Iran nuclear threat: After Ayatollah's son reveals regime was secretly trying to build a nuclear bomb, West must now support democratic opposition – Struan Stevenson

By Struan Stevenson
Published 6th May 2022, 04:55 BST
Updated 6th May 2022, 07:30 BST
Comment
In an astonishing interview on the Iran Students Correspondents Association (ISCA) news channel, an Iranian state television outlet, a former deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Motahari, spilled the beans on the theocratic regime’s nuclear ambitions.

“There is no need to beat around the bush,” he said. “When we began our nuclear activity, our goal was indeed to build a bomb.”

The politician, who is the son of an Ayatollah, admitted that the goal of constructing a nuclear bomb was to use it as a “means of intimidation and to strike fear in the hearts of the enemies of Allah”.

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Motahari continued by stating that the plan by the regime had been to keep the nuclear programme secret until such time as they were ready to perform a nuclear bomb test.

“It would then have been a done deal, like in Pakistan,” he said, arguing that the world tends to take seriously countries that have nuclear bombs like Pakistan and North Korea. They are “taken into consideration on the global stage”, he said.

During the interview, Motahari said: “From the very beginning, when we entered [into] nuclear activity, our goal was to build a bomb and strengthen the deterrent forces.

"But we could not maintain the secrecy of this issue and the secret reports were revealed by the group of hypocrites."

The pejorative term ‘hypocrites’ is used by the clerical regime when referring to the People’s Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) – the main democratic opposition group.

An unidentified Iranian missile in front of a large portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a square in south Tehran (Picture: Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)An unidentified Iranian missile in front of a large portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a square in south Tehran (Picture: Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)
An unidentified Iranian missile in front of a large portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a square in south Tehran (Picture: Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)
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The PMOI/MEK famously shocked the world when they revealed the Iranian regime’s secret nuclear programme at a special press conference in Washington DC back in 2003.

Western intelligence agencies had failed to detect the clandestine activity. The exposure of the regime’s top-secret Lavizan-Shian nuclear site in north-eastern Tehran by the Iranian resistance triggered the intervention of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and forced the regime to hide its nuclear activities underground.

Since that time the mullahs have strenuously denied they were attempting to build a nuclear bomb, while accelerating their construction of thousands of centrifuges used for the enriching of uranium to weapons’ grade capacity, now believed to be around 60 per cent purity – only a fraction short of weapons’ grade.