Iran will build nuclear weapons if Tehran’s demands regarding economic sanctions are not met, according to a top government official.
“Our nuclear program is peaceful, and the fatwa by the supreme leader has forbidden nuclear weapons, but if they push Iran into that direction, then it wouldn’t be Iran’s fault but theirs,” Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi said in newly published comments.
That threat is a little on the nose, even for the Iranian regime, and comes in the opening few weeks of President Biden’s term as the two countries posture and pressure each other ahead of possible talks about Washington’s return to a nuclear deal struck by the Obama administration and exited by the Trump administration.
Then-Secretary of State John Kerry cited the reported fatwa as evidence that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “as a matter sovereignty and pride,” would not pursue the illicit nuclear arsenal. Yet, Iranian officials have gradually violated the terms of the nuclear deal in order to gain leverage in talks with Western governments and even threatened to expel United Nations nuclear inspectors if the United States does not lift economic sanctions by Feb. 21.
“Iran, without a doubt, will stop the voluntary implementation of Additional Protocol if the sanctions against Iran, especially in finance, banking, and oil sectors, are not lifted by the mentioned day,” an Iranian lawmaker said last month. “We gave the U.S. a one-month opportunity. The new U.S. administration will take the office on Jan. 21.”
That threat targets the protocols for verifying compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which is a foundational pact independent of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement.
“On Feb. 21, if Iran has not resumed full compliance with the deal, Iran will still be out of compliance with the deal by definition,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Monday. “What we have put on the table is that we are looking for Iran to resume its full compliance. … Iran is quite a ways out of compliance in a number of specific areas, so we aren’t looking to any particular date.”
Iranian threats regarding the additional protocol have backfired in previous diplomatic jousts, including the one vote since the implementation of the 2015 deal in which major Western European nations joined the U.S. in voting to rebuke Iran for preventing nuclear watchdogs from accessing key sites. Subsequent inspections of those sites uncovered “new evidence of undeclared nuclear activities in Iran,” according to a report last week.
“Today, the world powers are terrified by observing the geopolitical and strategic capacities, progress, and capabilities of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Iranian General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri said this week to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. “Whether they like it or not, they should prepare themselves to accept the order and geometry of the emerging new power in the region of which Iran and Iranians are the main pole.”
Proponents of the Iran deal regard the pact as a means of defusing a nuclear crisis and containing Iran’s regional aggression, on the theory that every threat from Tehran worsens if the regime is close to building nuclear weapons. In that light, former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal worsened security in the Middle East by spurring Tehran to increase its enrichment of nuclear weapons material.
“Yes, this is very much a downside,” former State Department Policy Planning Director Peter Berkowitz, who led Foggy Bottom’s in-house think tank under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said in an interview published last week. “Although, one might have expected them to pursue this in clandestine manner under the JCPOA because of its defective provisions for monitoring the Iranian nuclear program.”
That fear animates the opposition to the deal voiced by Iran hawks in the U.S. as well as Israel and allied Gulf Arab states.
“Returning to the 2015 nuclear agreement, or even to an agreement that is similar but with a few improvements, is a bad thing, and it is not the right thing to do,” Israel Defense Forces Chief of General Staff Aviv Kochavi said last month. “Iran can decide that it wants to advance to a bomb either covertly or in a provocative way.”
However, back in Tehran, officials are trying to cast blame for the renewed tensions on Washington.
“If a cat is cornered,” Alavi said, “it may show a kind of behavior that a free cat would not.”
