Two Cases for What Iran Actually Wants From a Bomb

There are two competing theories of the Iranian regime among those who study it professionally, and they are rarely argued against each other in full.

One portrays the Islamic Republic as an apocalyptic project willing to absorb catastrophic losses in pursuit of a religious mission. The other sees it as a hardened, business-savvy survival machine that has spent more than four decades demonstrating that it prizes continuity over End Times.

Both interpretations draw on real features of the regime. Neither fully explains its behavior.

Complicating matters further is a new uncertainty that neither camp has fully reckoned with: we no longer know, with any confidence, who is actually making the most consequential decisions in Tehran.

The Case for a Regime Willing to Pay a Catastrophic Price

The martyrdom current within Iran’s revolutionary culture is not folklore. It has been institutionalized. The regime that sent teenage volunteers across Iraqi minefields carrying plastic keys to paradise still commemorates that sacrifice as a founding virtue. The same tolerance for extraordinary losses has since been reflected in many of the proxy forces Tehran has cultivated—from Hezbollah’s willingness to absorb punishment that would cripple most conventional militaries to the Basij tradition of sacrificial national defense.

Nor has the regime’s rhetoric substantially softened. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s repeated predictions of Israel’s eventual disappearance persisted for more than three decades across changing regional circumstances. Whether understood as sincere conviction or deliberate ideological discipline, the consistency itself is analytically significant. The leadership evidently judged abandoning that narrative to be more costly than sustaining it.

The strongest version of this argument is not that the regime is irrational in the clinical sense—incapable of weighing costs and benefits—but that it operates with a fundamentally different threshold for acceptable loss than Western deterrence theory generally assumes. A leadership willing to contemplate catastrophic civilian losses in pursuit of what it regards as a civilizational or even eschatological objective is still making calculations. It is simply calculating against different assumptions. An adversary that measures Iranian resolve according to its own tolerance for risk may therefore systematically underestimate the danger.

This argument also has a more immediate variant that deserves attention in 2026. Whatever the regime’s normal appetite for risk, a leadership that........

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