The latest:
Public advocacy for an Iranian nuclear weapon has moved from taboo to open discussion in Tehran’s official media, Reuters reported in March, with withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty gaining traction. Tasnim, the news agency tied to the Revolutionary Guard, published an article urging Iran to exit the treaty as soon as possible. Western reports tie the shift to the recent war and Khamenei’s killing.
Details:
- The fatwa: Iran’s official position has rested for two decades on a religious ruling by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declaring nuclear weapons forbidden in Islam. No written text was ever published; its authority came from public speeches. Iran formally submitted it to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005, and Khamenei restated it in 2019.
- The Amad Plan: Behind those statements, Iran ran a covert weapons program known as the Amad Plan, led by nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Scientists involved worked over the years inside civilian companies, research institutes and an organization known as SPND, established ostensibly to develop advanced technologies.
- The denial: In 2015, Iran told the IAEA that no such program had ever existed. Three years later the Iranian nuclear archive surfaced after Mossad operatives broke into a Tehran warehouse and moved roughly half a ton of documents and compact discs to Israel.
- The analysis: An assessment of those documents by the US-based Institute for Science and International Security concluded Iran pursued nuclear weapons under the Amad Plan in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Western intelligence agencies estimate the program halted in autumn 2003, after the American invasion of Iraq. The same analysis found parts of it kept operating afterward, smaller and more decentralized.
- The warning: In February 2021, then-intelligence minister Mahmoud Alavi told state television the fatwa banning nuclear weapons stood but cautioned that circumstances could change, saying a cornered cat may behave differently from a free one and that pressure from Western states would not be Iran’s fault.
- The capability: In July 2022, Kamal Kharrazi, senior adviser to Khamenei and a former foreign minister, told Al Jazeera that Iran had enriched uranium to 60% within days and could easily reach 90%. He added: “Iran has the technical means to make a nuclear bomb, but it has not decided to build one.”
- The doctrine threat: In April 2024, days after Iran’s first direct missile and drone attack on Israel, Ahmad Haghtalab, the Revolutionary Guard commander responsible for protecting nuclear sites, told Tasnim that Israeli threats against those facilities made it possible to revisit Iran’s nuclear doctrine and abandon earlier considerations.
- The US assessment: In March 2025, three months before the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iran was not building a weapon and that Khamenei had not authorized resuming the program he suspended in 2003. She said a decades-old taboo on publicly discussing nuclear weapons had eroded over the past year, likely emboldening advocates inside Iranian decision-making circles.
- The red line: Reuters reported that Revolutionary Guard commanders and other senior Iranian officials have warned Iran would be compelled to move directly toward a bomb if the survival of the Islamic Republic came under threat, and indicated the current war could create exactly those conditions.
Background:
The question of whether Iran’s leadership ever ordered a bomb built has occupied Western governments for decades. Western reports attribute the current acceleration to the recent war and to Khamenei’s killing in late February 2026.
Between the lines:
The sequence runs in one direction: a 2021 conditional warning, a 2022 claim of technical capability without a decision, a 2024 threat to revisit doctrine, and a 2025 US finding that the taboo itself was eroding. Each step moved the argument from whether Iran can build a weapon to under what conditions it would, without any stated decision to do so.
What’s next
Watch whether Iranian officials move beyond state-media commentary to formal steps on NPT withdrawal, and whether US intelligence revises its assessment that Khamenei never authorized resuming the weapons program.
