ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – Iran could reconsider its nuclear doctrine in a potential shift toward producing nuclear weapons, according to comments by Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani, the Deputy Political Chief of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). 

In an op-ed for the IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency on Wednesday, Javani warned of a decisive retaliatory strike coming from Iran if its nuclear sites were to be targeted by the United States. 

The general's comments came less than a week after President Donald Trump declared in an NBC interview that Iran's failure to negotiate a deal on its nuclear program would be met with US strikes. "It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before," Trump threatened. 

The US military has recently deployed B2 bombers to the little-known Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia, in what has been anxiously monitored by Iranian pundits as preparation for a potential military confrontation with Tehran. 

The IRGC deputy commander referenced a 2003 fatwa by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in which he declared the production and use of atomic bombs, among other Weapons of Mass Destruction, as religiously forbidden. While Iran has no intention to develop nuclear arms, Javani said, continued military threats could force it into a policy shift. "And such reassessment has a clear meaning," he added. 

In similar remarks on state television this week, prominent political figure and senior Khamenei advisor, Ali Larijani, also floated the same policy revision. He noted that US pressure could force Iran into producing nuclear bombs, "as it will have to go defensive against threats."

In his op-ed, the IRGC general also echoed a recent Khamenei warning of retaliation, and asserted that any strike on Iran's nuclear sites would prompt a counter-strike that will prove to be "effective." 

The hardline commander rebuffed US and Israeli threats, claiming that any attack of the sort "not only will fail to gain its stated objectives, but it will further push the Iranian nuclear program into a new stage." 

"That's when a new role will be defined for Iran and the Resistance Front in regional and global calculations," he concluded, using Iran's term for a network of anti-Israeli and anti-American armed proxies it has been funding and arming across the Middle East.