For months now, the world has focused on the danger of nuclear war between the United States and Russia. But Iran and Israel could beat them to it.
Anti-aircraft guns guarding Natanz Nuclear Facility, Iran. (Hamed Saber/Wikimedia Commons)
By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News
The outbreak of conflict between Iran and Israel appears to have changed Iran’s stance against possessing a nuclear weapon as Israel is poised to strike after Teheran’s retaliation with two major attacks of drones and ballistic and cruise missiles.
Iran has issued at least three statements through official channels since April that has opened the door to the possibility of religious edicts against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons being rescinded.
The circumstances which Iran has said must exist to justify this reversal appear to have now been met.
No mere threats, these statements issued by Teheran should be viewed as declaratory policy indicating Iran has already made the decision to obtain a nuclear weapon; that the means to do so are already in place and that this decision can be implemented in a matter of days once the final political order is given.
The religious fatwa against possessing nuclear weapons was issued in October 2003 by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It reads:
“We believe that adding to nuclear weapons and other types of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons and biological weapons, are a serious threat to humanity…[w]e consider the use of these weapons to be haram (forbidden), and the effort to protect mankind from this great disaster is everyone’s duty.”
However, the Shia faith holds that fatwas are not inherently permanent, and Islamic jurists can reinterpret the scripture in accord with the needs of time.
Shortly after Iran launched Operation True Promise against Israel in April, Ahmad Haghtalab, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander responsible for the security for Iran’s nuclear sites, declared:
“If [Israel] wants to exploit the threat of attacking our country’s nuclear centers as a tool to put pressure on Iran, it is possible and conceivable to revise the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear doctrine and policies to deviate from previously declared considerations.”
In May, Kamal Kharrazi, a former foreign minister who advises the Supreme Leader, declared: “We [Iran] have no decision to build a nuclear bomb, but should Iran’s existence be threatened, there will be no choice but to change our military doctrine.”
And earlier this month Iranian lawmakers called for a review of Iran’s defense doctrine to consider adopting nuclear weapons as the risk of escalation with Israel continues to grow. The legislators noted that the Supreme Leader can reconsider the fatwa against nuclear weapons on the grounds that the circumstances have changed.
These statements, seen together, constitute a form of declaratory policy which, given the sources involved, imply that a political decision has already been made to build a nuclear bomb once the national security criterion has been met.
Has the Capability
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei can reverse the fatwa. (Khamenei.ir, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Iran has for some time now possessed the ability to manufacture and weaponize nuclear explosive devices. Using highly enriched uranium, Iran could construct in a matter of days a simple gun-type weapon that could be used in a ballistic missile warhead.
In June Iran informed the IAEA that it was installing some 1,400 advanced centrifuges at its Fordow facility. Based upon calculations derived from Iran’s on-hand stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium hexaflouride (the feedstock used in centrifuge-based enrichment), Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium (i.e., above 90 percent) to manufacture 3-5 uranium-based weapons in days.
All that is needed is the political will to do so. It appears that Iran has crossed this threshold, meaning that the calculus behind any Israeli and/or U.S. attack on Iran has been forever changed.
Iran has made no bones about this new reality. In February, the former chief of the Atomic Energy Organization, Ali-Akbar Salehi, stated that Iran has crossed “all the scientific and technological nuclear thresholds” to build a nuclear bomb, noting that Iran had accumulated all the necessary components for a nuclear weapon, minus the highly enriched uranium.
Two weeks later, Javad Karimi Ghodousi, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Commission, declared that if the supreme leader “issues permission, we would be a week away from testing the first [nuclear bomb]“, later adding that Iran “needs half a day or maximum a week to build a nuclear warhead.”
A simple gun-type nuclear weapon would not need to be tested — the “Little Boy“ device dropped on Hiroshima by the U.S. on Aug. 6, 1945 was a gun-type device that was deemed so reliable that it could be used operationally without any prior testing.
Iran would need between 75 and 120 pounds of highly enriched uranium per gun-type device (the more sophisticated the design, the less material would be needed). Regardless, the payload of the Fatah-1 solid-fueled hypersonic missile, which was used in the Oct. 1 attack on Israel, is some 900 pounds—more than enough capacity to carry a gun-type uranium weapon.
Given the fact that the ballistic missile shield covering Israel was unable to intercept the Fatah-1 missile, if Iran were to build, deploy, and employ a nuclear-armed Fatah-1 missile against Israel, there is a near 100 percent certainty that it would hit its target.
Iran would need 3-5 nuclear weapons of this type to completely destroy Israel’s ability to function as a modern industrial nation.
Consequences of Pulling Out of Iran Nuclear Deal
U.S. team on way to JCPOA meeting at U.N., New York City, 2016. (State Department)
This situation came about after President Donald Trump in 2017 withdrew the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal. The driving factor behind the negotiation of the JCPOA, which took place under President Barack Obama, was to shut down Iran’s pathway to a nuclear weapon. As Obama said,
“Put simply, under this deal, there is a permanent prohibition on Iran ever having a nuclear weapons program and a permanent inspections regime that goes beyond any previous inspection regime in Iran. This deal provides the IAEA the means to make sure Iran isn’t doing so, both through JCPOA-specific verification tools, some of which last up to 25 years, and through the Additional Protocol that lasts indefinitely. In addition, Iran made commitments in this deal that include prohibitions on key research and development activities that it would need to design and construct a nuclear weapon. Those commitments have no end date.”
Early on in his administration, in June 2021, after Trump had already pulled the U.S. out of the deal, President Joe Biden declared that Iran would “never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.”
The director of U.S. National Intelligence said in a statement released Oct. 11 that, “We assess that the Supreme Leader has not made a decision to resume the nuclear weapons program that Iran suspended in 2003.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw from the JCPOA, Iran took actions which underscored that it no longer felt constrained by any JCPOA limits.
Iran has expanded its nuclear program by installing advanced centrifuge cascades used to enrich uranium and scaled back International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring of its nuclear program. In short, Iran has positioned itself to produce a nuclear weapon on short order.
While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) currently believes that the Supreme Leader has not made the political decision to do so, an assessment published in July contains a telling omission from past assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
The February 2024 ODNI assessment noted that, “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”
However, this statement went missing from the July 2024 assessment, a clear indication that the U.S. intelligence community, due in large part to the reduction in IAEA inspection activity, lacks the insight into critical technical aspects of Iran’s nuclear-related industries.
Senator Lindsey Graham, after reading the classified version of the July 2024 ODNI report on Iran, said he was “very worried” that “Iran will in the coming weeks or months possess a nuclear weapon.”
What Confronts the US & Israel
This is the situation confronting Israel and the United States as they decide on an Israeli retaliation against Iran for the Oct. 1 missile attack.
Iran has indicated that any attack against its nuclear or oil and gas production capabilities would be viewed as existential in nature. That could trigger the reversal of the fatwa and the deployment of nuclear weapons within days of such a decision being made.
President Joe Biden told reporters on Friday that he knows when and where Israel will strike but refused to say. Leaked U.S. intelligence documents in recent days showed the limits of U.S. knowledge of exactly what Israel plans to do.
The United States and nuclear-power Israel have long said that a nuclear-armed Iran was a red line which could not be crossed without severe consequences, namely massive military intervention designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
That line has been crossed — Iran is a de facto nuclear power, even if it hasn’t taken the final steps to complete the construction of a nuclear bomb.
The consequences of attacking Iran could prove fatal to the attackers and possibly the whole region.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.