When Iran’s covert nuclear program 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 United States 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…