Iran cleric shrugs off nuclear threats

A senior Iranian cleric has played down threats against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, saying Iran is pioneering in nuclear disarmament.

Tehran’s interim Friday Prayers Leader Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati pointed to the recent nuclear disarmament conference in Tehran and said “It gave a crushing response to those who accuse Iran of producing and using nuclear weapons.”

Jannati said that the West only sought to stop developing nuclear weapons and added, “But this is pointless because the question of what must be done with the existing nuclear weapons remains. Therefore the subject of disarmament must be raised.”

The cleric pointed to the message of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Imam Seyyed Ali Khamenei to the Tehran denuclearization conference, in which he described the US as the “only nuclear criminal in the world.”

“This is an undeniable issue because no one in the history of the creation of nuclear weapons has used such weapons but the United States,” Ayatollah Jannati said.

He added that threatening to use nuclear weapons against the Islamic Republic unmasked the US and “proved Iran’s truth and the fallacy of the claims made by the enemies who have stockpiled nuclear weapons and threaten other countries with these arms.”

“We hope that the enemies of the Islamic Republic will start seeing reason…, stop threatening us and accept that Iran has not produced nuclear weapons and is only making peaceful use of nuclear energy.”