By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Regional Conflict Has Sharpened Tehran’s Incentives To Develop Atomic Weapons

When it comes to Iran’s capacity and desire to develop nuclear weapons, conventional wisdom in the West has generally held that Tehran treasures its so-called threshold status —in which it possesses the ability to quickly manufacture such armaments but does not do so. Threshold status should, in theory, afford Iran the leverage that comes with having a nuclear deterrent without the blowback. Proceeding from the belief that Iran prioritizes this leverage, analysts seeking to determine the country’s strategic calculus in its expanding conflict with Israel and the United States tend to focus on how it might retaliate by using traditional arms, such as ballistic missiles.

But these experts must not write off the potential for Iran to acquire a nuclear arsenal. The country’s growing vulnerability does not mean it will abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. In fact, that vulnerability makes Tehran’s need for atomic munitions—and its incentive to complete manufacture of them—much greater.

There is already evidence that the regional instability triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel is pushing Iran toward developing nuclear weapons. In February, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, Rafael Grossi, noted that there had been an uptick in Iranian leaders’ “loose talk about nuclear weapons,” adding that a “very high official” in Tehran had told him that the regime now had “everything” it needed to manufacture one. This was not mere bluster. The U.S. director of national intelligence reported in July on the “notable increase this year in Iranian public statements about nuclear weapons” and added that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.” Then in August, a report by the IAEA expressed concern that the agency could no longer reliably provide “assurance of the peaceful nature” of the country’s nuclear program.

A missile system on display in Tehran, Iran, September 2024

Iranian leaders remain wary of triggering a devastating conflict with Israel or the United States. But the more they see conventional weapons failing to dissuade Israel from attacking their proxies or from carrying out assassinations on Iranian soil, the more attractive fast-tracking development of nuclear weapons will become. Indeed, the regime in Tehran appears to be concluding that possessing nuclear weapons is essential to its survival, for both external and domestic reasons. Iran’s leaders, after all, are not only threatened by foreign adversaries. They also face a hazard from within: the substantial dissatisfaction of their own citizens.

Popular discontent has been a growing problem for Tehran for years. But a window of opportunity has opened to curry favor with the Iranian populace. As the Middle East becomes increasingly unstable, Iranian public opinion is turning in favor of developing nuclear weapons after decades of opposition. All these factors combined mean that Iran could cross the nuclear threshold by assembling warheads within six to 12 months, according to estimates by the U.S. military.

 

Chain Reaction

Iran’s nuclear program dates back half a century, to the reign of its last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But for decades, Iran shied away from actually manufacturing nuclear weapons. This history is as much a product of Iran’s own strategic calculations as it is of any Western effort to contain the country’s progress. In October 2003, the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced a fatwa, or ruling, declaring the possession of nuclear weapons to be haram, or prohibited by Islam. Over the subsequent two decades, Khamenei has repeatedly mentioned this prohibition, as have the Iranian envoys negotiating with the IAEA. The fatwa did not, however, explicitly bar the Islamic Republic from developing the capacities to make such weapons or from manufacturing the warheads that could deliver nuclear payloads. This subtle position meant that the Islamic Republic claimed the right to advance nuclear technology while presenting its intentions as peaceful.

This stance played well on the world stage, especially among non-Western countries outside the Middle East such as India. For those states, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Tehran may appear to pose a less immediate threat than the higher energy prices and trade restrictions created by the United States’ sanctions on Iran. Claiming that the United States is the real villain in its dispute, and backed by Beijing and Moscow, Tehran has made increasingly successful efforts to rally such countries behind its push to rejoin the international community. Over the last year and a half, Tehran has been admitted to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS economic alliance, struck a free-trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union, and, last November, even chaired the annual meeting that the UN Human Rights Council convenes to engage civil society organizations.

The fundamental calculus behind Iran’s nuclear strategy, however, began to change rapidly after October 7. The proxy groups that Iran has spent years funding and training in the Palestinian territories as well as in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen have come under sustained bombardment by Israel and its allies. If Israel continues to expand its assault on Hezbollah-held territory in Lebanon, Tehran stands to lose crucial networks of roads, railways, airports, tunnels, and safe houses through which its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps supplies these affiliated militant groups.

The Iranian regime has suffered attacks much closer to home, too. Israel’s strikes on its military commanders and scientists have picked up in pace, along with its acts of sabotage against weapons systems and industrial facilities. Israel assassinated Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in July and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut in September. Iran’s top political leaders may reasonably wonder if they are next on the hit list. Khamenei has reportedly been moved to a safe house. But Haniyeh and Nasrallah were also ensconced in secure locations. It did not save either of them.

These attacks on Iran’s proxy groups as well as its own personnel are generating both fear and defiance in Tehran—not only from the regime’s historically most bellicose leaders but also from the recently elected and purportedly moderate Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian. On October 1, for example, Pezeshkian declared that his government’s missile attack against Israel represented “only an iota of our power.” Two days later, he promised “an even more crushing” response against Israel and the United States.

