Iran’s true nuclear capability and Khamenei’s big fatwa lie
Iran has already surpassed the enrichment levels of the World War II nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Israel’s attack was a long time coming, and a result of fears a nuclear breakout was imminent.
In the early morning hours of Friday, June 13, 2025, Israeli forces attacked sites across Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained that Operation Rising Lion was aimed at “rolling back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival”. He said Israel targeted Iran’s nuclear weapons program and that the campaign would last several days.
The Israeli attack was a long time coming and represents Israel’s belief that international diplomacy had failed and an Iranian nuclear breakout was imminent. The dismissiveness with which many governments treated Israel’s security fears compounded such fears.
Israel was not wrong. Iran’s original nuclear program preceded the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Initially, the Islamic Republic suspended its work, but as a result of Iraq’s 1980 invasion Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini resurrected a covert program.
In 1989, the Soviet government agreed to complete the reactor at Bushehr. While Bushehr was genuinely a civilian reactor, it also became a cover for the import of goods that Iranian authorities diverted to their covert nuclear programs.
In 2002, satellite imagery exposed Iran’s covert enrichment plant at Natanz, a facility reportedly destroyed in Israel’s attack on Friday. While Iranian authorities long justified their nuclear program by citing domestic energy needs, their claims that they needed nuclear power to meet energy requirements indigenously never made sense.
At various times Iranian authorities spoke about building eight nuclear reactors to power the country. Before the Islamic Revolution, the US Geological Survey had conducted an extensive review across Iran and carefully chronicled the country’s natural uranium reserves.
If Iran enriched its entire reserve of natural uranium to fuel grade, the country would have enough to power eight reactors for 15 years. For about one-third of that total investment, it could upgrade its refinery and pipeline network and power the country on gas for 100 years.
Other Iranian nuclear work undercut Tehran’s credibility. On November 8, 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency published an unclassified appendix detailing the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear work, activities that raised the concern of inspectors and cast doubt on Iran’s true intentions.
For example, if Iranian statements about a purely civilian nuclear program were true, why did Iranian authorities work in warhead design and implosion devices, and experiment with triggers? What need did the Iranians have to lie about their imports of uranium hexafluoride from China? And why did a peaceful program need to construct secret facilities under mountains?
Of course, many pundits dismiss such accusations, especially after the faulty intelligence ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The derivation of intelligence about Iraq and the reasons for its inaccuracies were completely different from the information driving suspicion about Iran.
There were two main ways in which the West derived intelligence about Iraq: through signals intelligence, such as phone intercepts; and human intelligence, such as defector debriefings.
The core of the problem with Iraq was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s bluff: Signals intelligence suggested he told his top generals he had nuclear weapons.
Forget Iraqi exile leaders such as Ahmad Chalabi. Within the US, only the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency could debrief defectors and insert their reports into intelligence. Both would subject defectors to polygraphs. Lie detectors, however, cannot determine truth; rather, they detect deception. If defectors believed their statements to be true because Saddam’s lieutenants had reported them as fact, then they would pass the polygraphs.
In effect, corrupted signals intelligence would affirm false human intelligence and vice-versa.
The source of the intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program was fundamentally different. The IAEA regularly inspected Iranian facilities. Often, Iranian authorities would make false claims and get caught in lies.
For example, Tehran would say its centrifuges were domestically produced. When inspectors found traces of uranium metal that had no function in an energy program and returned to Iran for explanation, the same officials would say the centrifuges actually originated in Pakistan.
To read through the IAEA inspection reports is to see a litany of inspectors catching Iranians in falsehoods, and then Tehran correcting the record.
Iraq did affect the Iran issue in a different way. In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor shortly before it came online, suspecting that it was meant to provide cover for a secret Iraqi nuclear program. For more than a decade after, the IAEA sent inspectors and gave Iraq a clean bill of health.
Then in 2005, Saddam’s own sons-in-law, Hussein Kamel and his brother Saddam Kamel, defected to Jordan with reams of documents detailing a secret Iraqi program that the IAEA consistently failed to uncover. The IAEA had egg on its face.
In the aftermath, the IAEA implemented the Additional Protocol to plug some of the loopholes in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The devil was in the details. As a carrot, when states signed the Additional Protocol they would receive enhanced nuclear technology sharing; the stick – enhanced inspections – kicked in only when they ratified the agreement. The Islamic Republic signed but did not ratify the agreement.
Barack Obama suggested the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action would render such problems moot since it would constrain Iran’s ability to build a weapon. The JCPOA was a deeply flawed agreement, however.
There are three main components to a nuclear weapons program: enrichment of nuclear fuel, warhead design and delivery systems. Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran committed to limit enrichment, though it never strictly kept its commitments.
