Iran is capable of building a nuclear weapon in days if the political decision is made, the author wrote in CN last October. He maintains that view after the U.S. and Israeli strikes on three nuclear facilities last month.
Anti-aircraft guns guarding Natanz Nuclear Facility, Iran. (Hamed Saber/Wikimedia Commons)
Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector, wrote the following article for Consortium News last October, in which he says that following the first missile exchange that month, Iranian officials made it clear that the fatwa against nuclear weapons could be lifted; that Iran was prepared to obtain a nuclear weapon; that it had the means to do so and that the decision could be implemented in days once the Supreme Leader gave the order.
Following the more intense 12-day war in June, Ritter told Consortium News‘ CN Live! and Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom that Iran could still be days away if a decision is made to build a bomb. There was no damage done to the facility at Isfahan, where Ritter told Napolitano 90 percent enriched uranium could be converted into metal, an important step in the bomb-making process.
The IAEA says it does not know where 400 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium was removed to from the Fordow enrichment plant, which was damaged by U.S. bombing. Ritter says enriching that to 90 percent can be done quickly. There is still no indication that Iran has decided to initiate this process.
The IAEA director general said on June 18 that there is “no proof of a systematic effort” by Iran to develop nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence estimates say the same.
Ritter says Iran eventually enriched to 60 percent as a bargaining chip with the U.S. after Donald Trump foolishly pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal, which was working to maintain Iran at 3.67 percent enrichment.
But he says the move was an unwise waving of a red flag before an aggressive U.S. and Israel.
Here is the updated version of Ritter’s October 2024 Consortium News article.
By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News
October 20, 2024
The outbreak of conflict between Iran and Israel [in October 2024] appears to have changed Iran’s stance against possessing a nuclear weapon as Israel is poised to strike after Teheran’s retaliation with two major attacks of drones and ballistic and cruise missiles.
Iran has issued at least three statements through official channels since April that has opened the door to the possibility of religious edicts against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons being rescinded.
The circumstances which Iran has said must exist to justify this reversal appear to have now been met.
No mere threats, these statements issued by Teheran should be viewed as declaratory policy indicating Iran has already made the decision to obtain a nuclear weapon; that the means to do so are already in place and that this decision can be implemented in a matter of days once the final political order is given.
The religious fatwa against possessing nuclear weapons was issued in October 2003 by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It reads:
“We believe that adding to nuclear weapons and other types of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons and biological weapons, are a serious threat to humanity…[w]e consider the use of these weapons to be haram (forbidden), and the effort to protect mankind from this great disaster is everyone’s duty.”
However, the Shia faith holds that fatwas are not inherently permanent, and Islamic jurists can reinterpret the scripture in accord with the needs of time.
Shortly after Iran launched Operation True Promise against Israel in April, Ahmad Haghtalab, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander responsible for the security for Iran’s nuclear sites, declared:
“If [Israel] wants to exploit the threat of attacking our country’s nuclear centers as a tool to put pressure on Iran, it is possible and conceivable to revise the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear doctrine and policies to deviate from previously declared considerations.”
In May, Kamal Kharrazi, a former foreign minister who advises the Supreme Leader, declared: “We [Iran] have no decision to build a nuclear bomb, but should Iran’s existence be threatened, there will be no choice but to change our military doctrine.”
And earlier this month Iranian lawmakers called for a review of Iran’s defense doctrine to consider adopting nuclear weapons as the risk of escalation with Israel continues to grow. The legislators noted that the Supreme Leader can reconsider the fatwa against nuclear weapons on the grounds that the circumstances have changed.
These statements, seen together, constitute a form of declaratory policy which, given the sources involved, imply that a political decision has already been made to build a nuclear bomb once the national security criterion has been met.
Has the Capability
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei can reverse the fatwa. (Khamenei.ir, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Iran has for some time now possessed the ability to manufacture and weaponize nuclear explosive devices. Using highly enriched uranium, Iran could construct in a matter of days a simple gun-type weapon that could be used in a ballistic missile warhead.
In June Iran informed the IAEA that it was installing some 1,400 advanced centrifuges at its Fordow facility. Based upon calculations derived from Iran’s on-hand stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium hexaflouride (the feedstock used in centrifuge-based enrichment), Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium (i.e., above 90 percent) to manufacture 3-5 uranium-based weapons in days.
All that is needed is the political will to do so. It appears that Iran has crossed this threshold, meaning that the calculus behind any Israeli and/or U.S. attack on Iran has been forever changed.
