Part One:
Introduction
At the heart of the ongoing struggle of the Islamic Republic of Iran against imperialism is its right to non-negotiable national sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity. It includes the right to peaceful nuclear power as a means to a modern, industrial, technological, 6G-Plus, and knowledge-based economy.
In November 1979 – barely nine months after the historic Islamic Revolution – USA banned the import of Iranian goods and froze $12-billion of its assets. It began developing sanctions as a weapon of war – now in its 47th year.
Unilateral sanctions
In the period 1979-1997 USA imposed five sanctions on Iran (Atlantic Council: 8 May 2018).
In the period 2001-2025 USA imposed additional 258 sanctions (United States Institute of Peace: 24 February 2025). They totalled only 263, according to USA sources. There is a period of silence in 1998-2000. Some Executive Orders are sub-divided into many ‘sub-orders’, which are counted as parts of the main Executive Orders.
But according to Dr Fatima al-Smadi at the ‘Iran and Palestine 1979-2026 Webinar: Masar Badil’ (12 February 2026), there are 8000 sanctions in four stages between 1981-2026. She is a professional researcher at the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies specializing in Iranian affairs.
These sanctions are the most comprehensive in modern history. There are also supporting sanctions imposed by European countries, Canada, and Japan. Why?
Gaza: the tiny aperture
Gaza is the tiny aperture-of-test through which worldwide decolonization has to pass to ultimate victory. Iran is the only state that fully supports the test. It gives USA excuse to destroy Iran.
USA is heavily invested in maintaining Israel as an artificial state to secure oil supply for itself.
Black Zionist Obama
President Obama pledged ‘unshakeable commitment’ to provide ‘security assistance’ to Israel. The ‘multifaceted cooperation’ MOU is for ten years (2019-2028). It is the ‘largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history.’ It is valued at $38-billion, payable in equal amounts annually. It ties USA and Israel in an incestuous military relationship, in which Israel is enabled ‘to acquire additional advanced military capabilities from the United States.’
The monetary value of it ‘includes $33-billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) funds and an unprecedented $5-billion commitment in missile defence assistance.’ It includes updating the fighter aircraft fleet and acquisition of outdated F-35s (to be superseded by F-47). It prohibits Israel to spend 26.3% of its annual FMF package within Israel on non-U.S. products and the purchase of fuel. The aim is to compel Israel to preserve its ‘Qualitative Military Edge’ amongst regional countries (mainly Iran).
(White House: Office of Press Secretary: Fact Sheet: Memorandum of Understanding reached with Israel: September 14, 2016)
The historic antagonisms
The origin of the antagonism between Iranian people and British colonialism dates back to 1890 when the Shah of Iran sold tobacco concession rights to Britain for £15000. Later, it secretly paid £500000 with borrowed British loan at an annual interest rate of 6% as damages to cancel the concession. It led to mass uprising.
The next major antagonism was against USA imperialism in 1953 when the CIA together with MI5 overthrew the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh government because it had nationalized the oil industry. USA and Britain re-privatized it.
The epochal antagonism
The year 1979 was the beginning of a new epoch in world history, viz., the Islamic Revolution in Iran. It overthrew the 2500-year-old feudal mode of ownership, production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of worldly goods – in Ten Days of Dawn (1-11 February 1979). And with it, it also overthrew the Pahlavi family monarchy, the structure of which was definitively broken by the industrial strike by oil workers in 1978 that halted exports of oil and throttled state revenue. Imam Khomeini (R.A.), through his unique hindsight, insight, and foresight functioned as the physical embodiment of unity – as the mobilizing ideological power.
The Revolution’s unique feature was that its birth was from within the Islamic ecosystem – free of Eurocentric concepts. It prioritized the creation of new human beings as human capital to manage society in new ways through seminal statecraft.
Islam and the primacy of knowledge
As Islam prioritizes knowledge, the Islamic Revolution initiated the ongoing renewal of the human mind. It shifted its illiteracy rate of 67.2% of men and 87.8% of women under the monarchy (UNESCO: 1966) to overall 98% literacy (UNESCO: 2023).
It had established the Literacy Movement Organization on 28 December 1979 for continuing education. Today it has 50000 instructors and 6000 administrators with branches located in 300 rural villages in 28 out of its 31 provinces. Today it has 843 universities for a population of 92.4-million (UNPF: 2025).
The Revolution still has its support base in the rural population and the peasants who migrated to urban areas as workers. It has the capacity to mobilize 20-million volunteers in its defence as demonstrated during the CIA-instigated proxy war of Saddam Hussein (1980-1988). This Sacred Defence War shaped Iranian national identity, as an aspect of patriotism to Iran/Islam, which sociologist Ali Shariati described as ‘sacred consciousness’.
What USA cannot understand
Islamic Revolution grew completely outside neo-colonialism and its ideology of western ‘human rights’, ‘liberal’ democracy, orientalism, and genderism. It has its own philosophical system.
USA fears that the present Muslim population of 2-billion is projected to grow to 2.8-billion in 2050 (Pew Research: 2025), outside of the present dying world order of colonized nation-states created by the Berlin Conference of 1884.
In 1839 Oxford University developed the idea of a so-called ‘commonwealth’ of nations to grant racist independence to ‘White’ Canada to subdue resistance by indigenous Indians. Cambridge University and British Foreign Office developed the idea further into neo-colonialism and ‘constitutionalism’ in the 1950s and 1960s in granting political independence to resistant countries in Africa and Asia.
