Nuclear weapons were once deemed un-Islamic by Iran’s supreme leader, who went as far as issuing a fatwa against their production.

But a lot has changed since the 1990s, and although Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still sits atop of the regime, nuclear arms appear to be far from taboo.

Iran's nuclear future.

Tehran, of course, insists it has no plans to weaponise its nuclear programme, which it claims is for civilian purposes only.

And the latest assessment by US intelligence is that Iran “is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”

But that isn’t the whole story.

Iran is ramping up its production of highly enriched uranium, just short of the weapons grade needed for an atomic bomb, at the underground Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant.

Since 2019, and as of February, Iran has increased its amount of enriched uranium from 997kg to 5,525kg.

This includes an increase in uranium enriched up to 60 per cent, or near “weapons grade”, from 88kg to 123kg in the past year, a 38 per cent increase.

UN inspectors noted this in a February report, which warned of new equipment and expansion at Fordow, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base 20 miles northeast of the city of Qom.

“Iran is sitting on the threshold of nuclear weapons; it can build a bomb more quickly than at any point in its history,” said Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association.

“If Tehran makes the political decision to develop a nuclear arsenal, it can produce enough weapons-grade uranium for an explosive device in less than a week and enough for five or six weapons in a month.”

She added: “Building a bomb would take more time – likely six months to a year – but that process will take place at covert, undeclared sites, making it more difficult to detect and disrupt.”

Iran’s nuclear deal

The roots of this build-up lie in the collapse of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran nuclear deal.

Signed in 2015, it offered Iran relief from Western sanctions in return for curbs to end international monitoring of its nuclear programme. Parties to the agreement included the UK, the EU, the US, China and Russia.

The Iran deal was hated by US conservatives. Donald Trump, then campaigning to replace Barack Obama as president, branded it “the worst deal ever”.

In 2018, despite the entreaties of his Western allies, the then President Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA and restored Washington’s sanctions against Tehran.

The move mortally wounded the JCPOA. Its ghost lumbers on in the form of some UN inspections of Iranian facilities.

An effort to revive the agreement early in Joe Biden’s presidency failed in the face of Iranian resistance and a lack of political will in the US.

Tehran has asserted its right to cancel parts of the deal since the US withdrawal.

Under the pact, Iran had agreed to tight limits that ensured it could not stockpile enough enriched uranium to produce a single bomb.

Enriched uranium numbers are still significantly below 2015 levels, the year the JCPOA was signed, when they hit 7,953kg but are increasing at a similar rate to that seen in the early 2010s.

UN inspectors have not been able to access some crucial facilities in the nuclear programme, including centrifuge production workshops, since February 2021.

On Sunday, Iran barred inspectors on the grounds of “security considerations” over a possible Israeli attack in retaliation for its missile and drone assault on Israel on Saturday.

“The bottom line is that Iran’s nuclear programme has advanced pretty dramatically and with far less international oversight than at any point in its history since the US withdrawal from the JCPOA,” said Julien Barnes-Dacey, of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Effectively today everyone’s flying blind. In less than a year’s time, the world may well be contending with a nuclear Iran,” said Urban Coningham, of the  Royal United Services Institute think tank on defence.

Five years after the JCPOA withdrawal and three years after Joe Biden’s attempts to renegotiate failed, he said there was “still no new methodology for engaging with Iran”.

What’s stopping Iran?

Tehran calculates that it stands to gain more in terms of sanctions relief and future negotiations by dangling the threat of the bomb than actually building it.

It has carefully cultivated a network of proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas across the Middle East as part of a “forward defence” strategy to contain Israel.

Iranian officials have begun talking of their “deterrent”, jargon associated with nuclear bombs, and suggesting that they have the ability to build a bomb when they want to.

Weaponising would be dangerous. Far better instead to leverage the status of a threshold nuclear power.

Escalation carries significant risk to the regime, which explains why the April 13 attack was so clearly telegraphed and more performative than intent on serious damage.

But if Israel retaliates, Tehran could decide it needs the bomb for its own security and has already shown a taste for danger.

