Behind the JCPOA Frontlines, Four Influential Iranians who Love(d) the Bomb

Negotiations to save the JCPOA are still ongoing in Vienna, with fresh debate recently sparked about the extent of the Islamic Republic’s indirect talks with the United States. A crucial sticking point is understood to be the lifting of non-nuclear-related sanctions. Meanwhile, Tehran continues to hold, as it has for years, that despite ramped-up uranium enrichment it has no desire to build a nuclear weapon.

It will always be impossible to deduce what’s in the mind of the Supreme Leader and those working under him. The Shiite principle of taqiyyah – not telling the truth where doing so might pose a risk to life – nowadays keeps most Iranian officials from speaking their minds. But over the decades, a few key insiders with the ear of the Leadership have come out in support of nuclear weapons, for different reasons. Here are four of them whose stories are less well-known.

Hassan Parnianpour: We Always Planned to Build a Nuclear Weapon

Not many Iranians are aware of the fact that the Iranian government once trained Iraqi and Pakistani operatives in nuclear science. For 25 years before the Islamic Revolution, Iran was a member of something called the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO): a military security organization composed of Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and the UK that aimed to counter the prospect of Soviet expansion into the Middle East.

In the late 1950s, in the framework of the CENTO pact, an Iranian official named Hassan Parnianpour was commissioned to provide training in Iraq on nuclear energy and particle physics. Decades later, just after the Islamic Revolution in May 1979, Parnianpour wrote a detailed op-ed for Ettela'at newspaper laying out his thoughts on the Shah’s nuclear program.

The project, Parnianpour asserted, had been extensive, cumbersome and costly. But he claimed its aim all along, with training from the Atomic Energy Organization, had been not to generate electricity but to build a nuclear weapon. Even though Iran had proposed to the UN that the Middle East be a “nuclear weapon-free zone", Parnianpour claimed, “eventually Iran wanted to acquire a nuclear weapon and become a regional military power, following the path taken by China, India, Pakistan and Israel."

In an appeal to the newly-installed rulers of the Islamic Republic, Parnianpour went on to argue that no past declarations should now stop Iran from pursuing its own nuclear ambitions. He was one of the few to openly express his views on the matter at a time when taqiyyah had yet to take root in Iranian political discourse. It is impossible to assess now how far his proposal was a driving force – if at all – behind future Iranian nuclear policy. But certainly at the time, the op-ed was praised by members of the military and political establishment.

Mohsen Rezaei: A Bomb to Defeat Iraq

In August 1988, less than a decade after Hassan Parnianpour's article in Ettela'at, Mohsen Rezaei, then commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, wrote a strident letter to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then commander of the Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq war. The letter called for Iran to obtain an atomic bomb to defeat Saddam Hussein’s forces. It was passed on to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Rezaei’s missive came less than a year before the end of the war, and months after he’d told Rafsanjani on the telephone: “Al-Faw can only be taken back by means of a nuclear bomb!”. Khomeini raised the point in a subsequent meeting with high-level officials as the conflict was drawing to a close. “The commander,” he told them, “writes that we will not see victory in the next five years. But we may have the power to retaliate or destroy if we build up the equipment over five years. By the end of 1992, if we can get 350 infantry brigades, and 2,500 tanks, and 3,000 cannons, and 300 warplanes, and 300 helicopters, and the power to build a significant quantity of nuclear weapons, which is in these times a necessity in war, we’ll be able to say, God willing, that we have offensive operations."

The nuclear shopping list was never achieved, and the ruinous war ended in stalemate. But the idea gained a half-life that would last for decades. Years after Khomeini’s death at the height of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear crisis, Mohsen Rezaei appeared on state TV to read out excerpts from the letter about the IRGC’s need for weapons against Iraq. But he omitted to mention his request for a nuclear weapon.

The taqiyyah went largely unnoticed – or perhaps the presenter was similarly too polite to say. Today, Rezaei is President Ebrahim Raici’s vice-president in charge of economic affairs, having run for president last year.

Abu Mohammad Asgarkhani: A Bomb to Preserve Iranian Identity

Abumohammad Asgarkhani, an associate professor of international relations at the University of Tehran’s Law School who recently died of Covid-19, was an ardent supporter of nuclear weapons for Iran. Both in public statements and in the classroom, he regularly called for Iran to withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, to arm itself “as soon as possible” – and, in later years, to abandon the JCPOA.

The late, influential Asgarkhani sharply criticized successive governments under Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Rouhani for not having devised “a unique policy for reaching the nuclear testing point". During Khatami’s presidency, when Iran was poised to install measuring devices to monitor any possible nuclear tests in line with a 1995 extension of the NPT, he made a series of explosive interventions that eventually convinced officials not to comply.

To this day, Asgarkhani’s words – and there were a great many of them –echo in the minds of some officials in the Islamic Republic. To avoid war, he contented, governments should be strengthening, not relinquishing, their hard power capabilities, and an atomic bomb was the logical conclusion. He acknowledged the costs to the Islamic Republic would be heavy, but in his view at least, “ensuring the survival and territorial integrity of Iran is worth the cost... [nuclear weapons] guarantee Iran's security and identity in the face of foreign threats."

Mohammad Jamshidi: Not a Bomb, Just a ‘Small Nuclear Arsenal’

Mohammad Jamshidi is perhaps the most influential living political figure in the Islamic Republic who openly speaks in support of acquiring nuclear weapons. Officially the deputy director of political affairs at the president’s office, he also enjoys a close relationship with the Office of the Supreme Leader. His statements are even occasionally published on Ali Khamenei’s official website, betraying the extent of his personal prestige in Iran’s corridors of power.

In the new role, Jamshidi has made his position crystal-clear: the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the regime is “not a taboo”. In an interview with state TV, he argued that the Islamic Republic presently “has neither a nuclear weapon nor the will to build one, but if you have the capability [of building one], you can show the region that you can."

An assistant professor at the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Law and Political Science, Jamshidi has come out against curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in the last half-decade. With some irony he was previously a member of the nuclear negotiating team under Saeed Jalili from 2008 to 2013.

Speaking at a one-day conference at Allameh Tabatabai University in April 2015, while talks with the P5+1 were ongoing in Lausanne, Jamshidi said the negotiations were “illegal” and taking place outside the framework of the original NPT. He added: “Nuclear breakout is a hypothetical and meaningless phrase... When you want to build a nuclear weapon, it means you are looking for deterrent power. It is not bad to build a small nuclear arsenal, not to achieve a nuclear bomb, in which case we could also maintain our enriched uranium reserves.”

These remarks and others by top officials down the years come despite the fact that Ali Khamenei himself issued a fatwa in the early 2000s prohibiting the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. For the first time last February, then-Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi suggested the oral fatwa might in certain circumstances be up for reconsideration. “If they push the Islamic Republic of Iran in that direction,” he claimed, “it would no longer be Iran's fault; rather, it would be the fault of those who have terrorized Iran.”

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