Iran has made no bones about this new reality. In February, the former chief of the Atomic Energy Organization, Ali-Akbar Salehi, stated that Iran has crossed “all the scientific and technological nuclear thresholds” to build a nuclear bomb, noting that Iran had accumulated all the necessary components for a nuclear weapon, minus the highly enriched uranium.
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Two weeks later, Javad Karimi Ghodousi, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Commission, declared that if the supreme leader “issues permission, we would be a week away from testing the first [nuclear bomb]“, later adding that Iran “needs half a day or maximum a week to build a nuclear warhead.”
A simple gun-type nuclear weapon would not need to be tested — the “Little Boy“ device dropped on Hiroshima by the U.S. on Aug. 6, 1945 was a gun-type device that was deemed so reliable that it could be used operationally without any prior testing.
Iran would need between 75 and 120 pounds of highly enriched uranium per gun-type device (the more sophisticated the design, the less material would be needed). Regardless, the payload of the Fatah-1 solid-fueled hypersonic missile, which was used in the Oct. 1 attack on Israel, is some 900 pounds—more than enough capacity to carry a gun-type uranium weapon.
Given the fact that the ballistic missile shield covering Israel was unable to intercept the Fatah-1 missile, if Iran were to build, deploy, and employ a nuclear-armed Fatah-1 missile against Israel, there is a near 100 percent certainty that it would hit its target.
Iran would need 3-5 nuclear weapons of this type to completely destroy Israel’s ability to function as a modern industrial nation.
Consequences of Pulling Out of Iran Nuclear Deal
U.S. team on way to JCPOA meeting at U.N., New York City, 2016. (State Department)
This situation came about after President Donald Trump in 2017 withdrew the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal. The driving factor behind the negotiation of the JCPOA, which took place under President Barack Obama, was to shut down Iran’s pathway to a nuclear weapon. As Obama said,
“Put simply, under this deal, there is a permanent prohibition on Iran ever having a nuclear weapons program and a permanent inspections regime that goes beyond any previous inspection regime in Iran. This deal provides the IAEA the means to make sure Iran isn’t doing so, both through JCPOA-specific verification tools, some of which last up to 25 years, and through the Additional Protocol that lasts indefinitely.
In addition, Iran made commitments in this deal that include prohibitions on key research and development activities that it would need to design and construct a nuclear weapon. Those commitments have no end date.”
Early on in his administration, in June 2021, after Trump had already pulled the U.S. out of the deal, President Joe Biden declared that Iran would “never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.”
The director of U.S. National Intelligence said in a statement released Oct. 11 that, “We assess that the Supreme Leader has not made a decision to resume the nuclear weapons program that Iran suspended in 2003.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw from the JCPOA, Iran took actions which underscored that it no longer felt constrained by any JCPOA limits.
Iran has expanded its nuclear program by installing advanced centrifuge cascades used to enrich uranium and scaled back International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring of its nuclear program. In short, Iran has positioned itself to produce a nuclear weapon on short order.
While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) currently believes that the Supreme Leader has not made the political decision to do so, an assessment published in July contains a telling omission from past assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
The February 2024 ODNI assessment noted that, “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”
However, this statement went missing from the July 2024 assessment, a clear indication that the U.S. intelligence community, due in large part to the reduction in IAEA inspection activity, lacks the insight into critical technical aspects of Iran’s nuclear-related industries.
Senator Lindsey Graham, after reading the classified version of the July 2024 ODNI report on Iran, said he was “very worried” that “Iran will in the coming weeks or months possess a nuclear weapon.”
Iran indicated that any attack against its nuclear or oil and gas production capabilities would be viewed as existential in nature. That could trigger the reversal of the fatwa and the deployment of nuclear weapons within days of such a decision being made.
The United States and nuclear-power Israel have long said that a nuclear-armed Iran was a red line which could not be crossed without severe consequences, namely massive military intervention designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
That line has been crossed — Iran is a de facto nuclear power, even if it hasn’t taken the final steps to complete the construction of a nuclear bomb.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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The idea that Iran enriching to 60% uranium was a decisive “red flag” that provoked U.S. and Israeli attacks is not supported by modern history. The U.S. and its allies have consistently attacked or overthrown governments, regardless of whether those states possessed nuclear capabilities, were enriching uranium, or were actively seeking WMDs.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein
In 2003, Iraq had no nuclear weapons, no enrichment program, and no stockpiles of WMDs. The Iraqi government repeatedly insisted this to the international community. Even UN weapons inspectors, including Scott Ritter himself, found no evidence of active WMD programs. Despite this, the U.S. invaded, citing WMDs as a pretext. Iraq’s nuclear status, or lack thereof, was irrelevant.
