What if Iran already had the bomb?

There is rarely a dull moment in Iranian affairs. Just the past few months have seen clashes with Israel and Pakistan, as well as a helicopter crash that killed Iran's president and foreign minister. But as dramatic as these events are, the most important changes often occur gradually, by imperceptible degrees.

One of these changes took time to manifest, but it is now obvious to all: in a radical departure from a policy that has lasted for years, top Iranian officials are now openly threatening to build and test a nuclear bomb.

Earlier this month, Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister, said Tehran had the capacity to build a bomb and that, if faced with existential threats, it could “change its nuclear doctrine.”

“When Israel threatens other countries, it cannot remain silent,” he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Arabic on May 9.

To emphasize that this was not a gaffe, he reiterated his position a few days later in a speech at an Iranian Arab conference in Tehran.

Kharazi is not just any old diplomat. He heads a foreign policy advisory body that reports directly to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who also appointed Kharazi to the regime's Expediency Council. He would not have spoken without Khamenei's blessing.

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The fact that Iranian officials openly acknowledge the possibility that Iran could acquire nuclear weapons constitutes a momentous change and marks the collapse of a previous taboo. Western intelligence agencies exposed Iran's clandestine nuclear program in 2002. For many years after that, Tehran's leaders insisted that it was a civilian effort with no military dimension. . Khamenei reportedly even issued a fatwa (an Islamic ruling) banning the possession and use of nuclear weapons, although, as journalist Khosro Isfahani recently argued, it is unclear whether such a ruling ever existed .

In any case, the fatwa was always a bit of a red herring. Under the tenets of Shiite Islam, ayatollahs can revoke most decisions at will. “We cannot make a bomb because we have a fatwa” has therefore never been a convincing argument, even from a purely religious point of view.

But the repeated invocation of the fatwa by Iranian officials has effectively led to boasting of a possible taboo on the bomb. This ban was maintained throughout the long years of nuclear negotiations between Iran, the United States and five other powerful countries, culminating in the historic nuclear deal in 2015. Even after President Donald Trump renounced this agreement in 2018 and Iran reinvigorated its program, the Islam Republic did not make such threats for some time.

However, over the past two years, Iranian officials have begun making sporadic comments insinuating a nuclear threat. In 2021, then-Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi told Western states that if they push Iran to become “a cornered cat”, they should expect it to behave like one: “S' they push us in such directions, it’s not our fault,” he said. » said, referring to the country's nuclear intentions.

These insinuations have been suppressed in recent weeks as many officials have made more direct threats, similar to those made by Kharazi. The list of those who have publicly boasted about Iran's ability to build nuclear weapons now includes the head of the military unit responsible for ensuring the security of Iran's nuclear facilities, a leading nuclear physicist known for playing a key role in the program and a former head of the nuclear agency.

The most extreme version of this boast is that Iran already has nuclear weapons and simply has not tested them. A former member of Parliament's foreign policy committee made the statement on May 10.

Last month, when Israeli attacks on an Iranian consular building in Damascus led to an exchange of fire between the two countries, pro-regime Iranian commentators made statements that would have been unthinkable in the past. If the United Nations did not act against Israel, Iran should “abandon all nuclear negotiations and reveal this handsome Iranian boy,” a pro-regime analyst said, obviously referring to Little Boy, the type of atomic bomb used by the United States against Israel. Hiroshima in 1945.

“Western intelligence services were wrong to think that Iran would not move toward a bomb under any conditions,” Mehdi Kharatian, director of an Iranian think tank, said recently. Regime media now speak of Khamenei's famous doctrine of “strategic patience” as having given way to “active deterrence,” allegedly demonstrated by last month's attacks on Israel, but with an apparently deliberate echo of Khamenei's language. nuclear deterrence.

Experts will inevitably debate whether this is all a bluff or a genuine change in military doctrine. Understanding the Islamic Republic has always been as much an art as a science, and key to this effort is distinguishing between the regime's bark and bite. But whatever the true intentions of the regime's bigwigs, the change in rhetoric matters in itself.

For more than 20 years, Western intelligence agencies have believed that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003 and made no subsequent decision to build a nuclear bomb. In 2018, Israel was able to infiltrate Iran's nuclear archives and examine much of their contents. No conclusions appear to have emerged from this attempt to significantly contradict the previous assessment of the decision-making process in Tehran. The problem, however, is that civilian nuclear efforts can have a “dual focus” – meaning that even without any specific weapons work, Iran's nuclear progress has brought it dangerously close to producing nuclear weapons. a bomb.

Under the 2015 deal, Iran agreed to enrich its uranium to just 3.67% for a period of 15 years, keeping it far from the high grades needed for possible military use, and to reduce its stock of already enriched uranium by 98%. percent. When the United States withdrew from the deal in 2018, Iran began to gradually expand its program. Today, according to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has more than 5,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, including more than 120 kilograms that are 60 percent pure, far more than what is necessary for most civilian purposes and at a very short stage. far from the necessary military rank. Not only is Iran the only non-nuclear weapon state in the world to have enriched uranium to such levels, but it already has enough material to make at least three bombs.

During his visit to Iran last month, Rafael Grossi, director general of the IAEA, said the country was only weeks, not months, away from being able to make bombs. He also said his agency did not have a complete view of the country's program, meaning it could be even further along. That assessment was backed up in a 112-page report that Grossi prepared ahead of next month's IAEA board of governors meeting in Vienna. If Iran is unable to convince the body that it is still complying with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including providing adequate access to IAEA inspectors, it could do so. subject to censorship or referred to the UN Security Council.

Are we then in a moment of acute crisis?

I've spent much of my adult life covering the Iranian nuclear issue, and I've seen many moments like this come and go. There is often more to the situation than meets the eye. For months, for example, Iran and the United States have been holding secret negotiations in Muscat around the nuclear issue. Perhaps something in this subtext also explains the strange condolences offered by the United States for the death of President Ebrahim Raisi, despite his well-known involvement in crimes against humanity.

As Washington-based analyst Karim Sadjadpour recently argued, Khamenei is 85 years old and unlikely to change his long-standing strategy. Sadjadpour suggests that as long as Khamenei is alive, Tehran will not attempt to build a bomb, but will continue to pursue the “Japanese option”, which involves standing on the nuclear threshold without crossing it. Perhaps the recent move to break the rhetorical taboo is an attempt to formally declare Iran's Japanese position: Tehran may hope that making its threshold status more explicit might deter a US or Israeli attack.

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Observers of the region will be forgiven if they find this explanation, while plausible, hardly reassuring, given Tehran's disruptive ideology and its promise to destroy Israel. Khamenei doubled down on his threats at Raisi's funeral, when he met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and promised that the world would see a “demise of Israel” and its replacement by “Palestine, from the river to the sea.” .

And as terrible as Khamenei is, he often avoids direct confrontations. When he finally dies, Iran will experience great changes; power will pass to others, likely including some members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A difficult period will follow, with unpredictable consequences. Whether in Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi or Washington, no one wants to see an unstable Tehran have access to nuclear weapons.

In other words, the United States and others should continue to want to do everything they can to curtail Iran's nuclear program. Realist theorist Kenneth Waltz said a nuclear Iran would actually help stabilize the region. But as even Waltz's ideological successors admit, that's a gamble best not taken.