Will 2024 be the year that Iran finally can no longer risk its own national security and rushes to build a nuclear bomb?
People in Tehran hold up pictures of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi as they mourn his death in a helicopter crash Sunday, Monday, May 20, 2024. With the deaths of Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian, the country has lost two of its most influential figures at a time of regional and domestic turmoil. (Arash Khamoussi/The New York Times)
John Ghazvinian | The New York Times
| May 26, 2024 12:00 pm
The uncertainty created by the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash just weeks after an unprecedented military exchange with Israel has raised a frightening question: Will 2024 be the year Iran finally can no longer risk its own security and rushes to build a nuclear bomb?
For reasons experts often debate, Iran has never decided to develop a nuclear weapon, even though it possesses at least most of the resources and capabilities needed to do so. But Raisi's death presented an opportunity for Iranian hardliners, whose allergy to nuclear weapons was far weaker than the Iranian regime's decades-long struggle with the issue.
Even before Raisi's death, there were signs that Iran's position was beginning to shift. Its recent engagement with Israel, which has not publicly declared but is widely acknowledged to have nuclear weapons, prompted a change in Tehran's attitude. “We have not decided to build a nuclear bomb, but if Iran's existence is threatened, we will have no choice but to change our military doctrine,” Kamal Khalerzi, a senior adviser to the Iranian supreme leader, said on May 9.
In April, a senior Iranian official and former military commander warned that Iran could enrich uranium to the 90 percent purity standard needed for a nuclear weapon in “half a day, a week.” He quoted Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as saying that “the Iranian government will respond to threats with the same level of commitment,” suggesting that an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would lead Iran to reconsider its nuclear posture.
Iran's relationship with nuclear technology has always been ambivalent and ambivalent. Whether under the pro-Western regime of King Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s and 70s or the anti-American Islamic Republic of Iran in power since 1979, Iran has perplexed and alarmed other nations about its intentions to develop nuclear weapons. Yet Iran has never made the decision to fully cross the threshold of nuclear weaponization. There are several important reasons for this, ranging from religious concerns about the morality of nuclear weapons to Iran's membership of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). But the biggest reason has been strategic.
Historically, Iranian leaders have repeatedly concluded that it is better to “play by the rules” of the international nuclear non-proliferation order than to race for nuclear arms. To do so would first require the country to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would send an immediate signal of Iran's intentions to the world and risk inviting U.S. military intervention. At the same time, the revolutionary government is reluctant to bow to Western demands and completely abandon its nuclear program, as that would show a different kind of weakness. Iranian leaders must be keenly aware of the example of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who agreed to abandon his country's nuclear program in 2003 but was ousted eight years later by a NATO-led coalition military intervention.
This strategic compromise has worked well for Iran until now: Two decades of dysfunctional U.S. nuclear policy toward Iran have created a dangerous dynamic that could lead Iran to enrich more uranium than usual as a defensive posture or negotiating tactic, gradually moving it down a path that would allow it to build weapons it may not actually want.
When U.S.-Iran nuclear conflict first emerged in the early 2000s, Iran had only 164 outdated centrifuges and little ambition to develop a weapon. But the Bush administration’s unrealistic insistence that Iran agree to “zero enrichment” made the issue a matter of national pride. While the Obama administration spent years negotiating with Iran, Iran continued to enrich uranium and build up its stockpile, in part as a hedge against future concessions. And of course, President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 and subsequent maximum pressure campaign only made Iran more defiant.
Iran now has thousands of modern centrifuges and large amounts of enriched uranium, which has sparked a debate in some quarters within Iran about whether it would be “okay” to go nuclear: “If we've come this far, why not go for nuclear weapons?”
Iran, under Ayatollah Khamenei's leadership, has maintained that it would be better for the country to show the world that it intends to remain in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But in recent years, with Western sanctions mounting and Iran's economy under pressure, hardliners have occasionally suggested that Iran would gain nothing from this and that it would be better to follow the “North Korea model” – withdraw from the NPT and pursue nuclear weapons, as North Korea did in 2003. So far, these voices have been quickly ignored. It is clear that the Supreme Leader does not share this view. In the early 2000s, Ayatollah Khamenei's fatwa (religious ruling) declared that nuclear weapons were “forbidden under Islam” and decreed that “the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.”
Raisi's death has changed the situation abruptly and dramatically. A regime that was already leaning toward militarism and control by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), some of whom see the fatwa as outdated, is now at risk of sliding even deeper into that camp. A former senior regime official told me recently that the military brass are itching to engineer a repeal of the fatwa and would probably do so if the opportunity arose.
Regardless of who wins the presidential elections, which must be held by early July, the eventual succession contest will be for the position of supreme leader, and the IRGC is likely to play a decisive role in the transition. The late president was seen as the leading candidate to succeed the 85-year-old ayatollah. Currently, there are few viable candidates other than Ayatollah Khamenei's son. Whoever wins will likely rely heavily on the IRGC for legitimacy.
Historically, Iran has felt that a nuclear hedging strategy was its best defense against external attack or invasion, and Iran may continue to calculate that a nuclear arms race would only invite further hostility, including from the United States. But an increasingly distracted and unpredictable Washington may not be in a position to respond forcefully to a sudden and rapid Iranian move toward nuclear weapons development, especially if Iran chooses its timing wisely.
Given the war in Gaza, a possible change in US leadership, and a power vacuum at home into which the IRGC could step in, it is not hard to imagine a brief window of opportunity for Iran to go all out and scare the world with a nuclear test.
Would you bet all your money on this scenario? Probably not. But from a historian's perspective, the possibility of Iran rushing to acquire a nuclear weapon has never felt more real than it does today.
John Ghazvinian is executive director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania and author of America and Iran: A History from 1720 to the Present. He is currently working on a book on the history of Iran's nuclear program. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
