Iran’s supreme leader must revoke a fatwa banning the development of nuclear weapons if the regime is to survive, his top military commanders have said, Report informs via The Telegraph.
In an extraordinary intervention by leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was told that Iran must have nuclear weapons to face down “existential threats” from the West.
The Telegraph can reveal that several senior commanders have U-turned in recent months, since the election of Donald Trump, and are now pressing for the development of an atomic bomb.
“We have never been this vulnerable, and it may be our last chance to obtain one before it’s too late,” one official told The Telegraph.
The fatwa – a religious ruling – was first mentioned at an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting in 2005. In it, Khamenei insisted that such weapons were “absolutely haram”, or forbidden by Islam.
It is the only constraint preventing the development of nuclear weapons, according to several Iranian officials – although exiles recently claimed that work was underway in the Islamic Republic to create nuclear missiles despite it.
An Iranian official told The Telegraph from Tehran, the capital: “The leader has forbidden negotiations with the Americans and the development of nuclear weapons, which seem to be the only ways for survival [of the regime], and he’s driving the regime toward collapse.”
“We have been just a few button presses away from building a nuclear weapon for some time now, but the pressures and justifications for having one are greater than ever.
