🖌Saeed Jafari, journalist

🔻After the attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran, one of the oldest security disputes of the Islamic Republic has been raised again with unprecedented frankness: could acquiring nuclear weapons prevent future wars, or would it, on the contrary, put Iran at even greater risk of escalation and confrontation?

Disagreement over the answer to this question has now moved beyond expert circles and is increasingly visible among political figures and different power blocs.

Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a reformist political activist and former mayor of Tehran, said on the evening of 22 Mehr in the live program “Be Waqte Iran” on IRIB with the argument that nuclear weapons—“if they were a deterrent, we wouldn’t have been able to attack Israel again and again”—expressed doubt about the effectiveness of nuclear weapons in preventing military strikes. The program host objected and said that if such a weapon were not a deterrent, Israel would not have attacked other countries with peace of mind.

📸Getty Images and IRIB