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Singer-songwriter Huey Lewis on seeing his songs come to life on stage

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What If Iran Already Has the Bomb?

There’s rarely a dull moment in Iranian affairs. The past few months alone have seen clashes with Israel and Pakistan, and a helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister. But spectacular as these events are, the most important changes often happen gradually, by imperceptible degrees.One such change took a while to register but

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There’s rarely a dull moment in Iranian affairs. The past few months alone have seen clashes with Israel and Pakistan, and a helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister. But spectacular as these events are, the most important changes often happen gradually, by imperceptible degrees.One such change took a while to register but is now obvious to all: In a sharp departure from a years-long policy, Iran’s leading officials are now openly threatening to build and test a nuclear bomb.Earlier this month, Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister, said that Tehran had the capacity to build a bomb and that, if it faced existential threats, it could “change its nuclear doctrine.”“When Israel threatens other countries, they can’t sit silent,” he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Arabic on May 9.To emphasize that this wasn’t a gaffe, he reiterated the position a few days later when he addressed an Iranian Arab conference in Tehran.Kharazi isn’t just any old diplomat. He heads a foreign-policy advisory body that reports directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who also appointed Kharazi to the regime’s Expediency Council. He would not have spoken without Khamenei’s blessing.[Read: Is Iran a country or a cause?]For Iranian officials to openly acknowledge the possibility that Iran could pursue a nuclear weapon is a momentous change and marks the collapse of a previous taboo. Western intelligence agencies unveiled Iran’s clandestine nuclear program in 2002. For many years after that, Tehran’s leaders emphatically insisted that this was a civilian effort with no military dimensions. Khamenei was even claimed to have issued a fatwa (an Islamic ruling) banning the possession and use of nuclear weapons, although, as the journalist Khosro Isfahani recently argued, whether such a ruling has ever existed is not actually clear.The fatwa was always a bit of a red herring anyway. Under the tenets of Shiite Islam, ayatollahs can revoke most rulings at will. “We can’t build a bomb because we have a fatwa” was thus never a convincing argument, even from a purely religious perspective.But the repeated invocation of the fatwa by Iranian officials did make boasting about a possible bomb taboo. This proscription held throughout the long years of Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the United States and five other powerful countries, which resulted in the landmark nuclear deal in 2015. Even after President Donald Trump quit that deal in 2018, and Iran reinvigorated its program, the Islamic Republic made no such threats for a while.Over the past couple years, however, Iranian officials have begun making sporadic comments insinuating a nuclear threat. In 2021, then–Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi told Western states that if they push Iran to become “a cornered cat,” they should expect it to behave like one: “If they push us to such directions, it’s not our fault,” he said, referencing the country’s nuclear intentions.The innuendo has been stripped away in recent weeks as numerous officials have made more direct threats similar to Kharazi’s. The list of those who have publicly bragged that Iran could build nukes now includes the head of the military unit in charge of safeguarding Iran’s nuclear installments, a leading nuclear physicist known to have played a key role in the program, and a former head of the nuclear agency.The more extreme version of the boast is that Iran already has nuclear weapons and just hasn’t tested them. A former member of Parliament’s foreign-policy committee made this claim on May 10.Last month, when Israel’s attacks on an Iranian consular building in Damascus led to an exchange of fire between the two countries, Iranian pro-regime commentators made statements that would have been unthinkable in the past. If the United Nations didn’t act against Israel, Iran should “leave all nuclear negotiations and reveal that beautiful Iranian boy,” a pro-regime analyst said, in an obvious reference to Little Boy, the type of atomic bomb the U.S. used on Hiroshima in 1945.“The Western intelligence entities were mistaken to think Iran won’t move toward a bomb under any conditions,” Mehdi Kharatian, the head of an Iranian think tank, said recently. Regime outlets now speak of Khamenei’s well-known “strategic patience” doctrine as having given way to “active deterrence,” allegedly evidenced by last month’s attacks on Israel, but with a seemingly deliberate echo of the language of nuclear deterrence.Experts will inevitably debate whether all of this is a bluff or an actual change in military doctrine. Understanding the Islamic Republic has always been as much an art as a science, and key to the endeavor is distinguishing between the regime’s bark and its bite. But whatever the true intentions of the regime’s bigwigs, the rhetorical shift matters on its own.For more than 20 years, Western intelligence agencies have believed that Iran shut down its nuclear program in 2003 and made no subsequent decision to build a nuclear bomb. In 2018, Israel was able to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear archives and examine much of their content. No finding seems to have emerged from this endeavor to significantly contradict the previous assessment of decision making in Tehran. The trouble, however, is that civil nuclear efforts can be “double purposed”—meaning that even without any specific work on weaponization, Iran’s nuclear advances have brought it dangerously close to producing a bomb.Under the 2015 deal, Iran had agreed to enrich uranium up to only 3.67 percent for a period of 15 years, thus keeping it far from the high-grades necessary for possible military use, and to cut its stockpile of already-enriched uranium by 98 percent. When the U.S. withdrew from the deal in 2018, Iran started gradually scaling up its program. Today, according to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has more than 5,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, including more than 120 kilograms that are 60 percent pure, many times more than what’s necessary for most civil purposes and a very short step away from the necessary military grade. Not only is Iran the only nonnuclear weapons state in the world to have enriched uranium to such levels, but it already has enough material for at least three bombs.When he visited Iran last month, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, said that the country was merely weeks, not months, away from bomb-making capacity. He also said that his agency didn’t have a full picture of the country’s program, meaning that it could be even more advanced. The assessment has been substantiated in a 112-page report that Grossi has prepared ahead of IAEA’s board of governors meeting next month in Vienna. If Iran is not able to satisfy the body that it is still abiding by its obligations to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including granting adequate access to IAEA inspectors, it could face censure or be referred to the UN Security Council.Are we in a moment of acute crisis then?I’ve spent much of my adult life covering the Iranian nuclear issue, and I’ve seen many such moments come and go. There is often more to the situation than meets the eye. For months now, for example, Iran and the U.S. have been holding secret talks in Muscat, with the nuclear issue at their center. Perhaps something in this subtext also explains the bizarre condolences the U.S. offered for the passing of President Ebrahim Raisi, despite his well-known involvement in crimes against humanity.As the Washington-based analyst Karim Sadjadpour recently argued, Khamenei is 85 years old and unlikely to change his longtime strategy. Sadjadpour suggests that as long as Khamenei is alive, Tehran won’t attempt to build a bomb, but will continue to pursue the “Japan option,” which entails standing on the nuclear threshold without crossing it. Maybe the recent decision to break the rhetorical taboo is an attempt to formally declare Iran’s Japan posture: Tehran could hope that making its threshold status more explicit can deter a U.S. or Israeli attack.[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear]Observers of the region will be forgiven if they find this explanation, though plausible, hardly reassuring, given Tehran’s disruptive ideology and vows to destroy Israel. Khamenei doubled down on those threats during Raisi’s funeral, when he met with the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and promised that the world would see a “disappearance of Israel” and its replacement with “Palestine, from the river to the sea.”And as terrible as Khamenei is, he often avoids direct confrontations. When he finally dies, Iran will see big changes; power will pass to others, likely including some within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A rocky period will follow, with unforeseeable consequences. Whether in Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, or Washington, no one wants to see a volatile Tehran have access to nukes.In other words, the United States and others should still want to do all they can to scale back Iran’s nuclear program. The realist theoretician Kenneth Waltz famously mused that a nuclear Iran would actually help stabilize the region. But as even Waltz’s ideological successors admit, this is a gamble best not taken.

