Introduction

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has passed another resolution demanding nuclear access from Iran (Al-Jazeera, 2025). This is not an aberration, but the fulfilment of its original design. The IAEA was never a neutral technical watchdog; it is the political enforcement arm of a nuclear apartheid system, a weaponised instrument spearheaded by Tel Aviv and Washington, with Rafael Grossi as its willing accomplice. As I have argued elsewhere, the Agency functions as an 'attack dog' for the Western powers, disciplining postcolonial states under the guise of non-proliferation while shielding allied nuclear arsenals (Suren-Pahlav, 2025a). This agency already facilitated the conditions for an Israeli attack on Iran back in June 2025. Now, Grossi is being deployed once more to legitimise another strike, the outcome of which remains terrifyingly uncertain.

 

Current military movements across the northern hemisphere, and within Israel itself, indicate that a second wave of attacks on Iran may be imminent. It is plausible that within the next six months, or even sooner, another war will unfold, potentially more devastating than the twelve-day conflict of June. This follows from a structural condition: no peace settlement can guarantee immunity from future aggression, still less an unwritten one. In place of discrete conflicts emerges a condition of continuous regional warfare, punctuated by temporary pauses. These ceasefires, properly understood as provisional, recall the interwar period between the First World War and the Second World War: interruptions rather than peace. The twelve-day war is thus unlikely to remain an isolated episode; rather, it will be succeeded by one or two unstable intervals preceding any eventual settlement. Such a settlement, if it is to endure, would require Iran to secure nuclear capability not as an instrument of offence, but as a mechanism of deterrence and prevention.

 

This paper advances precisely this argument. It contends that, under prevailing structural conditions, nuclear capability emerges not as an instrument of aggression per se, but as the only credible form of deterrence available to a state subject to persistent external threat. In doing so, it rejects the normative pretence of the non-proliferation regime and instead situates Iran’s strategic calculus within a broader history of asymmetrical enforcement and selective sovereignty. Failure to achieve such a capability would expose Iran to processes of ‘Somalisation’ and territorial fragmentation, a trajectory long embedded in strategic thinking since 1979 and often associated with the geopolitical formulations attributed to Bernard Lewis.

 

 

Did Donald Trump prevent the nuclear annihilation of millions of Iranians by Israel?

Israel’s aerial assault on Iran and Iran’s subsequent retaliation with ballistic missiles, a confrontation that spanned twelve days, constituted a gamble initiated by the Israeli entity, one that ultimately backfired (Suren-Pahlav, 2025a). Unable to mount an effective self-defence and with its defensive arsenal depleted, the entity found itself cornered and desperate. It was at this critical juncture, while actively planning a nuclear strike against multiple Iranian nuclear facilities, including Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, that the United States directly intervened to avert this catastrophe.

 

This assertion is not mere conjecture; it is substantiated by the account of John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower. Based on his disclosures, Israel had threatened Donald Trump that if he did not personally intervene and authorise strikes on Iran's nuclear installations, they would nuclearise the conflict and target Iran with nuclear weapons. The outcome was that devastating pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear sites, executed without human casualties, which brought the twelve-day conflict to an end.

 

Yet, this episode reveals a profound and unsettling violence: had such a strike been carried out, had the Israelis launched a nuclear attack upon Iran, it would not only have annihilated millions of Iranian lives and wrought immense destruction, but its nuclear poison would have seeped into our soil and water, afflicting generations yet unborn with a century-long curse. This is the stark truth we must confront: a criminal and genocidal regime in Tel Aviv, which with monstrous impudence masquerades as an opponent of the Islamic regime, in reality threatens the Iranian nation with nuclear devastation and radioactive contamination.

 

This stands as further testament to Israel's inherent hostility towards Iran. The dissemination of the falsehood that Israel is not an enemy of the Iranian people but merely seeks the overthrow of the Islamic regime, a fiction divorced from its documented history of pursuing Iran's dismemberment (Suren-Pahlav, 2021; 2024), is a malicious strategy predicated on mobilising a fifth column. This fifth column comprises gullible comprador elements and, indeed, agents of foreign interests who, through the lies and propaganda of entities such as the NUFDI, strive to institutionalise this narrative within Iranian society.

