Resurfaced Video Blows Up Iran's Nuclear Lies: 'Our Goal Was A Bomb'

A resurfaced 2022 interview is ripping through Israeli and Western media after former Iranian parliament deputy speaker Ali Motahari admitted, in his own words, that Iran's nuclear program was never purely peaceful. Speaking to Iran's ISCA News in April 2022, Motahari said plainly: "When we began our nuclear activity, our goal was indeed to build a bomb. There is no need to beat around the bush." He went on to explain the ambition was meant as a deterrent rather than an offensive weapon, citing a Quranic verse about striking fear into the hearts of enemies, and argued the effort collapsed only because Iran failed to keep the program secret before reaching what he called "the threshold" — the point of no return achieved by Pakistan before its own test.

Israeli outlet Channel 14 has now recirculated the 32-second clip, framing it as definitive proof that the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict is not, as critics allege, a war of choice, but a necessary response to a regime that once openly sought nuclear weapons for intimidation. Motahari's remarks stand in direct contradiction to Tehran's decades-long public insistence that its nuclear program has always been strictly civilian, and they arrive at a moment when Western and Israeli intelligence agencies continue to voice deep suspicion over Iran's uranium enrichment activities despite those same official denials. Notably, even Motahari acknowledged toward the end of the original interview that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has since issued a fatwa declaring nuclear weapons "forbidden," a detail regime defenders have seized on to argue the comments reflect a bygone era rather than current policy.

Motahari himself later attempted to walk back the remarks, claiming he had been misunderstood and that his comments reflected only his personal, early-era views rather than official state policy — a clarification that did little to stop Iranian state-linked outlets from scrambling to contain the fallout at the time. Still, the timing of this clip's resurfacing amid heightened 2026 regional tensions has reignited the core question at the heart of the conflict: whether a regime that openly admits it once pursued a bomb "for deterrence" can be trusted to have abandoned that ambition for good. For supporters of Israel's campaign against Iran's nuclear infrastructure, Motahari's own words are being treated as validation that the fight was never optional — it was, as the clip's framing insists, the only way to prevent a far graver outcome.