Libya under Muammar Gaddafi
Gaddafi agreed to dismantle his nuclear and chemical weapons programs in 2003, seeking to normalize relations with the West. He handed over centrifuges, warhead designs, and enriched uranium. Yet less than a decade later, in 2011, NATO intervened militarily, leading to Gaddafi’s violent overthrow and the collapse of the Libyan state.
Syria under Bashar
While Syria did possess chemical weapons in the past, multiple allegations of chemical use—many of them disputed—became pretexts for U.S. and allied missile strikes, even though Syria has no nuclear weapons or enrichment program of significance.
Russia under Putin
Russia possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, with over 6,000 nuclear warheads. Despite this overwhelming deterrent, NATO has continued to expand toward Russia’s borders, supporting proxy wars and imposing severe sanctions, which have amounted to an undeclared hybrid war.
Conclusion:
The historical pattern shows that U.S. military aggression is not reliably deterred or provoked by the mere presence or absence of nuclear enrichment or weapons programs. It is driven by imperial strategy, control of resources, and geopolitical dominance.
Therefore, framing Iran’s 60% enrichment as a unique provocation that “invited” U.S. or Israeli attacks misunderstands the broader reality. The U.S. has demonstrated a willingness to attack nations regardless of their nuclear status. The only consistent pattern is that the U.S. attacks when it calculates that doing so serves its imperial interests, not based on some objective nuclear threshold.
In truth, there is no diplomatic formula or percentage of uranium enrichment that guarantees safety from U.S. aggression. History proves that only the collapse of U.S. imperial power itself can bring meaningful security, both for targeted nations and for ordinary Americans who pay the price for endless war.
Since the fall of al-Assad in Syria, to my knowledge no chemical weapons or associated facilities have come to light. I’m sure if any had been found we’d all have heard about it.
Libya / North Korea
Minutes , a few miles away ?
How will they get them ?
Weapons like autos on the lot .
New and used , delivery is free ?
Self driving , automatic , manual .
Used is the best option some do say ?
Will new not bring back yesterday .
Used will not surivive the day .
The lot now full , we mow the neighbors grass .
Tell him to move his ass ,
Preeminent domain , free at last ?
Paradeless ticker tape instantaneous .
Patriotic songs to excite the mass .
With boots or ____ we’ll fill that blank ?
Hollyhood movies , a kaleidoscope of remakes .
Noone has an original thought ?
Miles and miles of a no-wailing wall ?
Will the eagle fly , if not , why ?
Is that sound the drummer boy ?
Afterall its the 4th of July .
One thing is pretty clear here, and surely everyone is entitled to their opinions. However reading Government documents such as especially,
Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy – A REPORT prepared. by the
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee pm Foreign Relations, United States Senate from December 1988 – Printed 1989. The entire document runs to 1969 pages.
Will educate readers to the filthy underbelly of the CIA and the DEA with respect to how D.C. actually works.
This is a tale of the Senate conducting a very efficient, revealing investigation which CIA and DEA for obvious reasons shut the investigation down by refusing to reveal information that would have led to George, H. W. “Poppie” Bush, “41” getting caught up with Ronnie Raygun in something referred to as Iran-Contra. Which was just the very beginning of fiasco called BCCI. Something Slick Willy rubber stamped and cancelled prosecution of to hide 41’s involvement.
So Winter soldier is correct to appoint. I spend my time reading factual material and with the world in the condition it is today it seems my time is better spend doing so. Very obviously no one in D.C. learned anything from the Vietnam experience too many Holly Wood distractions maybe, I dunno.
But there is one thing for sure whats wrong with D.C. is far too many bull shit artist like ‘Taco Don” end up getting their way there.
By the way the committee was led by John Kerry, who I’m damned well sure learned just how things really rock in D.C. John and learned from the experience in Vietnam it is not the American soldier who is the problem, it’s the fight wing greed heads. and billionaire who control the Congress.
The Iraq – Afghanistan experience shows us however not nearly enough Americans learned anything from these experiences. The fearless loser in charge being the latest and greatest example of pissy leadership!
For instance while Will Rogers and Mark Twain have been credited for coining this phrase truth is neither did. The creator remains anonymous, this phrase was widely used and a favorite of many writer around the same time.