A Throwback Show That Stays Relevant

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest

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theatlantic.com

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Malcolm Ferguson, an assistant editor who has written about the case for Kwanzaa, and why he wishes his family would take up the holiday again.One of Malcolm’s favorite art pieces is Pool Parlor, by Jacob Lawrence, an exceptional example of the artist’s “dynamic cubism.” Lately, he and his friends have been discussing the merits of Challengers, and he recently started his first watch of Sex and the City. The Carrie-and-Big situation remains as confounding as ever, but he’s enjoyed learning about “the deep inner lives of white, 30-something women”—a perspective he admits knowing “very little about.”First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Inside the decision to kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani Mad Max’s George Miller is taking on the apocalypse (again). The big AI risk not enough people are seeing The Culture Survey: Malcolm FergusonA painting that I cherish: Pool Parlor, by Jacob Lawrence. Like most people, I was more familiar with Lawrence’s famous Migration Series, a much more raw, somber collection depicting mass African American flight from the South to the North. But Pool Parlor takes the same grim artistic elements—the dark shading, the rigidity, the aggressive and overstated angles of Lawrence’s “dynamic cubism”—and converts them into an easy, effortless work. I’ll probably hang this painting on my wall someday soon.The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I can’t bring myself to say that I’m fully enjoying this show, but Sex and the City currently has a surprisingly firm hold on me. As with The Sopranos, I initially felt that I’d already consumed much of the series passively, via memes and pop-culture references. But from the very beginning, it was obvious why Sex and the City has maintained such relevance, especially among Gen Zers such as myself. It’s like if a soap opera was actually cool and well produced. I’m currently at the start of Season 5, and I’ve noticed that the ensemble cast develops well; I appreciate that the focus slowly shifts away from Carrie as the seasons progress. (Speaking of, Big and Carrie are about as insufferable together as a main pairing could be. Why are they still friends?)Samantha’s and Charlotte’s converse storylines—Samantha giving in to love, Charlotte (temporarily) reclaiming her singlehood—are much more compelling to me right now. And the wardrobe is unreal: great fits all around. But more than anything, the show is an interesting study of the pre-smartphone romantic landscape, the pre-smartphone version of New York City, and the deep inner lives of white, 30-something women—a perspective I know very little about. [Related: And Just Like That addresses its Che Diaz problem.]My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Although Reddit still has its fair share of dark and scary corners, I find that the sports Subreddits are a quick, accurate, and entertaining way to check the temperature of the most painfully obsessive and devout fans. The NBA Playoffs are happening right now, and a team’s Subreddit will have a live “game thread” for each game, where fans can gather and comment in real time. When a team I’m rooting against starts to collapse, I go straight to the Subreddit game thread to hate-watch fans’ lamentations from afar. It’s truly fun to witness internet communities of spoiled Lakers, Suns, and Heat fans go through the five stages of grief, especially when my team is too horrendous to even stress over. (Go Wizards.) I’ll be doing the same for the NFL when the Ravens start playing.The culture product my friends are talking about most right now: My friends shifted seamlessly from the Drake-and-Kendrick-beef discussion (Kendrick won) to the Challengers discussion. Everyone wants two boyfriends now … I thought that movie was about tennis! [Related: A sexy tennis thriller—yes, really]The last debate I had about culture: I wouldn’t call it a debate, but my roommate and I have been discussing how collective memory functions among historically persecuted groups, and it came up again at her Seder meal. She’s Jewish, and I’m African American, so there are plenty of catastrophic events and experiences between us to be memorialized and remembered each year. But what is the line between remembrance and self-victimization or self-othering? Does centering a history of pain and loss obscure the achievements? And what will we tell the generations that come after us, who are even further distanced from that suffering?I might be thinking about this forever. But right now, to me, the pain will always be important to remember and teach. We wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t be here—without the scars of others. They inform us and our