But on Sunday, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamanei quashed that idea, saying negotiations with America “are not intelligent, wise or honorable” after President Trump floated the idea.
By itself this story wouldn't be important. Khamanei has blown hot and cold on the topic for years.
But the concerning part is what The Telegraph reported Saturday:
Iran’s supreme leader must revoke a fatwa banning the development of nuclear weapons if the regime is to survive, his top military commanders have said.In an extraordinary intervention by leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was told that Iran must have nuclear weapons to face down “existential threats” from the West.The Telegraph can reveal that several senior commanders have U-turned in recent months, since the election of Donald Trump, and are now pressing for the development of an atomic bomb.An Iranian official told The Telegraph from Tehran, the capital: “The leader has forbidden negotiations with the Americans and the development of nuclear weapons, which seem to be the only ways for survival [of the regime], and he’s driving the regime toward collapse.”“We have been just a few button presses away from building a nuclear weapon for some time now, but the pressures and justifications for having one are greater than ever.“The existential threat we now face has led several senior commanders – who previously insisted on following the supreme leader’s guidance – to push for making an atomic weapon.”
Notice that the idea that Iran should abandon its nuclear weapons and uranium refinement program to stop Trump's sanctions is not even considered.
There is brinksmanship going on here, and it is a high stakes game. But the real difference is whether Iran's development of nuclear weapons is public or clandestine, as it has been. Israel's bombing of the secret nuclear research site in Parchin in October proves that.
Incidentally, I had missed this story but Mohammad Javad Zarif, former Iranian foreign minister, admitted that Israel had placed explosives in nuclear refinement materials that Iran had purchased. In the aftermath of the supply-side pager attack:
“This is part of the damage of sanctions, that you are forced to receive (purchases) through multiple dealers instead of buying from a factory directly,” Zarif said. “If the Zionist regime can infiltrate one of the dealers, then it can do anything and install anything.”He added: “For instance, our friends at the Atomic Energy Organization (of Iran) had purchased a platform for centrifuges in which (the Israelis) had installed explosive material.”
Cool!
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