IRAN – THE GROWING NUCLEAR THREAT

After more than four decades of menaces and threats to wipe Israel off the map, the shadow war finally exploded into open conflict when the Iranian regime launched an unprecedented barrage on 13^th April, with more than 300 drones and missiles fired at their arch enemy. Despite bombastic claims by the mullahs and fake videos of raging fires shown on state-run TV networks, in fact the air strike was a spectacular failure. Around 99% of the missiles and drones fired at Israeli targets either blew up shortly after launching or were destroyed by the Israeli Iron Dome defence system, with air support from the US, UK, France and Jordan. Nevertheless, this calamitous attack triggered Israel’s retaliatory response on 19^th April, with airstrikes on military targets in the Iranian cities of Isfahan and Tabriz, and simultaneous drone and missile attacks on Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) compounds in Iraq and Syria. The tit-for-tat exchange has concentrated minds on how much worse things could become if the mullahs develop a nuclear weapon.

The IRGC control the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme. Although the mullahs claim that their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa against the acquisition, development or use of nuclear weapons way back in the 1990’s, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), stockpiles of Iran’s enriched uranium now stand at 21 times the amounts permitted under UN Resolutions. The IAEA reported it had detected uranium particles enriched to 83.7% at Fordow, an underground uranium enrichment facility 20 miles northeast of the Holy City of Qom. IAEA inspectors say that there has been “frenzied activity” at Fordow recently as the mullahs’ race to install new equipment to accelerate the enrichment programme, enriching to levels a hairs’ breadth away from weapons grade, posing a grave threat to the Middle East and the wider world. An even bigger underground nuclear site has been constructed at Natanz, in the Zagros Mountains in central Iran, in a plant buried so deep in the earth that it is beyond the reach of weapons designed to destroy such facilities.

The Iranian regime has achieved this advanced state of uranium enrichment by deceiving the West into believing they were obeying the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, introduced by President Barack Obama in 2015. The mullahs are past masters at lying and cheating. They enthusiastically grasped Obama’s deeply flawed nuclear deal in 2015, agreeing to all of its restrictive clauses, while secretly accelerating their clandestine work on the production of a nuclear weapon. President Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the deal in 2018, declaring it the worst deal in American history. He imposed a tough new ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions regime and blacklisted the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization.

President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken have wasted valuable time and effort ever since, attempting to raise the JCPOA from the dead. It was never going to happen. It is well documented that the mullahs’ regime has used the JCPOA, even when it was operational, as a convenient cover for its clandestine nuclear programme, hiding its activities from IAEA inspectors. The regime is also developing ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads. But American attempts to appease the mullahs have been faithfully followed by the EU and UK. The EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security – the Spanish socialist Josep Borrell, has clung to every available straw to appease Tehran, ignoring IRGC terror attacks and assassinations in Europe and their brutal oppression inside Iran.

The IRGC’s raison d’être is exclusively summed up in domestic suppression and interference in the affairs of other countries, with the aim of expanding the Iranian regime’s malign influence. Meddling in the internal affairs of other nations and particularly exporting terrorism and fundamentalism, has for years been a strategic pillar for Tehran’s survival. However, although senior figures attached to the IRGC have been sanctioned by the EU and UK, there has been ongoing resistance to blacklisting the entire organization, emboldening the mullahs to engage in further warmongering across the Middle East and now, to launch a full- frontal attack on their sworn adversary Israel.

In their most recent report published on 4 March this year, the IAEA stated: “Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium and its centrifuge capacity combined are sufficient to make enough Weapon Grade Uranium (WGU), taken as 25 kilograms (kg) of WGU, for seven nuclear weapons in one month, nine in two months, eleven in three months, 12-13 in four months, and 13 in five months”. The growing threat is palpable. The mullahs are on the verge of building a nuclear warhead and a ballistic missile system capable of delivering it, with Israel as their clear target. We could soon face a scenario where Iran’s proxies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon, launch a simultaneous barrage of kamikaze drones and missiles at Israel, while Tehran dares the Israelis to retaliate, hovering their finger over the nuclear button. The path towards a terrifying nuclear conflict, spreading from the Middle East to the wider world, is ominous. 

The US State Department’s recent report on the growing nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime ended with the words: “We remain committed to a diplomatic solution and reaffirm our determination that Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon”. It is this sort of pathetic, weak-kneed, failure to abandon the policy of appeasement, that has created the threat we now face. It is time the US, UN, EU and UK recognised that severing the head of the snake in Tehran is the only way to end the nuclear threat. Western nations must show their support for the Iranian people and their courageous resistance units who want regime change. 75 million beleaguered Iranians have taken to the streets again and again in nationwide uprisings, only to be ruthlessly crushed by the IRGC. In the 2022 uprising over 750 were killed and 30,000 arrested, many of whom have been tortured, raped, and executed. 

The Iranian people hate the mullahs. They long for justice, freedom, democracy, human rights, women’s rights and a nuclear free Iran. They don’t want Western military intervention. They just ask for moral support and an end to appeasement. The first step towards showing our support would be for the EU and UK to blacklist the IRGC and for the International Criminal Court to indict Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Ebrahim Raisi and all those Iranian officials and institutions that have violated human rights and committed crimes against humanity. This will send the strongest possible message of moral support to the Iranian people, in whose hands severing of the head of the snake remains.