 

Atomic Cocktail

Because the Iranian regime is concerned about its survival, conducting a nuclear test will be quite attractive. It would signal to adversaries that Tehran is willing to wield the ultimate weapon. North Korea’s repressive regime, for example, long feared being toppled by the United States and its partners. But since it detonated atomic weapons in 2006 and 2009, it has felt far more secure and become more aggressive in East Asia. Iran’s biggest backers, China and Russia, would likely benefit from the uncertainty that a nuclear Iran would inject into the global system. And its major trading partners such as India would find it difficult to object strenuously to its change in nuclear strategy, dependent as they remain on Tehran’s cheap oil and gas. Apart from Israel, the Gulf Arab nations, Europe, and the United States, much of the world may not care much about the outcome of Iran’s nuclear quest.

Outside states, of course, are not the only entities endangering the Islamic Republic. The country’s leaders are also staring down domestic unrest. Iranian citizens have many complaints about their leaders. The economy has stalled, thanks to the government’s inefficiency and corruption as well as sanctions. The cost of living has skyrocketed, and the inflation rate now sits at over 35 percent. Persistent housing shortages are driving home prices up more than ten percent annually. Iran’s official unemployment rate is 8.9 percent, but both Western and Iranian economists estimate it to be double that. As a result of these pressures, protests have become frequent. The state has inflamed its citizens by dispatching official morality squads to harass and arrest women for breaching the country’s dress code; deaths from such arrests sparked widespread unrest in the winter of 2022–23.

Developing nuclear weapons might help the regime shore up its rule. Most Iranians would prefer that their leaders avoid openly confronting the United States, Israel, and Europe; their support for destabilizing interference in other Middle Eastern countries is also limited. Yet growing regional turmoil has produced a striking shift in Iranians’ views about nuclear weapons. Opinion surveys conducted between 2000 and the beginning of this year generally showed that a majority of Iranians opposed developing them, fearing that nuclearization would lead their country into further economic and societal isolation. But in a survey this spring by the opinion research company IranPoll, almost 70 percent of Iranian respondents agreed that “Iran should possess nuclear weapons.” The poll found that the percentage of respondents who said they strongly agreed with that statement rose from 40 to 48 percent directly after Israel’s April 1 attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.

Iran’s leaders could thus justify reversing their statements that nuclear weapons are haram on the grounds that their people think they are necessary to preserve the country’s national security. On October 8, the Tehran Times, a major media outlet with close ties to the government, ran a front-page story on the “rising call for nukes” among Iran’s youth. Iran’s leaders know well that even Iranians who oppose their regime have a historical sense of nationalism, which tends to drive support for military actions taken at times of crisis and external threats. A similar shift in opinion is emerging among the country’s Shiite clergy and intellectuals. At the end of September, for example, the legislator and University of Tehran ethnographer Ahmad Naderi explicitly said, “The time has come to revise [Iran’s] nuclear doctrine.”

For over a decade, hard-liners within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have suggested that Iranians would be safer and prouder if their country tested an atomic weapon. Those hard-line officers are ascending within the force’s ranks, and their demands that Iran begin deploying such weapons are becoming louder and more frequent. An Israeli or American attack on Iranian nuclear development facilities would further strengthen their case. 

Russia’s ongoing misadventures in Ukraine also have direct relevance for Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Moscow is increasingly dependent on Iranian-produced missiles and drones to sustain its war effort. And Bloomberg and The Guardian have reported that during their meeting in Washington in mid-September, U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed concern that Moscow—to stay on Tehran’s good side—was sharing technology that would speed up Iran’s capacity to assemble nuclear weapons.

 

The Fuse Is Lit

The Iranian government has played a huge role in stoking unrest in the Middle East. That instability is now rebounding on it. Consequently, this year may well prove to be the tipping point at which Iran abandons its coyness about pursuing nuclear weapons. And at present, no outside actors have viable solutions to dissuade it from moving forward. The United States’ attempts to deter the Islamic Republic from the nuclear path by imposing sanctions and brokering a 2015 nuclear deal—as well as Israel’s assassination of scientists and sabotaging of facilities—have only delayed rather than ended Iran’s military-related nuclear activities. Even if Israel follows through on its threat to launch a “lethal response” to a recent Iranian missile attack, that will be similarly unlikely to end Iran’s nuclear quest.

It may instead make Iran redouble its efforts. Over the course of the last year, Iran’s push to enrich uranium has only increased in pace and sophistication. In July, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that the time frame Tehran would need to produce the necessary fissile material for a nuclear weapon had dwindled to “probably one or two weeks.”

Iran’s leaders are not crazy fanatics; they are calculating and focused on the long-term durability of their rule. And the mood of their own citizens is shifting rapidly when it comes to atomic munitions. Many in the West may be reluctant to face the truth: that the past year has only made nuclear weapons a more attractive tool for the Iranian regime’s own survival.

 

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