“[A]n attack would make a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable. They would just bury the program deeper and make it more covert…The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world.”

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking about Iran at the Norfolk Forum, October 3, 2012. Gates was Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011, serving in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

He went on to add that sanctions on Iran are “our best chance going forward, to ratchet up the economic pressure and diplomatic isolation to the point where the Iranian leadership concludes that it actually hurts Iranian security and, above all, the security of the regime itself, to continue to pursue nuclear weapons.”