Critics of the Iran nuclear deal are right. It is a very bad deal. It surrenders to the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism the right to enrich uranium and the technological pathway to eventually build nuclear weapons, and intercontinental missiles to deliver them, on a mass industrial scale.

The deal, negotiated without the participation of any of the U.S. allies who must live in the Middle East, next door to the existential threat that is a nuclear Iran, is straining those invaluable relationships to the breaking point and making U.S. security guarantees non-credible.

The deal may have started a nuclear arms race in the Middle East already. According to press reports, Saudi Arabia, which has intermediate-range missiles from China, may purchase nuclear warheads from Pakistan. President Obama’s recent meeting with the Saudis, and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s trip to Israel, further evidences the extreme angst among U.S. allies about the Iran nuclear deal. Indeed, the nuclear deal with Iran will probably make inevitable another war in the Middle East.

Israel’s Netanyahu warns the deal is an “historic mistake” and “worse than the deal … that led to a nuclear arsenal in North Korea” and that Israel will do what it must to protect itself.

Some U.S. and Israeli experts assess that Iran has already clandestinely developed nuclear weapons and is following the example of North Korea. The Clinton Administration negotiated an Agreed Framework intended to dismantle nuclear weapons built by North Korea secretly. But North Korea cheated, continuing to build-up their nuclear and missile programs until they became irreversible, while reaping economic and political benefits from the Agreed Framework.

President George W. Bush should have heeded Ash Carter (now Secretary of Defense) and former Defense Secretary William Perry, who in a 2006 article urged surgical strikes to prevent North Korea from developing the long-range missiles that threaten the United States today. On April 7, 2015, the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) commander, Adm. William Gortney, warned at a press conference that North Korea’s KN08 intercontinental ballistic missile is assessed as having a nuclear warhead.

North Korea and Iran have both orbited satellites on trajectories that appear to practice evading U.S. national missile defenses and early warning radars by flying on south polar trajectories at altitudes consistent with making a surprise EMP attack on the 48 contiguous United States.