 

In essence, this current enmity is neither an exception nor a novel phenomenon; it is the continuation of the foundational legacy and innate bloodthirstiness upon which Israel was built, vividly recalling the ancient Persian adage: ‘The scorpion’s sting is not born of malice, but is the imperative of its very nature.’

 

 

Historical context and the nature of the Israeli threat

The Israeli state is a colonial construct, a geopolitical artefact born from British duplicity in 1947 and established through the systematic ethnic cleansing of its indigenous Palestinian population, the Nakba. Its founding principle was not coexistence but conquest; its primary goal, the genocide and erasure of the native to make way for the settler. The historical record is written in the names of destroyed villages and the rivers of refugee blood. This is a regime whose brutal practices of occupation, apartheid, and slow-motion genocide have led respected historians and human rights organisations to invoke the haunting spectre of the German Nazi regime. A state forged in and sustained by such violence cannot be trusted with a conventional army, let alone the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

 

Let us be abruptly clear: the historical grievances exist between the regimes in Iran and in occupied Palestine, a matter of political conflict. The Iranian nation has no quarrel with the followers of Judaism; indeed, our history testifies to the opposite. We are the descendants of Cyrus the Great, who liberated the Hebrews from Babylonian captivity. Furthermore, historical scholarship suggests that under the reign of Darius the Great, Iranians were instrumental in the consolidation of a distinct Judaism, guiding its transition from idolatry toward a monotheistic framework by synthesizing elements of Zoroastrian and contemporary Mesopotamian beliefs (Magee, 2007). During the Sasanian period, Persian imperial forces were deployed to Palestine to protect Jews from Roman aggression, and this legacy of protection continued into the modern era, when Iran provided passports to French Jews and gave refuge to Polish Jewish children fleeing German persecution during the Second World War. Thus, this stance is not anti-Jewish, but in defence of an ancient nation which is the torchbearer of human civilisation. Yet, it is the Iranian nation, our children, our ancient heritage, our very immortal soil, that is now being held hostage and threatened with atomic fire by the Tel Aviv regime. This is the ultimate betrayal of basic humanity. By threatening a nation of 91.7 million for the rhetoric of its rulers, this regime exposes its own moral bankruptcy. It proves it cannot be trusted to distinguish between a state and its people, between a regime and a civilisation. A state that wields the promise of genocide as a tool of coercion has forfeited any claim to being a rational actor; it is a rogue state, governed by a death cult hiding behind a nuclear arsenal. It must also be stated that modern Palestinians and Southern Lebanese are the direct heirs of those ancient Hebrews liberated from Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE, who during the 7th century CE Islamic conquests faced the ultimatum of conversion or death, leading to their forced Islamisation and subsequent adoption of the Arabic language.

 

 

The Architecture of Vulnerability: Forging a Nation's Shield in the Shadow of its Jailer

This historical reality of transformed identities is overshadowed by the immediate reality of an existential threat, defined by a deliberately engineered military asymmetry. The material imbalance that enables this genocidal threat is a geopolitical constant, demonstrated by the West's direct military partnership with the Israeli entity. This support extends far beyond arming it to the teeth with the most advanced American and European weaponry, free of charge; it encompasses active complicity in its assaults, as unequivocally demonstrated by Western powers' direct participation in defending and assisting Israeli attacks during the twelve-day aerial assault on Iran. This is the logical culmination of Israel's function as a garrison state, a colonial outpost utilised by the West to enforce its regional hegemony.

 

The Iranian nation, irrespective of its governing regime, is systematically rendered vulnerable to this threat. It labours under a suffocating sanctions regime designed to prohibit the acquisition of even defensive capabilities. This calculated deprivation encompasses an ageing air force and the explicit denial of advanced missile defence systems. So-called strategic partners, namely Russia and China, fellow members of the atomic oligarchy, demonstrate a parallel duplicity. Their rhetoric of alliance masks a strategic unwillingness to see a sovereign Iran join the nuclear club, leading them to deliberately withhold meaningful military technology, including vital air defence systems, to maintain this imposed hierarchy. Consequently, Iran's indigenous missile programme remains the nation's only tangible instrument of conventional deterrence, a testament to its resilience in the face of universal opposition.

