CNN ONLINE

When Iran’s covert nuclear programme came to international attention over two decades ago, Tehran insisted that its intentions were peaceful and that it had no plans to develop weapons.

The country’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even went as far as issuing a fatwa, or legal ruling under Islamic law, banning them. But his death at the hands of the US and Israel last month could clear a path for the regime’s hardest-line factions to rethink the ruling. The public discourse in Iran is already heading that way.

“The nuclear fatwa is dead,” Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft told CNN. “Elite opinion as well as public opinion has shifted dramatically on this, which shouldn’t be surprising since Iran has been bombed twice in the midst of negotiations by two nuclear-equipped states.”

For years, the former supreme leader resisted internal pressure to authorize the building of a nuclear weapon, particularly after President Trump withdrew from nuclear pact negotiated between Iran and Obama administration in 2018.

Faced with escalating American and Israeli hostility, Khamenei instead adhered to his doctrine of what experts call “strategic patience.” He allowed Iran to steadily advance its uranium enrichment program, bringing the material ever closer to weapons-grade levels without crossing the threshold into actual bomb development.

The calls to pursue a nuclear bomb grew louder after Trump’s order to strike three of Iran’s most important nuclear sites this month.

Even before those strikes, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had warned that Tehran was prepared to shift its nuclear posture.

Presuming the Iranian regime has access to its highly enriched uranium stockpile, it could opt to build a crude nuclear device rather than a sophisticated, missile-deliverable weapon, said Sina Azodi, author of “Iran and the Bomb: The United States, Iran and the Nuclear Question.”

He points out that Iran’s deterrence policy over the decades has largely focused on Iraq, Israel and more recently Saudi Arabia. And, if Iran were to push forward with its own weapon, he says Riyadh would likely be the next regional candidate to go for a bomb.