Ayatollah Khomeini, Nuclear Weapons, and the Problem of Scientific Education in Iran

• In Event: Understanding Authoritarianism - II

Abstract

Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in the 1990s declaring that nuclear weapons have no place in Islam. Notwithstanding this objection, and his predecessor’s private caution against nuclear weapons, Iran has aggressively pursued the development of nuclear weapons capabilities since the early 1990s. This paper argues that nuclear weapons are indeed permitted in the theological framework of Iran’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but their development was never pursued in the first fifteen years of the Islamic Republic’s existence because their cultivation ran against a principle aim of Khomeini’s regime: the severe curtailment of scientific education in all levels of education. Combining methods of textual analysis and historical institutionalism, I argue that the fall of the Soviet Union presented a critical juncture at which time the Khamenei regime had to decide whether or not to remain true to Khomeini’s plan for a scientifically illiterate society or risk the spread of “scientism” in order to provide the necessary educational prerequisites for generating the talent required to sustain and progress nuclear weapons development. The regime opted for the latter. Accordingly we can observe that the development of scientific education in Iran has paralleled the regime’s desire for nuclear weapons.

Author

• Max Prowant, University of Texas