Iran threatens to build nuclear weapons

Kamal Kharrazi, an adviser to the Iranian Supreme Leader, gave the television interview Wednesday on Qatar’s Al-Jazeera Network, according to The Middle East Media Research Institute. He said that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear bomb, but if Iran’s existence were ever threatened, it would have no choice but to change the country’s military doctrine. He added that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would be enough to prompt a change in its nuclear doctrine. The remarks came days after head of the United Nations' atomic watchdog agency traveled to Iran, where it has faced increasing difficulty in monitoring the nuclear program.

Have Iranian officials made threats like this before? Last month, Brigadier General Ahmad Haqtalab made a similar statement. Haqtalab is the nuclear facilities protection and security commander for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He said that if Israel threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran would likely abandon its assurances not to build a nuclear weapon. His comments were reported by Iran’s Tasnim News Agency, a news outlet associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

What has the country’s nuclear doctrine been in the past? Officially, Iran has insisted that it has no plans to build a nuclear bomb. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa, or religious edict, in the early 2000s, banning the development of nuclear weapons. He would go on to declare such weapons “haram,” or forbidden by Islamic law, in 2019. In 2013, then-Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif maintained that Iran had never considered building a nuclear weapon. He even added that developing such a weapon wasn’t in the national interest and would pose a threat to Iran’s security, Tasnim News Agency reported. He said that Iran reserved the right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Western governments have long suspected the Iranian nuclear power program as being a cover for the secret development of nuclear weapons. That suspicion has been the basis of several sanctions against Iran imposed by the United States.