TEHRAN (The Thursday Times) — Iranian lawmakers are pressing for the country to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), with 10 proposals to leave registered in parliament, as Qatari and Pakistani mediators try to head off a resumption of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
“Now that we have paid the heavy costs of war and sanctions, it is time for the Iranian nation to withdraw from the NPT treaty and change the nuclear doctrine,” legislator Mahmoud Nabavian wrote on X on Saturday. Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said the withdrawal proposals were under consideration.
Cleric Mohammad Javad Haj Ali Akbari used his Friday sermon to call for a review of Iran’s nuclear doctrine, describing it as a “national demand”, and the hardline Paydari Front urged parliament on October 24 to quit the treaty. The country’s leadership has not responded, and the government’s official position that it does not seek nuclear weapons is unchanged. President Masoud Pezeshkian has said Tehran’s policy follows a longstanding religious edict against weapons of mass destruction.
What leaving would mean
The treaty allows a member to withdraw on three months’ notice if “extraordinary events” have jeopardised its supreme interests. Iran signed it in 1968 and ratified it in 1970. Of the world’s states, 191 are party to it; Pakistan, India, Israel and South Sudan are not. Leaving would not by itself mean Iran was building a bomb, but it would end its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has had no access to key sites such as Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan since the war of June 2025. Last month the agency’s board expressed “grave concerns” about Iran’s “continued noncompliance”, a resolution Tehran called politically motivated.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that the war was “going to get wrapped up soon” but that Washington needed “a guarantee there’ll never be a nuclear weapon”. “We are never going to give them a nuclear weapon,” he told a rally in Daytona Beach, Florida. US officials have said Trump may order a major new strike if Republicans fare badly in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesman Mohammad Akraminia warned on Saturday that if Trump “resorts to another adventure in the region” with Israel, “the flames of war will engulf a much wider area”, a day after Iran’s leadership ordered a ‘geographically unrestricted response’ to any attack. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also hit back at German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said the war had added more than €100 billion to Europe’s energy bill: “Red lines are a thing of the past.”
The war, which began on February 28 and is in its ninth month, has shut most traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Qatari mediators returned to Tehran this week, with Pakistan backing the effort.
