Iran reaffirmed Monday its opposition to the atomic bomb, arguing a religious ban on the possession of such a weapon after a controversy sparked by a minister.
“Iran’s position has not changed: Iran’s nuclear activities have always been peaceful and will remain so,” Iranian Foreign Affairs spokesman Said Khatibzadeh said at a press conference in Tehran.
“The fatwa of the Supreme Leader on the ban on nuclear weapons is still valid,” Khatibzadeh added, referring to a religious decree by Iranian number one Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The text of this fatwa, which Iran has claimed to have existed for several years, was made public for the first time in 2010, in the midst of the crisis over the Iranian nuclear issue.
The Islamic Republic was then accused by the international community, Westerners and Israel in the lead, of seeking to secretly acquire the atomic bomb in violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), of which Iran is a member.
The Guide’s fatwa declares the use of the atomic bomb to be “haram” (prohibited by Islam) and is regularly brandished by Tehran as an absolute guarantee of its good intentions in nuclear matters.
But Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi recently sowed doubts with comments deemed “very disturbing” by the State Department in Washington.
“Cornered cat”
“Our nuclear industry is a peaceful industry, the Supreme Leader [l’a] explicitly stated in his fatwa […] But if a cat is cornered, it may behave differently than a free cat would, ”Alavi said on state television on February 8.
“If they push Iran in this direction, then it will not be Iran’s fault, but the fault of those who pushed it,” he said, adding that “in normal times, Iran has neither such intention nor such a plan. “
The Minister of Intelligence is one of those cabinet members who cannot be appointed or dismissed by the president without the approval of the Supreme Leader.
Abroad, Mr. Alavi’s remarks may have been seen as an attempt to raise the stakes in the standoff between Tehran and Washington over the international Iran nuclear deal concluded in Vienna in 2015, while the West is alarmed by the increase in nuclear activities of the Islamic Republic.
In response to the unilateral exit of the United States from this pact in 2018, Iran has in fact gradually freed itself since 2019 from the number of limits that it had agreed to impose on its nuclear program in exchange for relief. international sanctions against it.
While the new US government says it wants to reinstate the Vienna Accord, which Iran also says it holds, Tehran and Washington currently appear to be at an impasse.
Iran demands, to return to the full and complete application of the agreement, that the United States first lift its sanctions, while Washington demands that Tehran return to respect its commitments to cancel these measures.
Iran’s ultra-conservative Tasnim news agency sharply criticized Alavi, accusing him of not thinking “about the consequences” of his “completely wrong” words.
The fatwa is “not a hypocritical position [destinée à] please or deceive Western diplomats, ”Tasnim stressed.