Iran will never abandon its military nuclear option, ex-president says

In an interview to Iranian daily Etemaad, Mr. Rafsanjani, who's now the Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, an administrative assembly appointed by the Supreme Leader, said the post-revolutionary regime had held talks with AQ Khan, founder of Pakistan's nuclear bomb programme. This was [our] state of mind, but things never become serious.

The U.S.is not under any "illusions" about what Iran is doing in the Middle East, a top American official said Wednesday. We worked in various areas and also taught a great deal. He audaciously continues, "Our basic doctrine was peaceful usage of the nuclear technology although we never abandoned the idea that if one day we are threatened and it is imperative, we would have the capability for going the other path [to nuclear weapon] as well".

Iran is implementing a deal reached with world powers in July, aimed at curbing its nuclear program to allay Western fears it was trying to build an atomic bomb. Rafsanjani also acknowledged that from the onset there has been a comprehensive clandestine nuclear plan, including construction of secret sites, enrichment of uranium, manufacture of centrifuge parts, laser technology, and the heavy water reactor.

Senator and presidential candidate, Ted Cruz has criticised Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House of Representatives speaker John Boehner for failing to take action against the agreement and threatens to punish banks that release frozen Iranian funds under its terms. "It's getting worse day by day, and they realize that Iran is the only country on the ground helping Assad to survive". They were all implicated in skimming hundreds of millions of dollars from Iraq's "Oil for Food" program. "We, of course, have our large military presence in the Persian Gulf, in the Gulf of Aden", she said.

But during the (Iran-Iraq) war, we both tried to restart the program. We have a very specific intelligence focus.

He was the First Chairman of the Parliament during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and became the President shortly thereafter.

The Iranian regime has repeatedly vowed that it is not pursuing a nuclear weapon, and Khamenei has issued fatwas forbidding nuclear weapons.

"In Syria, the geopolitical and strategic objectives and gaps are too deep to bridge between the two sides", Rafizadeh, an expert on Iran and Syria at Harvard University, told DW. That support is expected to increase once Iran begins receiving billions of dollars in sanctions relief from the nuclear deal.

But he has been targeted by conservatives after clashing publicly with Khamenei. "The signatories believe that a democratic Iran is the essential requisite for regional stability and to this end, the Iranian Resistance and the ten-point plan of Maryam Rajavi for a democratic, non-nuclear Iran based on separation of religion and state and women's equality must be supported". Just like America's Awakening era in the 1960s, the era politically pits the generations of war survivors against the generation that grew up after the war. It would not have been bad if [the ideological camp] had acted morally and in accordance with national interests.