So to so many who claim to be knowledgeable about complicated histories I have this to add. “It ain’t what a person claims to know that bothers me so much, it’s the fact that what he claims to know just ain’t so.
Thanks to CN & Co. Give us all the strength to know the right fight to fight and clean out D.C.. NOW!
Have a nice safe 4rth of July. I’ll be boycotting the event. Something about celebrating Freedom when the U.S. leadership in D.C. is working overtime stealing from us.
8 years “WAR” was about the business interests of U.S. based, trans-national corporations.
As always…
And, like everything else written in “The Free World”, Col. Ritter manages to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room. Which is Israel’s Rogue Nuclear Weapons Program that has produced hundreds of nuclear weapons.
The one big surprise to me in the last round of fighting was that Iran’s hypersonic missiles did not hit the Israeli nuclear complex, at Dimona iirc. That might have called enough attention to Dimona so that even the corrupt cops on the beat at the IAEA could not have missed it.
—
The one topic that I’d like to hear Mr. Ritter address is how frequently “inspectors” are really planted spies by the CIA or others? The role of the IAEA in this latest round of fighting appeared to be to provide quick bomb damage reports on the Israeli/American strikes. Necessary so the bombers know whether they need another strike. And, now, the big cry from the IAEA is that Iran must immediately tell Israel and America exactly where its enriched uranium currently is located. The bombing planners need that information ASAP.
The picture of that lying scum John Kerry wants to make me puke. But, I would like to ask him a question, if anyone gets a chance to address such Democratic Royalty. How does it feel to be an old man ordering young men to go and die in a useless war?
For those who don’t know the liar that is John Kerry, go look up “winter soldier.” It was the launch point for this Fortunate One’s career to be a professional con artist.
Does anyone here know: Would a reversal of the fatwa necessarily be public?
thank you, mr ritter, for reminding us
of the indisputable facts on the ground.
they constitute quite a scary scenario,
apparently initiated by those who think they can
win any fight they start and will own the world
w/o having to pay even the slightest price?
[how many wars have the US of A won, actually?]
millions of human lives already sacrificed in the
race for global [white] settler colonial supremacy
apparently don’t matter to the few insatiables.
will we be able to stop them, against all odds?
Grenada. It was de nada.
Iran’s “latent deterrence” strategy up to this point, and their potential path to securing “weapons of mass destruction” in the form of nuclear and chemical weapons should they end up definitively shifting course, has been directly enabled by the proliferation of proscribed components, technologies, and expertise to those countries by the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and other aligned states.
As early as the 1960s and into the twenty-first century, nuclear components from US-based facilities such as the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma, the NUMEC site in Apollo, PA, and Giza Technologies in Secaucus, NJ were acquired by Israeli-affiliated actors for their nuclear weapons program with the complicity of various US officials and authorities, some of which ended up being proliferated onward to states such as apartheid South Africa, Pakistan, and both pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, according to investigators such as Rep. John Dingell and Daniel Sheehan (accompanying more wide-ranging US and Israeli protection and participation in the A.Q. Khan network, detailed in sources such as David Armstrong and Joseph Trento’s “America and the Islamic Bomb,” which simultaneously increases the probability of Iran being placed under Pakistan’s own nuclear umbrella should their interests sufficiently align). Moreover, from the 1990s onward, seemingly misguided initiatives such as MI6/Mossad joint efforts to supply Iran with chemical weapons components (disclosed in Richard Tomlinson’s case) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s “Operation Merlin” to provide Iran with ostensibly misleading but readily reverse-engineerable nuclear bomb blueprints, alongside Hallibuton’s sale of nuclear technology to Iran, have likewise eased Iran’s path to potential WMD acquisition.
Much of this covert assistance has often appeared aimed at incentivizing Iran into renouncing its multiple fatwas against WMD development that have been in existence since the 1980s under both Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei in order to give those countries a more tangible pretext for a full-scale regime change once Iran has reached an unambiguous threshhold status.
They have tried “full-scale regime change” on several occasions now. The most recently during the last war. The Mossad spy cells in Iran were supposed to sow chaos after the initial decapitation attacks at the top leadership. This was supposed to lead to the constant CIA/Mossad dream of a revolution that puts the Son of the Shah back on a remade Peacock Throne. This was after several ‘color revolution’ attempts, frequently based around claims of “women’s rights” over recent decades.
In this latest round of fighting, the CIA/Mossad was disappointed that they could not spark a revolution in Iran, and instead the people of Iran appear to have rallied against the foreign bombers. Instead of a revolution, Mossad got so many of its people arrested that they apparently went for a Hannibal Doctrine strike on Evin Prison.