“While the recent Iranian attack was ultimately ineffective, it illustrates that the regime in Tehran is deeply reckless, and seemingly comfortable with the risk that one drone or missile strike could have hit a densely populated urban target and completely changed Israel’s response,” Mr Coningham said.

“Iran will pay a steep price for developing nuclear weapons, so it will not make that decision lightly,” Ms Davenport told The Telegraph.

She added: “Escalating tensions between Israel and Iran increases the risk of Tehran determining that nuclear weapons are necessary for its security, particularly if Israel responds to the April 13 attack with a counterstrike on Iranian territory.”

Mr Barnes-Dacey said: “The intelligence suggests they don’t want to weaponise at the moment but that could change on a dime.

“Iran could decide, particularly given the worsening regional situation, that actually ultimately a nuclear deterrent is precisely what it needs in the context of a more aggressive Israel and the prospect of Trump coming back into power.”

Axis of Putin and Trump

The prospect of Mr Trump winning November’s US elections is not the only factor in play in a complicated geopolitical picture that also involves Russia.

Vladimir Putin has deepened Russian ties with Iran since his illegal invasion of Ukraine made Moscow an international pariah, which risks emboldening Tehran.

Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi told the Russian president in a call on Tuesday that Tehran’s strikes on Israel were limited and that the Islamic republic was not interested in escalation.

Russia won’t now play the same role it did in the negotiation of the JCPOA, Mr Barnes-Dacey said.

“The prospect of a kind of unified international coalition, including Russia and China, coming together to squeeze Iran on the nuclear issue is pretty non-existent at this stage,” he said.

An already unpredictable situation is complicated by the age of Iran’s Supreme Leader. When the 84 year old dies, his fatwa could be reshaped by a more hardline successor.

“It could well be that hardliners are able to seize the reins of power more fully and push the nuclear agenda forward without really caring about making any deal with us,” Mr Barnes-Dacey said.

Can the West stop Iran?

Western influence is at a low ebb with the region in such turmoil and the chances of the JCPOA being resurrected appear slim to non-existent.

Mr Biden was captured on video describing the deal as “dead” as long ago as December 2022.

“While the JCPOA is off the table, diplomacy is not. It is past time the United States puts a deal on the table to stabilise the nuclear crisis and prevent further escalation,” Ms Davenport said.

“A package that includes enhanced transparency in exchange for limited economic relief would be a good place to start.”

However, there was no political will to engage in sanctions relief with Tehran, said Mr Barnes-Dacey. “At the moment, that seems impossible given US domestic politics and the forthcoming election.

“Iran is now one of those one of the poisonous issues where there’s no room for manoeuvre in the US.”

Comment

Iran has chosen self-destruction, and is happy to take the world down with it.

Iran has chosen self-destruction, and is happy to take the world down with it

Tehran can’t possibly win a war against Israel, but the danger is its leaders are just too irrational to admit it.

Iran's Stalin? Some see Ayatollah Khamenei as the summation of the regime's brutality seeded by the Islamic Republic's Lenin, its founder Ayatollah Khomenei.

The Iranian regime has chosen suicide. True, it will take some time for the logical conclusion of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s fatal and probably irreversible course of action to play out. Like a pre-AI automaton incapable of adapting to the input of new information, the BBC will continue to blather about Iran’s capacity for “strategic patience” and the risks of Israel “dragging” the US into a regional war. 

But one thing seems clear: the Iranian theocracy has now entered a death loop. Unless Israel throws it a lifeline, it is increasingly likely that Tehran faces either a Soviet-style collapse amid a regional war it cannot afford, or bloody regime change as the revolution is eaten by its children.

By directly attacking Israel from its own soil, Iran has initiated a battle of brinkmanship that it cannot possibly win. Some will argue that it was Israel that ripped up the playbook when an Iranian general was killed in Syria in an airstrike that hit parts of Tehran’s “consulate”. Still, Jerusalem’s new red lines are by now perfectly obvious to anyone of sound mind. 

Israel knows that it cannot afford to let the Iranian onslaught pass without a response. It also knows that Tehran – possibly soon with nuclear weapons – is likely to escalate co-ordinated displays of aggression from Syria in the east and from Hezbollah in Lebanon in the north. And with the West whispering that a pivot to Asia looms, Israel may well have decided that it is now or never. 

