“While President Donald Trump has repeatedly asserted that preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was a key aim of the war he launched alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” Tom O’Connor writes for Newsweek, “the Islamic Republic’s new leader may opt to do just that should he and his government survive the conflict.” This will sound peculiar to most readers, and it should. The article’s argument rests on the premise that Iran was not actively pursuing nuclear weapons.
To bolster his claim, O’Connor interviewed a range of experts predisposed to agree with the thesis. Unsurprisingly, they affirmed his biases. O’Connor and his sources believe that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wished to have only the capacity to build a nuclear weapon merely as leverage in negotiations.
O’Connor writes, “The tactic appeared to finally pay off in 2015 with the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” adding, “President Barack Obama lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on the nation’s enrichment capabilities.” It is curious to argue that the tactic had paid off. After the implementation of the agreement, the sanctions regime had returned to where it was before Iran started its nuclear program, i.e., the Islamic Republic of Iran had not gained anything economically compared to when the sanctions regime had started.
The former supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
But it had also gained assurances that its growing terrorist proxy networks would not be assaulted by the United States; received a green light for its ballistic missile program and retained an operational nuclear program, which, by the end of the JCPOA, and according to President Obama, would leave Iran days away when the deal would have expired in 15 years. Simply put, Iran’s economy returned to the status quo ante and it now had three new guaranteed strategic assets. Effectively, the deal rewarded Iran’s decision to violate its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 2018, the Mossad extracted some of Iran’s nuclear archives, which showed that Iran had hidden its high-explosive tests from the world and had the intention to build a nuclear weapon.
The first Trump administration withdrew from the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran. Still, O’Connor suggests that Iran still did not want to acquire nuclear weapons. Even the most charitable interpretation only this thesis until 2023.
Sometimes an Islamist military dictatorship with a nuclear program that chants death to America and death to Israel is just an Islamist military dictatorship that seeks a nuclear weapon to destroy its enemies with it.
In March 2024, Nadav Eyal reported for Yedioth Ahronoth that “Iran is forging ahead with its plan to build a nuclear warhead.” According to the Israeli intelligence, Iran was “working to obtain the elements needed to produce the war head with ‘very concerning actions.’”
In June 2024, Barak Ravid reported for Axios, “U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies are looking into new information about computer modeling by Iranian scientists that could be used for research and development of nuclear weapons,” which was an alarming move toward weaponization.
Then in August 2024, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence removed a line from its previous reports stating that “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” While the removal of the line did not explicitly suggest that Iran was moving toward weaponization, it is noteworthy that every intelligence assessment had included this sentence since 2019, and its deletion raised further alarms.
Concerns over Iran’s nuclear program grew so much that, in the waning days of the Biden administration in January 2025, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan presented the president with military plans should the United States need to attack Iran militarily in an emergency scenario.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes an Islamist military dictatorship with a nuclear program that chants death to America and death to Israel is just an Islamist military dictatorship that seeks a nuclear weapon to destroy its enemies with it. It is unfortunate that Newsweek would leave out such a key context in reporting on nuclear armament, complicating matters to portray the Islamic Republic of Iran as less threatening than it wishes to be.