 

Thus, a nation confronting a nuclear-armed and genocidally-inclined foe, while abandoned by a global order that guarantees its adversary's invincibility, cannot be expected to abide by rules that codify its own annihilation.

 

It is this stark reality, a coordinated international consensus to deny Iran the means of its own defence, that transforms the nuclearisation of this existing capability from a strategic option into an existential imperative for the nation itself. The current Islamic regime, one of the most oppressive and brutal in Iran's long history, bears primary responsibility for placing the nation in this perilous situation through its ideological intransigence and strategic failures, which have isolated the country and invited unrelenting foreign aggression. This regime now presides over this ultimate choice. The bitter, tragic irony is that a regime whose actions have pushed Iran to the brink of annihilation may become the instrument through which it acquires the very shield that guarantees its continued existence, a deterrent for the land itself that will outlast the fleeting tenure of any political order, and a bitter testament to the profound national tragedy of being saved by one's own jailer.

 

 

Deterrence or Death: Forging Iran's Nuclear Shield Against a Genocidal Foe

Faced with this historical and moral reality, the path forward is dictated not by choice, but by survival. It is evident that Tel Aviv has once again directed Grossi and its proxy agency to act, initiating a process designed to culminate in another devastating war, a war that would solely harm Iran and the Iranian nation, not the Islamic regime.

 

This relentless anti-Iranian campaign confirms a singular, inescapable truth: the sovereign continuity of Iran, the very integrity of our ancient civilisation, demands the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent. This is no longer a strategic debate but the imperative for national survival in the face of overt foreign aggression. This conclusion is not reached in a vacuum, but is forced upon us by the architecture of the nuclear order itself. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as I have detailed, is not a neutral guardian but the 'attack dog' of the nuclear weapons states, its inspections a political ritual designed to suspend the sovereignty of postcolonial nations (Suren-Pahlav, 2025b). To rely on the IAEA for protection is to beg the wolf for a character reference; its function is not to verify compliance, but to manufacture a perpetual state of non-compliance through ambiguous language and politically motivated demands, thereby creating the technical pretext for war. This is not a failed system; it is a system functioning precisely as its architects intended: to discipline and ultimately dismantle states that challenge Western hegemony.

 

Thereby, we must call a spade a spade. We exist within an international order devoid of chivalry or conscience, where power masquerades as principle. So-called democratic powers operate under a thin veneer of legitimacy, masking conduct as coercive as any recognised tyranny (Suren-Pahlav, 2004). They have explicitly targeted our homeland, and their client state, a nuclear-armed monster, is openly planning our nation's extinction. Make no mistake: their goal is not regime change; it is the dissolution of Iran as a sovereign entity.

 

However, this is the delicate calculus of national preservation. Iranian history, spanning millennia, provides the definitive lesson: the Iranian nation is the eternal agent of its own destiny. Through our own will and sacrifice, we have liberated this land from the grip of every despotism that has afflicted it. The current regime, too, shall be consigned to the past by our hands; this is our historical covenant. However, this sacred cycle of renewal depends on one inviolable condition: that Iran itself remains. Should the nation be destroyed, there is nothing left to redeem.

 

We are not blind to the domestic calculus at play. The regime is executing a 'garrison state' gambit: by cultivating a perpetual state of conflict with the West, it seeks to justify its militarisation and frame all dissent as treason (Suren-Pahlav, 2025c). This strategy, however, does not negate the reality of the external threat; it is amplified by it. Every sanction and threat from abroad is metabolised by the regime to fortify its position, creating a vicious cycle that imperils the nation.

 

Furthermore, our history has seared a crucial lesson into the national consciousness: opposition movements seen as clients of foreign powers are doomed to irrelevance and betrayal. The fate of groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MKO) stands as a permanent warning. True sovereignty means that Iran's liberation must be an authentic, internal process, free from the taint of foreign agendas. This is precisely why the current Western strategy is not only immoral but strategically incoherent: it strengthens the regime it claims to oppose while weakening the very civil society it claims to support.

