We already know that’s been the edict in Iran since his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, banned pursuit of nuclear weapons back in the 1980s. But here Khamenei is repeating it, again.

“Building and stockpiling nuclear bombs is wrong and using it is haram (religiously forbidden) … Although we have nuclear technology, Iran has firmly avoided it.”

Now, Horton’s law says he must be lying since he’s a politician saying something good, however, in this case, the actual behavior of the Iranian government this whole time has been consistent with creating a latent deterrent at worst, and mostly have just built up their program so they’ll have something to trade away in exchange for normalization. Something that worked for them, temporarily, at the end of the last administration, when Obama signed the JCPOA.