Between a fatwa and war: how Iran makes sense of its nuclear capability

Under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to abandon its nuclear programme, Iran has “vowed” to protect its nuclear stockpile. At the same time, former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei disapproved of the use of nuclear weapons on religious grounds. How does Iran reconcile the two positions?

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons — NPT for short — discourages countries from developing nuclear weapons, but does not prevent them from developing the ability to make these weapons. This is ostensibly because some of the same technologies and processes are necessary in a civilian nuclear programme, like to generate nuclear power and to make nuclear isotopes for medical use. But the NPT does not turn a blind eye altogether: it expects the civilian programme to include some safeguards that resist the ability to develop from becoming the possession of a nuclear weapon. Examples of such safeguards include closely monitoring the use of technologies like uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing.

Trump and Iran find a fragile peace as nuclear questions still loom

This said, even these safeguards are focused on diversion, which is only of the two pieces of the gap between ability and possession, the other being capability. That is, a country can have the capability to develop a nuclear weapon, but the NPT’s safeguards have been designed to deter the diversion of that capability to military uses. Countries interested in helping tame the spread of nuclear weapons have enforced this fuzzy barrier using export controls and diplomacy, including sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) contributes as an independent watchdog that performs intrusive inspections.

Pitfalls of not knowing

This is one way the world has kept itself from downsliding into nuclear catastrophe. It is a fragile setup because the regulatory regime decision focusing on weaponisation rather than capability has created important downsides. Perhaps foremost among them is the threshold state: a country that learns about and builds everything required to make a nuclear weapon but stops just short of building one. This country may also strategise its breakout — the rapid sequence of events from enriching weapons-grade fissile material to deploying a nuclear warhead. This way, the country does not draw sanctions, but the moment its policy changes, it can ‘breakout’ quickly. North Korea was once an example of a threshold state — and now so is Iran.

Not knowing whether a country will actually build nuclear weapons, especially since it has the ability to do so, is also bad for the non-proliferation regime for a few reasons. When a country breaks out, the regime will be forced to respond very close to weaponisation, which may warrant drastic measures, which does not bode well to limit escalation. Second, a non-nuclear-capable country has to guess whether another country — perhaps a neighbour — intends to build nuclear weapons. Figuring it out requires judgment, diplomacy, and acting in good faith, all of which are powerful but hard to enforce using external pressure. It also muddies international waters. For example, South Korea does not view Japan with suspicion but it may not extend the same courtesy to, say, Argentina.

Another consequence is the nuclear cascade: if Country A is a threshold state, and is not on good terms with its neighbours, the neighbouring countries may find it necessary to arm themselves with nuclear weapons in case Country A decides to break out. This is why the world has clusters of nuclear-capable states: South Asia, West Asia, North America, and Eastern Europe.

Threshold state

Iran joined the NPT in 1970 but has recently expressed doubts about its participation. It is also a threshold state with a breakout time widely understood to be in the order of a few weeks. It is also thought to possess around 500 kg of uranium enriched to 60%. According to The New York Times, in fact, Iran possesses 11 tonnes of uranium overall enriched anywhere from 2% to 60%. Nuclear power reactors require uranium enriched to significantly under 20%. Weapons-grade uranium requires 90%. The way enrichment works, the road from 60% to 90% is much shorter than getting to 60%. In other words, Iran is for all practical purposes a nuclear-capable state — yet it is not known to have developed a nuclear weapon.

Ayatollah AliKhamenei spoke against using nuclear weapons, calling them ‘haram’. Many have claimed that he issued a fatwa — a ruling based in Islamic law— against the nuclear bomb. Tehran has held that its stockpile and nuclear infrastructure are “peaceful” and intended for civilian use. This is technically possible because uranium enriched to 20% or more can be transformed in a process called downblending to a lower enrichment and used for civilian purposes. The NPT also treats the use of nuclear technologies for scientific progress to be every country’s “inalienable right”.

Iran’s claims to that end were also politically credible as it abided by the 2015Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a.k.a. the Iran deal, until Trump unilaterally exited it in 2018. In effect, Trump sought to back Iran into a corner, which backfired after Tehran took licence from Israel’s aggression across West Asia to resume higher enrichment.

Despite the Joe Biden administration’s attempts to restore parts of the deal, Iran progressively scaled back its commitments under the JCPOA. In Islamic jurisprudence, Iran has a valorous duty to defend its homeland against “Zionist” aggression — which includes defending its enrichment sites and, by appealing to its right to scientific progress, its nuclear stockpile as well.

Limited options

These reasons alone have not convinced the international community, however, much of which agrees Iran is a threshold state. The UN Security Council, the U.S., and the European Union have sanctioned Iran pre-2015 over Tehran’s failure to declare uranium particles the IAEA found at three undeclared sites and the related past uranium processing activities, as required by its safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

Today, Iran’s stockpile and the extent and sophistication of its nuclear infrastructure are believed to mean its breakout time could be short — yet the non-proliferation regime has limited courses of action because Tehran is technically toeing the line.

The U.S. and Israel have nonetheless repeatedly gone to war against Iran because they are nervous and want to eliminate even its status as a threshold state. This includes the ongoing conflict as well as the Twelve-Day War last year, and attempts over the years to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and mount covert attacks, such as the Stuxnet virus in the late 2000s.

Iran-Iraq war

In fact, the fatwa is also not necessarily binding, thanks to a policy called Maslahat-e-Nizam, meaning ‘expediency of the system’. Specifically, in Shia Islam, a fatwa is not necessarily eternal but can be a ruling based on existing circumstances. If those circumstances change, so can the decision. Since the threats to Iran from Israel and the U.S. have been deemed existential of late — a point the U.S. has been happy to parrot as part of its brinkmanship — the Supreme Leader, currently Mojtaba Khamenei, could supersede his predecessor’s diktat.

In the post-revolution era, Iran’s leadership has been opposed to nuclear weapons on religious or ethical grounds because of the country’s experiences during and after the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). In the early and mid-1980s, Iraq deployed chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers as well as civilians, killing tens of thousands. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously resisted retaliating in kind, appealing to his religion forbidding indiscriminate killing and securing a moral victory for his regime.

But Tehran revived its interest in the nuclear programme after officials argued that the international community, including the UN, had however failed to respond adequately to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons.

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