Iran Threatens to Work on Nuclear Arms if Israel Attacks Nuclear Sites
Tehran is believed to have shelved most efforts to build the weapons years ago
Updated April 18, 2024 The Wall Street Journal
A senior Iranian official warned Thursday that Iran could work on building nuclear weapons if Israel attacks its nuclear facilities, the latest escalation in threats issued by the two sides amid heightened tensions in the Middle East.
The comments follow Iran’s aerial attack on Israel last weekend. Israeli officials have said they intend to respond to Tehran’s missile-and-drone barrage.
Brig. Gen. Ahmad Haghtalab, the commander for security of Iran’s nuclear facilities, said Iran could change its nuclear policies—a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s longstanding public pledge not to build nuclear weapons.
Haghtalab, a top figure in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the paramilitary force that dominates military and defense policy under Khamenei—warned that Iran would retaliate against Israeli nuclear sites if Israel hits Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons but has never confirmed that.
He added: “If the counterfeit Zionist regime would want to use the threat of attacking our country’s nuclear sites as a tool to put Iran under pressure, revision of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear doctrine and polices as well as a departure from the previously announced reservations is conceivable and probable.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment. The prime minister’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and U.K. on Thursday imposed new sanctions on Iranian military leaders and drone makers to punish Tehran for its aerial attack on Israel last weekend. The European Union said it planned new restrictive measures against Iran, for the first time targeting Tehran’s military transfers to pro-Iran militias in the Middle East.
“We are committed to acting collectively to increase economic pressure on Iran,” Biden said in a statement, referring to G-7 countries. He called for additional steps “to restrict Iran’s destabilizing military programs.”
Despite Khamenei’s 2003 religious order against working on weapons of mass destruction, Iran is believed by the United Nations atomic agency and Western officials to have worked on nuclear weapons until at least that year.
The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed in recent years that Tehran hasn’t resumed work on building a weapon but has continued to make progress on various fronts it would need to master if it were to do so.
Experts have said it is unlikely that Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in retaliation for last week’s attack on the country by Tehran. Without active U.S. participation, an Israeli attack on the heavily fortified facilities might be much less effective in setting back Tehran’s nuclear program.
Still, Iran also has moved to protect its nuclear facilities. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi told reporters on Monday that Iranian facilities were closed over the weekend. They reopened Monday and inspectors resumed their work there on Tuesday, the agency said. The agency declined to comment on Thursday.
Iranian officials have previously threatened to exit an international agreement aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and kick out U.N. inspectors from the country if the U.S. or Israel took aggressive actions against it.
Iran had agreed to significantly stepped up checks under the 2015 nuclear deal, which imposed tight but temporary limits on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for lifting international sanctions. Iran has wound back most of that extra scrutiny since the U.S. left the nuclear deal under former President Donald Trump in 2018.
Nuclear experts have long predicted that if Tehran were to start resuming its nuclear-weapons work, it would do so covertly. Iran says its nuclear program is purely civilian in nature.
In recent months, top Iranian officials have made a series of statements suggesting that Iran was much closer to mastering building nuclear weapons than Western officials have said, drawing renewed concerns from the U.N. atomic agency about Tehran’s plans.
Any move to resume nuclear-weapons work would be a highly risky step by Tehran. Israeli officials have said Israel would act militarily if Tehran started producing weapons-grade fissile material.
Among Iran’s nuclear facilities are two plants, Natanz and Fordow, to enrich uranium; a uranium mine; and a factory to produce yellowcake, a basic ingredient for uranium enrichment. Iran also has factories to produce the crucial parts of centrifuges—machines that spin uranium to higher levels of purity—and a uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan.
Iran has blamed Israel for previous sabotage attacks on these facilities.
President Biden, like his predecessors, has pledged to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
Iran has already produced enough near weapons-grade fissile material for around three nuclear weapons, U.N. atomic-agency data shows. However, that would need to be built into a warhead and attached to missiles to produce a bomb.
While it would take Iran just days to produce enough weapons-grade material for a weapon, estimates vary on how long it would take Tehran to build a nuclear weapon. Last year, Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that Iran could field a nuclear weapon in several months.
Dov Lieber contributed to this article.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com