Israeli spies’ heist of Iran’s secret nuclear archive showed that Iranian authorities had never abandoned their desire for weaponisation. As a last-minute concession to get Iran’s acquiescence to the 2015 agreement, secretary of state John Kerry changed wording that previously had outlawed Iranian work on delivery systems.
Before 2015, it was illegal for Iran to develop missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead; following the JCPOA, Iran was prohibited only from developing missiles designed to carry a nuclear weapon.
In effect, by relabelling its ballistic missile work as satellite launch systems, Iran was able to continue working on ever more sophisticated and precise warhead delivery systems.
Did Donald Trump shred the JCPOA and spark the resurgence in Iran’s program? While it would have been diplomatically wiser to force an insincere Iran to shred the pretence of compliance by taking a zero-tolerance attitude towards violations until Tehran threw in the towel, Iran’s subsequent increase in enrichment was illegal for two reasons.
First, the JCPOA never supplanted Iran’s core responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Second, the UN Security Council enshrined Iran’s JCPOA commitments in UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which remained in force.
Legalisms aside, a timeline of Iranian enrichment shows its breakout attempt coincided not with Trump leaving the agreement but, rather, with president Joe Biden lifting “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran. This should not have surprised had Biden and partners such as Australia listened to Iran’s own rhetoric.
During a June 14, 2008, debate at the University of Gilan, for example, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, the spokesman for reformist former president Mohammad Khatami, debated advisers to Khatami’s successor, hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At issue was the utility of negotiating with the West.
Ramezanzadeh criticised Ahmadinejad for his rhetoric and counselled him to accept the Khatami conciliatory diplomatic approach. “We should prove to the entire world that we want power plants for electricity,” Ramezanzadeh said. “Afterwards, we can proceed with other activities.”
He said while Khatami spoke of a “Dialogue of Civilisations”, that call had less to do with compromise than with deception. “We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the activities,” Ramezanzadeh said.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei often engaged in the same deception. Many Western leaders cited Khamenei’s supposed fatwa banning nuclear weapons construction. On March 19, 2015, for example, Obama said: “I believe that our countries should be able to resolve this issue peacefully, with diplomacy. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons.”
The problem is Khamenei never issued any such fatwa. For years, no such fatwa existed on Khamenei’s web page; rather, what Obama called a fatwa was really a political statement issued on the occasion of the First International Conference on Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. Khamenei subsequently deleted even that page.
Still, the idea of a fatwa was useful for Iranians as it reassured Western diplomats. When Iranian authorities cited it, they quoted it differently each time, suggesting they tailored it to whatever their argument was in the moment.
That Khamenei’s closest associates spoke openly of developing a nuclear weapon should have heightened cynicism towards the fatwa. On December 14, 2001, for example, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani warned Israel that Iran could annihilate it with the use of just one bomb.
Just over three years later, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Kharrazi, the secretary-general of Iranian Hezbollah, said: “We are able to produce atomic bombs and we will do that.” On May 29, 2005, Gholam Reza Hasani, Khamenei’s personal representative in the West Azerbaijan province, said: “An atom bomb … must be produced.”
In February 2006, Rooz, an Iranian reformist website, quoted Mohsen Gharavian, a Qom theologian close to influential Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, as saying it was only “natural” for the Islamic Republic to have nuclear weapons.
Sometimes, it is important to take Iranians at their word. When Ahmadinejad promised to “wipe Israel off the map”, academics in Australia and the US argued journalists mistranslated his remarks. The only problem was that Iran’s official translation and banners draped over missiles in Iranian military parades used the English.
Likewise, when Major General Hassan Tehrani-Moghadam, the father of Iran’s ballistic missile program, died in a mysterious 2011 explosion, his last will and testament requested his epitaph read “the man who enabled Israel’s destruction”. Sometimes it is important to listen to what Iranian authorities say to each other and not just to Western diplomats.
Meanwhile, Iranian enrichment continued well beyond what was needed for civilian nuclear power. Here, Western self-deception worried the Israelis. The US intelligence community, for example, bases its assessments on an assumption that a nuclear bomb would require 20kg of 90 per cent enriched uranium. Perhaps that is what modern American warheads use, but the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good.
Iran has already surpassed the enrichment levels of the World War II nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. And while Western diplomats celebrated after Israel, the US and moderate Arab states downed all but seven of the approximately 300 drones and missiles Iran launched at Israel in April 2024, this hardly reassured the Israelis.
After all, what if any of those seven missiles that got through had biological, chemical, or radiological warheads? That even more Iranian missiles struck Israel six months later simply compounded Israeli concerns.
