Kamal Kharrazi, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, this week said that Iran will change its nuclear doctrine if Israel threatens its existence. This latest comment by a top Iranian official raises questions about Tehran’s claims that its nuclear program is peaceful.
“We 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,” Kamal Kharrazi, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the nation’s former foreign minister, was reported as saying by Iran’s Student News Network on Thursday.
“In the case of an attack on our nuclear facilities by the Zionist regime, our deterrence will change,” Kharrazi said, using a term Iranian officials use to refer to Israel.
Iran has maintained that it has no plans to obtain nuclear weapons. Western governments suspect that it wants nuclear technology to build a bomb; its nuclear program has been at the centre of a long-running dispute that has led to sanctions.
Kharrazi in 2022 warned that Iran was technically capable of making a nuclear bomb but had not yet decided whether to build one.
The final say in Tehran’s nuclear program is that of its supreme leader Khamenei. He banned the development of nuclear weapons in a fatwa, or religious edict, in the early 2000s.
He reiterated that in 2019, saying that building and stockpiling nuclear bombs was “wrong and using it is haram”, or religiously forbidden.
But Iran’s then-intelligence minister said in 2021 that Western pressure could push Tehran towards nuclear weapons.
Decades of shadow war spilled into an open confrontation in April when Iran launched about 300 missiles and drones against Israel in retaliation for a suspected Israeli strike on its embassy compound in Damascus. Both nations have been arch enemies for a long time. Israel launched an attack on Iranian territory in response to the missile barrage.
Iran is enriching uranium to up to 60% purity, whereas weapons grade uranium is enriched to about 90%. If the current nuclear material on hand were enriched further, it would suffice for two nuclear weapons, according to an official UN nuclear watchdog IAEA’s yardstick.
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