gains whether we like it or not. And although those scars fade, they never really disappear; they can often be reopened. To decenter them just doesn’t feel right.The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I visited the National Museum of Anthropology, in Mexico City, last month. It was startlingly beautiful inside and out, and there was a real emphasis on the traces of precolonial Mesoamerica in modern Mexico via art, food, and fashion. I was also struck by the concept of the Tlaltecuhtli, or “Earth Monster.” Some early Mesoamericans believed that the Earth was neither round nor flat, but a gargantuan turtle or alligator whose back they were riding on. I think that’s a very interesting way to perceive Earth, as this sentient, moving creature that we’re just clinging on to. (Honorable mention goes to the Simone Leigh sculpture exhibit, which I saw when it was at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C.)My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a blockbuster that feels like everything a kid’s superhero movie is supposed to be: well paced and wonderfully animated, with some real meat to it plot-wise. The dynamic of choosing versus creating your own fate plays out over a diverse gaggle of Spider-people from many dimensions, and the cliff-hanger ending actually surprised me. [Related: A spidey sense we haven’t seen before]A thought-provoking art film is Nashville, directed by Robert Altman, the guy who also did M*A*S*H. This movie is hard to describe. It’s dense, sharp, grim yet funny, and incredibly American. It features about an hour’s worth of live folk, gospel, and country music, and 24 “main” characters, some of whom are gathered for the political fundraising of the presidential candidate for the Replacement Party. His character is unseen but heard, as his political messaging—and the film’s thesis—blares loudly throughout the city: All of us are deeply involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not.A musical artist who means a lot to me: Roy Ayers, perhaps the most important figure in modern Black music. His work is a convergence of all my favorite genres. From his early, groovy stuff such as Stoned Soul Picnic and Vibrations to his ubiquity in early hip-hop sampling and his generation-linking feature on Tyler, the Creator’s 2015 track “Find Your Wings,” Ayers has made his mark on seemingly every stage and sound of Black music since the 1960s. I’m not sure where my taste would be without him.The Week Ahead Eric, a psychological-thriller miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a devastated father and puppeteer who searches for his missing 9-year-old son (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Young Woman and the Sea, a film based on the true story of the first woman to swim across the English Channel (in theaters Friday) Housemates, a novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg about two artistic housemates who go on a road trip of self-discovery (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Sources: Fred Mullane / ISI Photos / Getty; Tullio Puglia / Getty; Matteo Ciambelli / Getty; Dan Istitene / Getty. The Unbearable Greatness of DjokovicBy Scott Stossel What is perhaps most intimidating about Djokovic is the steeliness of his nerve. The ice water in his veins gets chillier as the stakes get higher: The more important the point, the more likely he is to win it. The ATP keeps track of what it calls “pressure stats,” which measure performance on the highest-value, highest-stakes points (break points, tiebreakers, etc). Djokovic, unsurprisingly, has the highest ranking on the pressure-stats list among current players. But he also ranks highest all time by that metric, ahead of Pete Sampras, Nadal, and Federer. Before he lost a tiebreaker to Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon championship last summer, Djokovic had won a staggering 15 straight tiebreakers in major tournaments. When everything is on the line, he rarely falters. Read the full article.More in Culture What’s really epic about Furiosa Tennis explains everything. The Brooklyn sequel asks the most American of questions about immigration. Hollywood’s most pessimistic blockbuster franchise The new sound of sexual frustration A powerful indictment of the art world Catch Up on The Atlantic Trump’s money problems are becoming a crisis for the entire country. The British prime minister bowed to the inevitable. New 9/11 evidence points to deep Saudi complicity. Photo Album A bear-safety demonstration at Yellowstone National Park (Jennifer Emerling) The photographer Jennifer Emerling had been to 22 national parks by the time she was 12 years old. Since then, she hasn’t stopped returning to photograph them. Here are some images from her many pilgrimages to the natural scenes of American beauty.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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