Many in the West misunderstood Israel’s core fear. For the West, an Iranian nuclear weapon would be strategically untenable but it would not be the end of the world. Certainly, if Iran hid behind a nuclear deterrent, it might lash out conventionally or via terror proxies and calculate it could escape accountability. “Iran is not suicidal,” many Western diplomats and intelligence analysts insisted.
This was always a strawman argument, however. The problem was never whether Iran was suicidal but if it was terminally ill.
In 1999, Iranians took to the streets across the country to protest against security forces that attacked a student dormitory after the students had demonstrated against newspaper closures.
Two years later, nationwide protests erupted after rumours spread the Iranian government had forced the Iranian football team to throw its World Cup qualifier match against Bahrain to prevent men and women from celebrating in the streets.
In 2005, labour unrest erupted. Then, in 2009, it was Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election that brought Iranians out en masse.
In subsequent years the environment, gas prices, the economy and the murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police have each sparked nationwide protests. During the past three weeks, a trucker strike has spread to more than 120 towns and cities in 31 Iranian provinces.
The Islamic Republic is, like Cuba and North Korea, a zombie regime. It remains in power by brute force but it has lost its legitimacy. Increasingly, however, some security forces join in protests. This worries the Israelis.
After all, should Iran develop nuclear weapons, it would be the most ideologically pure units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that would have command, control and custody over the weapons. What would happen if protests erupted and, like Romania in 1989 or Libya in 2011, security forces joined in and turned on their leader?
If the Islamic Republic had only 24 hours left, what would stop the custodians of the nuclear weapons from launching at Israel for purely ideological reasons? This is where deterrence breaks down. Neither Israel nor any other country would retaliate against Iran and kill millions of Iranians after regime change had occurred.
Other factors also come into play. While Australian and American diplomats consider the words of their Iranian counterparts, they pay too little attention to Khamenei’s psychology. Khamenei is 86 years old. He is partially paralysed from a 1981 assassination attempt. A decade ago he acknowledged having prostate cancer. Rumours swirl of other health crises.
Meanwhile, many of his peers have died in recent years. Looming mortality can influence a man who has dedicated his life to enabling Israel’s demise but who realises his time is running out.
While Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong can issue boilerplate statements seeking peace, their own pandering to an anti-Israel fringe may have undermined prospects for peace and contributed to Israel’s decision to take unilateral military action. After all, if Israel believes Western powers will rationalise terror with moral equivalence and criticise and sanction, then the old adage “in for a penny, in for a pound” comes into play.
If Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada and Norway will castigate Israel no matter what it does, then Israel may as well do what it believes it needs to, to ensure its security.
Those who suggest Netanyahu acts only to distract from his political difficulties misunderstand Israel. First, there is remarkable consensus among the Israeli left, centre and right with regard to security policy.
Remember, the controversial border wall between Israel and the West Bank was proposed not by Netanyahu but by Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin. Certainly Netanyahu is polarising, inside and outside Israel, but Israelis take the accusations and castigations of his rivals with a grain of salt given the rough-and-tumble nature of Israeli debates.
The idea that Netanyahu could use the Israel Defence Forces in such a way is also impossible. Unlike Australia, Israel has a conscript army with reserve duty that can extend decades. Men and women of all political persuasions – not just Netanyahu supporters – staff the army at the most senior levels. In such circumstances, political conspiracy becomes impossible.
Netanyahu may have believed it was no longer possible to delay the decision. Iran’s nuclear work had reached a critical level. Due to past diplomacy that prioritised symbolism over substance and wishful thinking over reality, the Islamic Republic had the warhead designs, delivery systems and enriched uranium to build a bomb.
The difference between a nuclear-capable state and a nuclear weapons state is measured in days rather than weeks or months.
Rather than virtue signal and finger wave, far more productive Australian, European and American diplomacy would look at how they might contribute when the guns fall silent.
The multinational coalition’s decisive 100-hour liberation of Kuwait in 1991 enabled the Madrid Conference and ultimately the Oslo Accords. Should the Islamic Republic fall, Iranians are going to demand a truth-and-reconciliation commission, if not trials for top regime officials guilty of torture, rape, and murder. They will want justice dispensed to the jailers at Evin Prison.
The financial empire of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Khamenei are huge – together more than $300bn. The Iranian people will need help unravelling and returning that money to rebuild their country.
Iran will need a new constitutional convention. Bashing Israel’s actions and drawing equivalence between democracies and genocidal regimes may make good politics in some quarters but it is not leadership.
Albanese and Wong may not like Israel but they could prove themselves true friends of the Iranian people by taking a lead in helping Iran rejoin the community of nations that embrace the rule of law and eschew terror. What diplomatic opportunity will this conflict open?
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum.
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