(A Commonwealth approach to decolonization: Melanie Torrent: Cairn Info Journal: pp347-362: 2012/3 Vol.65).
What USA cannot manage!
Modern USA still does not know how to manage the new unanticipated phenomenon of Islamic Revolution. As imperial power shrivels up it becomes more vicious, fascistic, and militaristic at home and abroad. It resorts to militaristic diplomatic bullying that conceals its jitteriness.
Iranians oppose what they ideologically call Gharbzadegi (Westoxification). They have demonstrated that modernization is possible without westernization.
A new sociological phenomenon
There is now the emergence of a new sociological phenomenon in world bourgeois history, viz., the Epsteinian/Trumpian billionaire class of paedophiles with raw economic/military power, which is averse to morals, ethics, and basic human decency. It made Gaza Genocide possible. It has captured foreign policy to serve its own private interests.
The MAGA project seeks to worm itself into ‘western civilization’ project in domestic and international affairs. In domestic affairs it has created ‘migration’ as a new metaphor for racism that aims to get rid of foreign Blacks, Browns, and others. In international affairs it aims to supplant European countries, which have become a burden on USA since WWII. It is forcing them to pay for their own NATO security. It is trying to extract money from them through tariffs, as a new form of extractive economy. It is also trying to decouple ‘free trade’ for itself from international rules-based order.
Munich Security Conference 2026
USA Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the Conference on 13 February 2026. The title of his prescriptive address was, Secretary of State calls on European leaders to defend Western Civilization. He said:
- ‘Controlling who and how many people enter our countries is not an expression of hate or xenophobia. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.’
- ‘Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.’
(U.S. Department of State: 14 February 2026)
Geneva negotiations
At the nuclear power negotiations in Geneva on 17 February 2026 Iran entered indirect discussions with circumspection and emerged with cautiousness to move deliberatively forward on technical, nuclear, legal, economic, and sanction issues – with trust-building – in the primary interests of the heroic and self-sacrificing Iranian nation.
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Part Two
The media as ‘soft’ war
The media wing of the USA military-industrial-media complex has created confusion over nuclear threat – serious and noisy threats.
The serious ones are easy to contend with because they are based on scientific truth. This forms the substance of Part Two.
The noisy ones are the difficult ones because they are based on opinions. They are used to manipulate public fears to generate raw profits for the complex. This forms the substance of Part One.
Science before opinions
Before forming opinions on nuclear power, there is a need to know the basic science of:
- Civilian nuclear power
- Military nuclear power
- The difference between fission and fusion
- The limits of uranium enrichment
- International law.
Civilian nuclear power
This kind of power is used to produce electricity, nuclear medicine, medical diagnostic tools, radiopharmaceuticals and more for beneficial use by human beings.
Military nuclear power
This kind of power is used to produce bombs for the destruction of human life.
Fission
This process is used to produce civilian nuclear power:
Heat is used to boil water to produce steam to turn the turbines to run the generator to produce electricity through the light water reactor the splitting of nuclei produces large amount of energy from the uranium fuel.
Light water reactors use isotopes, enriched to 3-5% for commercial viability of the generation of electricity. For the research reactors, enrichment is up to 20%.
Light water is used to obtain controlled chain reaction. The splitting of one atom triggers only one more fission. Energy release is controlled.
(Note: Technical terms are used minimally in order not to distort truth from a set of facts in a historical context.)
Fusion
This process is used to produce military nuclear power. It produces bombs.
It requires uranium enrichment of more than 90%, which takes 15-20 years.
It involves light nuclei fusing together to make one heavier nucleus. Nuclear bomb making requires uncontrolled chain reaction.
The burdensome demands of bomb-making
To make bombs Iran would have to develop new processes and design and build new facilities to convert uranium gas to uranium metal. Then fabricate two fifty-pound (22.7kg) components and assemble them with high explosives for a gun-type weapon. Its explosive power would be equal to one kiloton (1000 tons of TNT). This is comparable to USA’s tactical weapon. It would take Iran many years to make a low-yield weapon.
High-yield bombs have an implosive power of 20000 tons of TNT, which was demonstrated in 1945 by the USA army in Nagasaki, Japan. Testing of high explosives is needed for the design of complex bombs.
Production of nuclear bomb
For Iran to move into the extended phase of the production of nuclear bomb it would have to develop new processes, facilities, capacity, expertise, and technology to convert uranium gas to uranium metal and then enter into the overextended phase of fabricating metal and assembling them with high explosives into a gun-type weapon before entering the phase of manufacturing plutonium bombs. Finally, they need prior testing to its actual use on targets. They cannot be done in secret – thanks to satellite and seismic technology.
International law
International law permits Iran the right to nuclear energy that includes uranium enrichment.
Conclusion
The people who are on the side of nuclear justice place science before opinions.
Will the final agreement be curative or preventative diplomacy?
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By Haroon Aziz, Quantum Physicist, South Africa
Haroon Aziz is the author of the book, The Science & Politics of Iran’s Nuclear Power (2013). It was used by some diplomats at UNSC and IAEA in support of Iran’s right to nuclear power. He is a former prisoner and member of the armed wing of ANC.
