A few days ago, US President Donald Trump said that if the Iranian regime possessed a nuclear weapon, it would use it against its neighbors and against anyone the ideologues of the Revolutionary Guards consider a permissible target.
Some among the opponents of Trump and of Trumpism - and some of them have well-founded quarrels with him - insist that he is exaggerating in this claim, if not lying outright, in order to inflate the matter and marshal every capability against Iran.
Some may go further still and say that the nuclear bomb is forbidden by the fatwa of the historic Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whom the American bombs did away with.
I want to take up some of this.
In an interview conducted with him in October 2025, Ali Shamkhani, adviser to the Iranian Supreme Leader on the military defense council and former secretary of the National Security Council, killed by the same bombs that killed Khamenei, said on an Iranian pprogram that Iran had made a mistake in not developing the nuclear bomb during his tenure in the 1990s.
Shamkhani, defense minister in the era of "reformist" President Mohammad Khatami, said that he had been thinking about it at the time and that it was now established that Iran should have possessed such a capability.
Asked whether he would pursue the bomb's development if he returned to his post as it was then, he said that yes, he would certainly go in that direction.
This is plain proof from within the very core of the Iranian regime. As for the former Supreme Leader's fatwa, it is no more than a fatwa that "changes with the change of time and place," as the well-known juristic maxim puts it.
The other matter, which those who have addressed it have said repeatedly, is that the Iranian regime's greatest danger lies in the essence of a nihilistic, confrontational, totalizing, and closed ideology, and that this danger is the very heart of the DNA of the Khomeinist political and intellectual body.
That is to say: after the nuclear weapon, the pursuit of possessing it, and the deceiving of the world with narcotics of this kind, like Khamenei's nuclear fatwa, they have come out at us with the bomb of the Strait of Hormuz, and perhaps other bombs soon.
The true threat lies in the ideas that spark these advanced weapons. These unpredictable, evolving dangers stem directly from the core of the nuclear program: the regime's own doctrine. The sum of the problem, for us, is that a non-nuclear Iran is a great danger, and that its real nuclear weapon is the essence of its policies.
Proceeding from this genuine understanding, plans can be laid and creative solutions devised - at times, perhaps, harsh ones - for dealing with this danger at its roots. Anything else is a waste of time, effort, and money, and perhaps pursuing diplomacy to no end, with no glimmer of hope.
Let us return to the picture Ali Shamkhani wished for. Had he in fact succeeded, as defense minister under Mohammad Khatami, in acquiring nuclear bombs, does anyone imagine that the mullahs and the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards would have hesitated to use them against the Arab states, Kurdistan, and the others who have received the Revolutionary Guards’ "blessings"?!
