https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-iran-vows-revenge-israel-worries-it-could-get-e...The nuclear option
But Iran could also respond in another way — by ramping up enrichment activity and making a dash for a nuclear weapon.
At two separate events recently, senior Iranian figures called on Khamenei to do just that.
Technically, Khamenei maintains a fatwa – an Islamic legal ruling – against the assembly of nuclear weapons because they are contrary to “the spirit of Islam.”
Whether or not Iranians take the ban seriously, during Friday Ramadan prayers last week, the regime’s main imam gave a sermon calling on the supreme leader to cancel the fatwa and order the Iranian nuclear agency to build a bomb.
This remark raised eyebrows in the West because it had the optics of a senior religious figure challenging the supreme leader, which prompts the yet-to-be-proven suspicion that Khamenei is preparing the ground for such a decision by inviting “pressure” from religious figures.
Suspicions increased later in the week when Mahmoud-Reza Aghamir, chancellor of Shahid Behesti University in Tehran, said in an interview on Iranian television that the supreme leader can certainly retract his fatwa.
Aghamir, a professor of nuclear physics who is considered to be well-connected to the regime, added that at the nuclear program’s current stage, “it would be a lot easier to build a bomb than to keep holding so much enriched uranium at high levels.”
As far as we know, Iran currently holds 150 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent,
enough to build three bombs.
Israel is tracking this possible development, and if it happens, then the US will be pushed to enter the picture with a significant military threat that leaves the Iranians no doubt as to the US’s intentions.
The danger is that Khamenei can give the order discreetly, and then the only indications that Iran is assembling a bomb will be through intelligence.
Israel has said in the past it will know when Iran is about to reach the final stages of building a nuclear warhead. But after October 7, all the assumptions in Israel regarding intelligence are being reexamined, including those concerning Iran.