Whether Iran's leadership has ever given the order to build a nuclear bomb has preoccupied Western governments for decades. Tehran's official position has long rested on a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, issued by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the early 2000s declaring nuclear weapons forbidden under Islam.
No written version of the fatwa was ever published. Instead, its authority rested on statements Khamenei made in public speeches. Iran formally presented the ruling to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005, and Khamenei reiterated it in 2019.
Yet behind these declarations, Iran had for years operated a clandestine nuclear weapons development program known as the Amad Plan, headed by nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Scientists involved in the program also worked over the years at civilian companies, research institutes and an organization known as SPND, ostensibly established to develop advanced technologies.
In 2015, Iran denied to the IAEA that the program had ever existed. Three years later, however, the Iranian nuclear archive was exposed after Mossad operatives broke into a warehouse in Tehran and smuggled approximately half a ton of documents and CDs to Israel.
According to an analysis of the documents by the US-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), Iran pursued the development of nuclear weapons under the Amad Plan in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Western intelligence assessments indicated that the program was stopped in the fall of 2003 following the US invasion of Iraq. The seized documents, however, showed that elements of the program continued operating afterward, on a smaller scale and in a more decentralized form.
A religious decree banning nuclear weapons
In February 2021, then-Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi told state television that the fatwa prohibited nuclear weapons, but warned that circumstances could change. "A cornered cat may behave differently from a cat that is free," he said. "And if they (Western countries) push Iran in that direction, it will no longer be Iran's fault."
In July 2022, Kamal Kharrazi, Khamenei's senior adviser and a former Iranian foreign minister, told Al Jazeera that Iran had the technical capability to produce a nuclear weapon. "In a few days we were able to enrich uranium up to 60% and we can easily produce 90% enriched uranium," he said.
"Iran has the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb but there has been no decision by Iran to build one," Kharrazi added.
In April 2024, days after Iran launched its first direct missile and drone attack against Israel, Ahmad Haghtalab, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unit responsible for protecting Iran's nuclear facilities, told the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency that Israeli threats could prompt a change in Tehran's nuclear policy. "The Zionist regime's threats against Iran's nuclear facilities make it possible to reconsider our nuclear doctrine and depart from our previous considerations," he said.
US intelligence identifies a shift
In March 2025, three months before the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, the US intelligence community also identified signs of a shift in Tehran's thinking. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei had not authorized the resumption of the weapons program he suspended in 2003.
However, she added: "In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran's decision-making apparatus."
The latest war and Khamenei's elimination in late February 2026 accelerated that shift, according to Western reports. In March, Reuters reported that the idea of withdrawing from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was gaining increasing prominence in Iranian state media, alongside once-taboo calls for the country to pursue a nuclear bomb outright.
Tasnim, the news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, even published an article urging Iran to withdraw from the treaty as soon as possible.
According to Reuters, Revolutionary Guard commanders and other senior Iranian officials had previously warned that if the survival of the Islamic Republic were threatened, Iran would be compelled to pursue a nuclear bomb directly. The current war, they suggested, could create precisely those circumstances.
