WASHINGTON — Days after he was named Iran’s next supreme leader, and over a week since U.S. and Israeli bombing wiped out much of his family, Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first statement on Thursday demanding vengeance against the alliance over the war it unleashed.
He called on Iranian forces to continue thwarting vital shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. He vowed to open new fronts against the United States and Israel. And he warned that Gulf states hosting U.S. bases would remain targets of Iranian attack.
Yet, what concerned the White House most was what the new supreme leader didn’t say.
Khamenei made no mention of a strategic endeavor that had brought the Islamic Republic to war: Its nuclear program, suspected for decades of harboring military dimensions.
The omission was not lost on officials in the Trump administration, who told The Times they are largely in the dark over the new supreme leader’s stance on whether Iran should break out to build a nuclear weapon.
Khamenei’s deep alliance with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has advocated for weaponization in the past, has raised concern that the new leader will depart from his father’s long-standing position against building a bomb.
U.S. intelligence assessments long held that the late ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, had adopted a strategy of remaining at the threshold of developing a nuclear weapon while avoiding the costs and risks of actually building one. In 2003, as the United States invaded Iraq over false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, Khamenei issued a religious edict — a fatwa — declaring nuclear weapons to be forbidden under Islam.
That doctrine is now in doubt, with the new supreme leader wounded and stewing underground over the U.S. assault that has devastated Iran’s military and killed his father, his mother and his sister, among other family members.
Concern among U.S. officials comes as Trump has expressed interest in ending the war “very soon,” even though a stockpile of uranium — a key ingredient in the construction of nuclear weapons — remains buried but accessible to Iranian authorities.
Defense officials are skeptical that the nuclear program can be fully dismantled without sending in a substantial U.S. ground force, an escalation that Trump has sought to avoid. But ending the war with Iran’s nuclear infrastructure partially intact could have devastating repercussions. The U.S.-Israeli campaign could force the new Iranian leader to conclude that regime survival requires a nuclear deterrent, one official said.
“Even if President Trump declares victory tomorrow, and points to the damage done to Iran’s conventional military, the fact of the matter is you have a more hardline regime in place with the key ingredients for a nuclear weapon,” said Eric Brewer, deputy vice president of the nuclear materials security program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, who noted that Tehran still has a stockpile of 60% enriched uranium — close to weapons grade — and advanced centrifuges to take it over the finish line.
“What’s the plan for day after,” Brewer added, “as Iran starts to build back, and potentially seeks nuclear weapons?”
Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that Mojtaba Khamenei’s position on the nuclear program has been a stubborn mystery. Reports spreading on social media that he opposed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear deal brokered among world powers and Iran during the Obama administration, are unsubstantiated, he said.
“While Mojtaba often advised his father on domestic issues, there is much less information about his position on foreign affairs, other than opposition to Israel,” Clawson said. “I have never seen any indications he took a position about the JCPOA.”
President Trump has outlined the destruction of Iran’s nuclear capabilities as a major goal. But in closed door briefings to Congress, defense officials have been less emphatic, according to Democratic lawmakers.
On Tuesday, shortly after Khamenei was named to succeed his father, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned him to disavow continued nuclear work in an exchange with reporters.
“He would be wise to heed the words of our president, which is to not pursue nuclear weapons,” Hegseth said, “and come out and state as such.”
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