MOSCOW, April 2. /TASS/. If Israel uses nuclear weapons against Iran, other countries will move to field their own nuclear arsenals, especially wealthy Middle Eastern nations, Alexey Pushkov, Chairman of the Information Policy Committee at the Federation Council upper house of Russian parliament, said at a roundtable discussion on the issue Information and Artificial Intelligence: Interconnection, Challenges, and Threats.

Pushkov noted that the question of whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will use nuclear weapons in Iran has been actively discussed on American television in recent days. "If they do this—I repeat: no one believes they will, but the very discussion of something that has never been discussed before already raises a number of questions—then you understand that other countries’ progress toward acquiring nuclear capabilities, at least countries in this region, which, by the way, can all afford it financially, is simply a matter of time," the parliamentarian said.

"If this threshold is crossed in the Iran war, then we will no longer have nine nuclear states, but many more," the lawmaker added.

Pushkov also noted that nuclear technology, in a certain sense, "has become widespread on a global level."