrichment programs and nuclear power plants. It limited the amount of uranium Iran could enrich, the speed it could build new nuclear facilities, and called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to routinely inspect Iran’s various facilities.

So why did the President kill the deal?

“He’s an insecure racist who hates Barack Obama. It’s not more complicated than that,” Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and the Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told me over the phone. “If George Bush had negotiated this deal, we’d still be in this agreement. I don’t think there’s any reason to normalize this decision or pretend its based in substance because it is not.”

Lewis and many other nuclear experts, feel that the US pulling out of the Iran Deal might allow the country to produce nuclear weapons faster. “So I get a new nuclear weapons program to study,” Lewis said. [Continue reading…]