 

Therefore, it is from this position of profound national duty, and as one who has spent four decades in opposition to the Islamic Republic, that I advance this difficult necessity: the regime must secure for Iran the ultimate safeguard of atomic weaponry. This is the only force that can compel respect from those who recognise no other language. It is the sole guarantor that will deter foreign powers from orchestrating another 'humanitarian' intervention, a discredited fable used to dismember Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, upon our soil. Their manufactured democracy, a system tethered to wealth and power, is not a gift to be imported but a threat to be resisted.

 

 

The Ukraine example

The tragic dismemberment of Ukraine offers the most stark and recent vindication of this logic. Had Kyiv not been lured into the strategic trap of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, an instrument of a Western-designed non-proliferation regime that deliberately creates vulnerable states, and retained the formidable nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet collapse, the calculus in Moscow would have been fundamentally altered. However, no amount of NATO provocation or European greed, the true instigators of this conflict, would have compelled a nuclear-armed Russia to risk mutual annihilation by launching its 'special military operation' against a sovereign nuclear power. Ukraine’s fatal error was to trade a tangible shield for a parchment guarantee, a lesson written in the blood of its people and the annexation of its territory. This is the precise fate a nuclear deterrent is designed to preclude: not merely regime change, but the dismemberment of the nation-state itself.

 

To this, the predictable and hypocritical chorus from Western capitals will warn of regional proliferation, that a nuclear Iran will force Saudi Arabia or Turkey to follow suit. This is not a genuine security concern; it is a scarecrow tactic, a form of geopolitical blackmail designed to maintain their atomic monopoly and perpetuate a global hierarchy with them at its apex. Their true fear is not a nuclear arms race, but the erosion of their own unipolar dominance and the emergence of any state capable of deterring their own and their client state’s aggressive, expansionist policies. The logical conclusion of their own specious argument, however, is one they dare not confront: if a nuclear deterrent is the only proven guarantee against foreign invasion and dismemberment, then not only Iran, but every resource-rich nation subjected to the vampiric greed of the Western financial-military complex should indeed possess one. Why should the right to ultimate self-defence be the exclusive privilege of a self-appointed cartel of powers, whose own histories are stained with the blood of countless aggressive wars?

 

This specious concern for regional stability deliberately ignores the fundamental power dynamics at play. The so-called 'peace process' has always been a euphemism for the gradual implementation of the 'Greater Israel' project, a plan for the balkanisation and subjugation of the entire region. If the ultimate guarantee against national dismemberment is a nuclear deterrent, then this logic must extend to all potential victims of this hegemonic design. It is not merely Saudi Arabia or Turkey that should follow this imperative, but also Egypt and Jordan. These nations, whose regimes currently serve as comprador clients for Western interests, are nonetheless slated for the same fate as Palestine and Syria: occupation, genocide, ethnic cleansing, war, and reduction to fractured, client-statelets incapable of resisting Tel Aviv's expansionist drive. Their current subservience offers no long-term security, only a delayed execution. A nuclear-armed Cairo and Amman would thus serve not as a threat to regional peace, but as the ultimate guarantor against the systematic dismemberment and annihilation of the region's nations, a final, insurmountable bulwark against a long-planned geopolitical carve-up.

 

Therefore, the true fear in Washington and Tel Aviv is not a Middle East with more nuclear weapons, but a Middle East they can no longer dominate and dismember at will. In fact, this is the precise mechanism that would forge a safer world. The proliferation of nuclear deterrence among sovereign states, particularly those rich in the resources that invite Western intervention, would universalise the inescapable logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). When the costs of aggression become catastrophically high for all parties, not just the unarmed, the imperialist powers would be forced to the negotiating table out of sheer self-interest. Their choice would be stark: coexist in a world of sovereign equals, or perish in a universal conflagration of their own making. Thus, the path to global nuclear disarmament does not run through the empty promises of non-proliferation treaties, but through the iron logic of mutual vulnerability. To make the world safe from nuclear weapons, we must first make the world safe from the empires that wield them with impunity. Only when their own security is directly threatened will they be compelled to dismantle their arsenals, not out of goodwill, but out of necessity.

