Tulsi Gabbard, the recently resigned/retired/fired US Director of National Intelligence, told Congress just two months ago that US intelligence agencies had concluded Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Indeed, she added, experts also determined Iran had not resumed its suspended 2003 nuclear weapons programme. 

However, Donald Trump said she was “wrong” His claim that “Iran would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks to four weeks” had been his justification, however improbable, for attacking Iran on 28 February. Gabbard went silent.

When Trump started up again last week, saying that Iran has a “maximum” of two weeks to sign a deal on its nuclear activities or else he restarts his war, Gabbard backed his lies. Iran is “at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months.” she said. She’s loyal to the end, but this is so stupid that it’s insulting.

How can Iran have no active nuclear weapons programme in March of 2026, but be within “two to four weeks” of nuclear weapons only a couple of months later? Almost all the ‘evidence’ about Iranian nuclear weapons  is about as reliable as Donald Trump himself.

You will encounter references to this ‘nuclear weapons programme’ literally every day in the media, as though it were a universally acknowledged fact, but it’s not a fact at all. It’s an allegation that feels like a fact because it has been said so many times, so loudly, by so many people. However, the ‘evidence’ is purely circumstantial, and quite possibly wrong.

Iran’s late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, published a fatwa (religious ruling) in 2004 forbidding Muslims to use nuclear weapons: “We consider the use of these weapons to be haram (forbidden), and the effort to protect mankind from this great disaster is everyone’s duty.” This is a lot stricter than declared US military doctrine on the same issue.

We should take supreme religious leaders seriously when they speak on matters of faith and morals, and Khamenei clearly believed in the sinfulness of killing millions of people. However, he was quite vague when he discussed building nuclear weapons for deterrence only. In fact, he made a distinction between “our religious fatwa and our rational fatwa.”

The ‘rational fatwa’ says that Iran must never start a nuclear war because it would not survive it. Israel alone has 300 nuclear warheads and the United States has thousands, whereas Iran has none now and could never match those numbers. Nor, given recent performance, could Iran count on any of its (putative) nuclear-armed missiles getting through to their targets.

But if just one or two of Iran’s hypothetical nuclear missiles could strike back at Israel or the US – “revenge from the grave” – the mere knowledge of that capability could deter Iran’s enemies from attacking it at all. The ‘rational fatwa’ can therefore include building a few nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes only (provided Iran never actually uses them.)

This has led Iran to a stop-go pattern of nuclear weapons research, like this:

Iraq invades Iran (1980), old nuclear research from the Shah’s time is dusted off.

War ends (1988), research shuts down.

Pakistan tests nuclear weapons near Iran’s border (1998), Iranian nuclear research restarts.

Leak of information about the research; operation shut down (2002).

And it stayed shut down well past 2015, when all the great powers signed a deal with Iran. ‘Obama’s deal’, if you like. It guaranteed that for 15 years Iran would not enrich uranium beyond 3.67%, and Iran obeyed it to the letter until Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu persuaded Trump to tear it up in 2018.

The Iranians did nothing for a couple of years, hoping that the other signatories to the treaty could talk sense into Trump – and then they did something stupid. They started enriching uranium fuel beyond the treaty limit, though very slowly and still far short of weapons grade.

It took them four years to go from 20% to 60%, and they announced every step in advance.

They weren’t trying to ‘break out’ of the treaty; they were trying to make the other countries return to it. But it certainly allowed hostile governments to claim that Iran is now actively seeking nuclear weapons.

It isn’t. Not even now. Even before the United States and Israel attacked Iran ten weeks ago, it was at least two years of hard work away from a working nuclear weapon. Indeed, it had not even begun working on it.

One big reason that everybody else stands by and let the US and Israel pound Iran into the ground is that the regime is revolting: murderous, tyrannical and corrupt. But Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu are vigilantes, not policemen, and their war is illegal. They are war criminals.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’.  The previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.