Semafor Signals
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Iran could go nuclear if threatened, top officials warn as Middle East tensions rise
Insights from Amwaj.Media, Eghtesaad 24, and UNIDIR
The News
Iran would be compelled to build nuclear weapons if the country’s existence is in jeopardy, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader warned.
Kamal Kharrazi emphasized that while Iran has the capability to produce a nuclear bomb, it has so far chosen not to go nuclear. “In the case of an attack on our nuclear facilities by the Zionist regime, our deterrence will change,” Kharrazi told Iran’s Student News Network.
The remarks are the latest in a string of warnings from Iranian officials that the Tehran will rapidly build nuclear weapons if it feels sufficiently threatened. One senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said in mid-April that threats, and especially Israeli, could lead Tehran to “review” its nuclear doctrine.
Gen. Jim Hockenhull, the head of UK Strategic Command, which includes the UK Defense Intelligence unit, told Semafor last month that “statements made by the IRGC are often made for the shaping impact rather than necessarily as a statement of either what might happen or what will happen.” Even so, “the possibility of this to unravel is clearly there,” he cautioned.
SIGNALS
UN watchdog calls Iran’s nuclear cooperation ‘completely unsatisfactory’
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran’s nuclear cooperation was “completely unsatisfactory” after a trip to Tehran earlier this week. Rafael Grossi said that there had been a “slowdown” in cooperation, and that Iran cut the number of international inspections and retracted the accreditation of IAEA experts. Even so, Grossi said his agency would continue negotiating with Iran, and that it hoped to set out new arrangements “soon.” Abdolrasool Divsallar, a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, said that progress may be hard to achieve without the US also making concessions. “Given zero progress in US-Iran talks, Tehran predictably takes no new steps,” he wrote on X.
Talk of the nuclear option goes mainstream in Iran
The ongoing crisis in the Middle East has pushed talk of nuclear weapons to the forefront of Tehran’s political debate. “A taboo has been broken. Support for nuclear weapons has gone public and mainstream,” Mohammad Ali Shabani, an editor of Amwaj.Media and expert on Iranian foreign policy, wrote on X. One prominent moderate Iranian activist said that Israel’s attack on the Iranian Embassy in Syria “destroyed the final justification for Iran not to test its own atomic bomb and enter the nuclear club.” An Iranian lawmaker wrote on X that “if the permission is issued, it is one week before the first [nuclear] test.” The growing discourse could help foster popular support for the nuclear option, Farzan Sabet, an expert in Iran’s nuclear policy, wrote on his blog Iran Wonk.
