At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Brad Sherman, a Los Angeles Democrat, called for an oversight hearing on the Trump administration's nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, suggesting that exporting that technology could be as big a mistake as having armed the Shah of Iran in the 1970s. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

"There are those who think that the Saudi possession of nuclear technology is totally benign, but I've been involved in this for a long time, and I remember when the most powerful monarch in the Middle East was a good friend of America. And the Shah got his hands on important US military technology. Thank God, nothing nuclear," Sherman said while questioning Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, and former national security adviser to Donald Trump.

"Everything the Shah had in 1978 was in the mullahs' hands in 1979," Sherman said, referring to the Islamic revolution that toppled the Iranian monarch and brought the theocratic regime to power. "We have no idea who is going to be running Saudi Arabia 10 years from now."

Sherman went on to point out that, in 2018, he and then-Senator Marco Rubio had introduced the "No Nuclear Weapons for Saudi Arabia Act" which would have required approval from Congress before the US could enter into a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, and a Saudi investigation into the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi - whose murder the same year in Turkey US intelligence later determined had been approved by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Sherman argued that Congress should approve the deal only if it has what he called later "the same gold-standard safeguards as our deal with the UAE," referring to a similar agreement with the United Arab Emirates struck in 2009, in which the UAE voluntarily committed to nonproliferation and agreed to not pursue domestic uranium enrichment and reprocessing.

"Is there any reason we should be bombing Iran because they won't agree to limit their nuclear program while telling Saudi Arabia we give them the green light and they don't even have to agree to these additional inspections?" Sherman asked Waltz.

After Waltz argued that US resolutions calling on Iran to not develop nuclear weapons provided a pretext for the current US-Israeli war on Iran, Sherman suggested there was "great hypocrisy here."

"Saudi Arabia is not agreeing to the additional inspections that could make sure that their program is not used … to develop a nuclear weapon," the congressman said, based on press reports of the terms of the agreement that has not yet been shared with Congress.

"I predict someone will introduce a resolution of disapproval and I invite members of this committee who have worked with us to prevent nuclear weapons in the Middle East, from non-democratic countries, to join in that effort," Sherman said, in an oblique reference to the open secret that one nation in the region, Israel, does have nuclear weapons.