Iran's supreme leader calls use of nuclear weapons:'big sin'

[Straha]

The Iranian clerical leadership has always held that Nuclear Weapons, and weapons of mass destruction in general, are abhorrent and unIslamic. Khomeini went on record multiple times decrying their very existence and calling for the global disarmament of nuclear weapons. This has been a consistent refrain on all levels of the Iranian religious leadership since '79, and I have never seen any convincing evidence to doubt their sincerity of belief (there were even purges in the mid-80s largely of people who had gone on record supporting WMD programs to fight Iraq, though these were done primarily for other political beliefs).

Either way, I want to believe that what the Ayatollah is saying. While politicians do lie, when a religious figure of his stature calls something a sin, his followers are going to take that to heart.

How many Catholics take everything the Pope says to heart?

There's a tremendous difference between the Pope and the Rahbar. One is a mostly defunct spiritual leader who sits at the apex of a medieval bureaucracy, the other is an active dynamic force inside a country of which he is the head of state, whose bureaucracy and foreign policy he controls, and who has spent the past two years making Mahmoud Ahmadinejad his personal political bitch while making sure that everyone understands that he's still a major political player.