Today, it can count on America’s support in the event of a full-blown regional war; this may not be the case in a few years’ time. In other words, Jerusalem is unlikely to back down. 

But while a regional war would test Israel, it would destroy Iran, for the simple reason that Tehran cannot afford to take on its adversary. To raise the billions needed to bankroll its nuclear programme and prop up Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, it has already raised taxes by eye-watering amounts and devalued its currency to dangerous levels. 

The situation may have reached a tipping point where Iran cannot increase spending to meet the demands of military escalation without bringing about its effective bankruptcy or presiding over an economic collapse likely to trigger a popular revolt.

It seems equally unlikely, however, that Tehran can back down without a tremendous loss of face. Its credibility among the new generation of Islamists who prop up the regime would surely be destroyed. Khamenei would struggle to revert to his earlier strategy of channelling their bellicose energies into a domestic war on headscarf rebels. 

With the theocracy gripped by infighting, it is hardly impossible that its critics could seize on the regime’s temporary weakness to attempt an uprising. Regardless of who prevailed in the resulting power struggle, the elders of the 1979 revolution could be destroyed, spurned by one side as inept and the other as insane.

So why on earth has Khamenei’s inner circle committed to this course of action? Has the regime gone insane? Khamenei himself, the second longest-serving leader of the Middle East, may no longer be acting rationally.

Advocates of the Iranian nuclear deal naively pushed interpretations of the Supreme Leader as a “tactician” and a “pragmatist”. There is an accumulation of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. 

As with Putin, Western analysts have struggled to appreciate Khamenei’s sweeping sense of destiny, hovering on that fine line between delusion and apocalypticism. 

Unlike his predecessor Ayatollah Khomenei, who feared being corrupted by French decadence while living in exile, Khamenei is said to be obsessed with the perceived depravities of Western civilisation. He devours novels that expose its cruel underbelly (Les Misérables and The Grapes of Wrath are known to be among his favourites) and is reported to have personally translated into Persian the “clash of civilisations” tracts of the Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb, cited as an inspiration for Osama bin Laden.

Khamenei’s dangerous messianism may also have been underestimated. He is to his predecessor Khomenei what Stalin was to Lenin. Vauntingly ambitious, yet paralysingly insecure, he has sought to create a cult of personality around himself. Since the brief ascendancy of the rival reformist cleric Mohammed Khatami, moderates have been purged, while a hardline loyalist faction has been built up. 

Have Khamenei’s delusions of grandeur curdled into downright derangement? His televised word vomits spewed against the “evil Zionist regime”, or American “arrogance”, are so formulaic and circular, that – much like the speeches of Soviet apparatchiks – they can effectively be read top to bottom or bottom to top (lending an illusion perhaps of stability and immutable truth in a society characterised by chaos). While his people eat from bins, and despite official claims that he enjoys only a modest lifestyle, he is believed to spend his time rattling around in the Shah’s restored palaces. He recently raised eyebrows by proclaiming that God speaks through him.

In a country where 60 per cent of people live in poverty and refusal to wear a headscarf has become a powerful symbol of resistance, his strategy appears to have shifted from religious populism to survival. The aim no longer seems to be to convince Iranians to keep the faith in the revolutionary cause but to shore up the support of a narrow base of loyalists who can protect him from being toppled. It is, of course, likely to be this faction that is hell-bent on war, having become radicalised to the point where it is incapable of geopolitical realism or cost-benefit calculations.

The sickness of the regime extends to the wider country. Pathological self-deception has come to oil the theocratic machine as much as black gold. Clerics grant men one-hour marriages to prostitutes, and young women routinely undertake hymenoplasties in advance of marriage.

All of this might seem like irrelevant detail, but having created a virtual reality in which black is white, perversion is modesty, and Iran can win against the Little Satan, the regime may be incapable of escaping the suicidal conclusions of its radicalism even if it wanted to. To show moderation at this crucial juncture would risk unravelling the intricate universe of lies that holds the system together.

This makes for a deadly geopolitical situation. World powers may well call for calm, as if this were a mere game of chicken. But the terrifying reality is that Iran simply may have gone nuts.