 

 

Conclusion

The liberation of Iran from its current regime remains the rightful mission of its nation. But if the West and its cancerous progeny, Israel, a geopolitical entity whose creation was birthed by Britain, succeed in their designs and leave no Iran behind, then our mission becomes meaningless. There can be no freedom for a land that no longer exists.

 

Therefore, the hierarchy of our priorities is dictated by necessity, not desire. The paramount, non-negotiable duty is to the enduring soul of Iran: its sovereignty, its territory, its immortal continuity. All other aspirations are secondary to the preservation of the nation itself.

 

Consequently, the message must be clear to both the despots in Tehran and our foreign tyrannical enemies in Washington and Tel Aviv: the Iranian nation will not be the next victim on the altar of a 'new world order.' We have read the fate of our neighbours and we reject it. The current nuclear oligarchy, enforced by the IAEA, offers no security, only a choice between subjugation and destruction. It is a system where the nuclear arsenals of allies are shielded and the peaceful programmes of adversaries are weaponised into casus belli. To seek shelter within this corrupt framework is to invite our own dismemberment. The shield of sovereignty must therefore be forged outside of it, whatever the cost.

 

 

References:

• Al Jazeera 2025, IAEA passes resolution demanding nuclear access from Iran, Tehran rejects, Al Jazeera, 20 November, viewed 22 November 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/20/iaea-passes-resolution-demanding-nuclear-access-from-iran-tehran-rejects [Accessed: 21 November 2025].

 

• Magee. M. D. (2007) ‘Did the Persian Empire Create Judaism?’, CAIS at SOAS, [online] Available at: https://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Religions/non-iranian/Judaism/Persian_Judaism/Persia_created_judaism.htm/ [Accessed: 21 November 2025].

 

• Suren-Pahlav. S., (2004) ‘Designing A Democracy That Works For Iran: Expert-Executive Direct Democracy (EEDD)’, suren-pahlav.com (12 May). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/designing-a-democracy-that-works-for-iran-expert-executive-direct-democracy.html [Accessed: 21 November 2025].

 

• Suren-Pahlav. S., (2021) ‘Brenda Shaffer and FDD’s ‘Iran Is More Than Persia’ and the Weaponisation of Iran’s Linguistic Diversity’, suren-pahlav.com (05 May). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/brenda-shaffer-fdd-iran-is-more-than-persia-weaponisation-of-linguistic-diversity.html [Accessed: 21 November 2025].

 

• Suren-Pahlav. S., (2024) ‘Know Thyself, Know Thy Enemy: 'Misinformation,' My Ally & the Enemy of My Enemy’, suren-pahlav.com (26 March). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/know-thyself-know-thy-enemy-misinformation-my-ally-and-the-enemy-of-my-enemy.html [Accessed: 21 November 2025].

 

• Suren-Pahlav. S., (2025a) ‘Netanyahu's Folly: How Misreading Iran Shattered Israel and Opened the Gates of Hell’, suren-pahlav.com (3 June). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/netanyahu-s-folly-how-misreading-iran-shattered-israel-and-opened-the-gates-of-hell.html [Accessed: 21 November 2025].

 

• Suren-Pahlav, S., (2025b) ‘Enforcing Atomic Apartheid: How the West Weaponised the NPT and Unleashed its IAEA Attack Dog', suren-pahlav.com (23 May). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/enforcing-atomic-apartheid-how-the-west-weaponised-the-npt-and-unleashed-its-iaea-attack-dog.html [Accessed: 21 November 2025]

 

• Suren-Pahlav, S., (2025c) ‘The Garrison State Gambit: Why Betting on Israel Imperils Iran’s Liberation’, suren-pahlav.com (18 July). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-garrison-state-gambit-why-betting-on-israel-imperils-iran-s-liberation.html [Accessed: 21 November 2025].