One section of the “interview with Hassan Rowhani”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2012/05/qa-former-iran-nuclear-negotiator-bush-negotiation-bid-was-rebuffed.html, about which “I blogged”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2221/rowhani-interview-2012-edition a little while back, discusses the Supreme Leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons.
For me, this is the most interesting part:
bq.. Did the content of the fatwa include both production of nuclear weapons and their use?
*When the SL discussed it, he mentioned production, storage, and use.* I believe it was in early November 2004 that the SL talked about it at the University of Tehran [where the capital’s Friday Prayers are held]. That was when we were on the verge of [signing] the Paris Agreement. The agreement mentioned Iran’s guarantees [to not produce nuclear weapons], but the European troika emphasized strong guarantees and strong commitments. *My first negotiation with the European ministers [following the fatwa] was on December 13, 2004, a month after the fatwa.* I told them that our most important discussion should be reaching an agreement about our guarantees, and your guarantees and strong commitments. […] In a negotiation session, the discussions were over the type of guarantees that the Europeans could give us. The representative of [Javier] Solana [then European Union foreign policy chief] suggested the word mohkam [strong], and our team accepted it. But our European counterparts did not appear happy with the suggestion of Solana’s representative. I told the three European ministers that they should know about *two explicit guarantees from our side, one of which is the fatwa of the SL. He issued the fatwa and declared the production nuclear weapons haram [forbidden]. This fatwa is more important to us than the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] and its Additional Protocol, more important than any other law.*