How Close Is Iran to the Bomb?
If Iran ever builds a nuclear bomb, then we’ll be living in a drastically more dangerous world. For more than two decades, avoiding that reality has motivated American foreign policy, with decidedly mixed results. Now, recent activities at a secretive office inside Tehran’s Ministry of Defense is stoking fears that we’re far closer to that day than many experts understand.
Two separate documents—about a half dozen pages written in Farsi—obtained by The Free Press reveal how Iran’s parliament, or Majlis, is significantly expanding the funding and military pursuits of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Farsi language–based acronym, SPND. The pages of legislation, passed this summer, were downloaded from the parliament’s website, but are being detailed for the first time in the Western press.
While the new Iranian legislation doesn’t specifically mention nuclear bomb development, it clearly states that SPND’s mandate is to produce advanced and nonconventional weapons with no civilian oversight. The legislation, which The Free Press translated, states that “this organization focuses on managing and acquiring innovative, emerging, groundbreaking, high-risk, and superior technologies in response to new and emerging threats.”
The law essentially shields Iran’s defense department from any domestic oversight—while giving it a seemingly unlimited budget, though no specific numbers were given. When Iran’s parliament published the legislation on its website in May, it offered the most detailed accounting yet of SPND’s structure, which was largely kept secret.
The Iranian law decrees that SPND reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is also the chief commander of Iran’s armed forces. It says the organization “has an independent legal [status] and operates as a government institution with financial, transactional, and administrative independence.”
Ali Akbar Salehi, a former foreign minister and ex-head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, bluntly told Iranian state television in February that his country already has all the necessary components to build a bomb. “We have all the thresholds of nuclear science and technology,” Salehi said in response to a question about Iran’s nuclear capabilities. “I’ll give you an example: What does a car want? It wants a chassis, an engine, a steering wheel, and a gearbox. You tell me, did you make the gearbox? I say yes. Did you make the engine? Yes, but each one is for its own purpose.”
For more than a decade, American, Israeli, and United Nations officials have closely tracked SPND’s operations due to their collective belief that it has played the leading role in covert nuclear weapons research for the Islamic Republic.
Starting in 2014, the U.S. has sanctioned a spiderweb of SPND officials, subsidiaries, and front companies in a bid to drain the organization’s supply lines and resources. Israel was so alarmed by SPND’s activities that its agents assassinated the organization’s former chief, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, on the outskirts of Tehran in November 2020. Assassins, also believed to be backed by Israel, killed five other Iranian scientists between 2007 and 2012, and attempted to take out a sixth.
Now, in an apparent jab at Israel, this new Iranian law described in the documents reviewed by The Free Press honors SPND’s fallen founder, stating that the organization’s work will “continue and consolidate the path of the scientist, Martyr Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and achieve the advanced technologies needed for current and future defense and security.”
David Albright, a former UN arms inspector who has closely tracked SPND’s activities for more than a decade, believes the documents show Tehran’s brazenness and desire to make known its growing capabilities. “SPND seeks to develop all kinds of weapons systems and do all kinds of military-related research, and they want to worry their adversaries while ensuring an open spigot of money from the Iranian regime,” Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, told The Free Press. “This would come largely free of governmental or parliamentary oversight.”