Ayatollah Khamenei: Nukes Are Haram

by | Oct 10, 2019

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.

About Scott Horton

Scott Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. He's the author of the 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, the 2017 book, Fool's Errand:Time to End the War in Afghanistan, editor of the 2019 book The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019 and the 2022 book Hotter Than The Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. He’s conducted more than 5,800 interviews since 2003. Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Larisa Alexandrovna Horton.

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