U.S. and European officials based their confidence in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in part on the notion that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had issued a fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons. It was a belief based on ephemeral statements and wishful thinking, but a lie that the Islamic Republic’s officials interfacing with the West were happy to affirm.
“If we had wanted to build nuclear weapons, America could not have stopped us.”
Khamenei’s statements in recent days, however, should put to rest any notion that Khamenei sees religious prohibitions on the development or use of nuclear weapons. During a Ramadan meeting with students, Khamenei responded to President Donald Trump’s statement that “Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Khamenei approached the issue in a tactical and political, rather than religious, sense. “If we had wanted to build nuclear weapons, America could not have stopped us,” the supreme leader explained. “The reason we do not have nuclear weapons and are not pursuing them is that we ourselves do not want to, for certain reasons. … It was our own decision not to pursue them; otherwise, if we had wanted to, they would not have been able to stop us.”
This amounts to a strategic shift from Khamenei’s statement from more than a decade ago, when he said, “The Islamic Republic of Iran wants to prove to the world that possessing nuclear weapons does not create power, and that power is not derived from nuclear weapons.” Gone today are any moral, let alone religious, concerns.
Khamenei’s inner circle, meanwhile, increasingly endorses an Iranian nuclear breakout. Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesman for the Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, warned on December 4, 2024, “If the snapback mechanism is activated, we will exit the [Nuclear] Non-Proliferation Treaty,” essentially following the North Korea example.
On March 17, 2025, Vatan-e Emrouz published an issue headlined “The Nuclear Year.” Its author, international relations scholar Hossein Mahdavi Tabar, emphasized the strategic justification for Iranian nuclear weapons: deterrence, influence, and diplomatic leverage. Since the Islamic Republic does not have a free press, such an argument prominently placed suggests regime endorsement.
Tabar argues for an explicit shift in Iran’s nuclear doctrine in response to the activation of snapback sanctions. He cites Kamal Kharrazi, a former foreign minister-turned-advisor to the supreme leader, who suggested that the Islamic Republic may alter its nuclear stance if it perceives a serious existential threat. He also notes that Iran hardly would be alone because, increasingly, global threats lead to open discussion of attaining nuclear weaponry in countries ranging from Germany to Saudi Arabia to Japan. Put another way, Iran’s nuclear policy now shifts to accommodate whatever Iranian leaders find most beneficial for Iranian power and interests. So much for the sanctity of that fatwa.
Iran’s nuclear policy now shifts to accommodate whatever Iranian leaders find most beneficial for Iranian power and interests.
Nor are Rezaei and Tabar alone. Seyyed Nesamuldin Moussavi, a politician and former editor for Revolutionary Guards-affiliated media outlets like Fars News and Javan, suggested on March 17, 2025, that Japan lost the war because it did not have the nuclear bomb. “Japan had one of the largest and most well-equipped armies in the world during World War II. Almost all of its industrial factories had been repurposed for weapons production. It had fearless warriors willing to sacrifice their lives, with kamikaze pilots being a prime example. Japan had everything, except the atomic bomb. But America had it!”
The Islamic Republic may be a theocratic dictatorship, and it may lack a free press, but its clerics and its news outlets do hint at where Iranian policy will go. To believe Iran’s rulers would hesitate to build a nuclear bomb is naive. Over the past 45 years, morality has been absent from the Iranian leadership’s political calculus.
True, Iran’s leadership could step back from the nuclear brink, but to do so would admit the flaws in the regime’s decades-long policy. The question now is whether the regime will continue to deceive the International Atomic Energy Agency, Europe, and the United States on its path to its “nuclear year,” or whether Khamenei’s pursuit will be the regime’s own undoing—political suicide with devastating consequences.
