On October 18, an Iranian lawmaker said out loud what Tehran spent two decades refusing to say.
Ahmad Naderi sits on the presiding board of Iran’s parliament. He said Iran needs an atomic bomb and a live nuclear test. He said he has pushed for both for more than a decade.
Then he went further.
“From Mojtaba Khamenei’s conduct, my understanding is that his fatwa will be different,” Naderi said. In plain English, the new supreme leader may not feel bound by his late father’s religious ban on nuclear arms.
For two decades, Iran’s answer never changed. No bomb. No need. Religiously forbidden.
That answer is cracking in public.
Naderi has company. Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee argued in July that Iran has already paid the price for its nuclear program and should build the bomb.
Hossein Ali Haji-Deligani called the lack of nuclear deterrence a major weakness, backed an emergency bill in September to quit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and urged nuclear weapon tests “as soon as possible.”
On Tuesday, lawmaker Abolfazl Aboutorabi called for Iran to leave the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) and build a bomb.
Yesterday, the IRGC-linked Tasnim news agency published a commentary making the case for walking away from the treaty.
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, warned on September 10 that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) “politicized” moves would push countries out of the NPT.
Iran has not decided to build a bomb. President Masoud Pezeshkian told the UN General Assembly on September 23 that Iran does not want nuclear weapons.
The next day, in an interview with Fox News, he said Iran was ready to open itself to international verification. Rezaei also said in September that no decision on leaving the NPT has been made.
So nothing is official. But the question in Tehran has changed. It used to be whether Iran could build a bomb. Now it is whether Iran made a mistake by not building one.
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