The only ‘tangible pretext’ the CIA/Mossad needs is that the Shah does not rule in Iran.
The DC-Tel Aviv-London axis, alongside many of their sometime allies in the region and beyond (e.g., MeK, PJAK, Jundallah, the Republic of Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and other GCC states, etc.), have certainly attempted to induce regime change in Iran using multiple methods on myriad occasions at this point, but by adding the qualifier “full-scale,” I mean to state that they have not yet made a unified full-bore commitment to something on the unlimited scale of, e.g., a 2003 Iraq-style invasion involving the extensive deployment of conventional boots on the ground, or at least US armed forces marshalling every air and remotely-targeted resource available to them to hit government and civilian infrastructure on an unrestricted basis (rather than leaving Israel to do so with its relatively inferior armaments, with Trump’s purported insistence that they do not directly assassinate the Supreme Leader). Of course, I realize that Iran’s defenses are much more extensive than those of Iraq, but “while boys have gone to Baghdad, real men have not yet gone to Tehran” as part of an inevitably shortsighted campaign to permanently incapacitate their perceived foe, to paraphrase an oft-repeated remark in neoconservative circles. Given overall circumstances, I do concede that it is possible that we are now finally in the initial stages of that endgame.
As a separate aside, the CIA, Mossad, and other MICIMATT powers that be are not necessarily of one mind on whether or not Reza Pahlavi should be empowered or imposed to rule Iran in the event of a successful regime change. For instance, some influential figures, including former JCS chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton, are adamantly opposed to the Shah’s monarchy retaking power and appear to favor other candidates such as Maryam Rajavi and her MeK allies (who are notoriously unpopular among even much of the domestic anti-government opposition in Iran due to their collaborationist support for Ba’athist Iraq during the 1980-88 war and legacy of terrorism against civilians), while still others would prefer to balkanize Iran into several ethno-religious polities by encouraging separatist tendencies among Kurds, Baluchs, Khuzestani Arabs, and others (in contrast to those who take the Brzezinski position that Iran should remain a vital pillar of stability within the MENA region). Of course, some self-defeating mix-and-match employment of those scenarios would be more likely in practice, yielding the paradoxical prospect of curveball outcomes such as ironically increasing the influence of people like former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (as Michael “Ayatollah Mike” D’Andrea and others within the MICIMATT basically did in the case of the 2017-18 protests in Iran).
I would think that if Iran did already have nuclear bombs, Israel would have known about it and would not have started a war with them. If they DO make some now, I think Israel might cool their jets a bit in their intentions to dominate the Middle East.
The US has demonstrated quite clearly that it cannot be trusted to stick to any deal that would limit Iran’s ability to make such a bomb and we have now definitely given them the incentive to do so ….
Neither the US nor Israel can be trusted to abide by any agreement they make. Let us not forget that Iran complied in every respect, as even the corrupt and thoroughly dishonest IAEA reported, with the JCPOA until the Blowhard in Chief “withdrew” from that agreement, once again displaying his stupidity and bad judgment. Iran was also negotiating in good faith to try to reach another agreement with the US and other parties while the US was not negotiating in good faith, but in an effort to deceive Iran into believing that it was possible to reach a reasonable agreement which would limit Iran’s use of nuclear material and relief from the illegal sanctions imposed on it by the US. Trust the US or Israel? No reasonable person in this world would trust either one on any subject. They lie, cheat, steal, murder and act as wrecking balls throughout the Middle East.
“The US has demonstrated quite clearly that it cannot be trusted to stick to any deal”
Could have stopped right there. When does the USA keep any deal? Trump even breaks his own deals. Ask Mexico and Canada how renegotiating NAFTA worked out? The USA can not be trusted to stick to any deal.
——–
One would rather suspect that Kim Jong-Un of North Korea called Iran, or met with them on the sidelines of the SCO or someplace … and told Iran … “hey, you would never have gotten bombed it you had gone ahead and build those nukes years ago.” I wonder if the North Koreans like to use the phrase “I told you so”?
US and Israeli “diplomacy” at work: Do as we say or we will destroy you. Take a look at the Middle East and observe what a wonderful job these two thugs have done in the region – millions of innocent civilians dead, tens of millions of displaced persons, total chaos, the top head-chopper is now in charge in Syria, etc. Oh, maybe this would be a good time to remember that these two thugs are continuing to carry out the genocide of the Palestinians. I guess that is what the bloviating politicians call “American Values”.