Heterarchic Strategic Culture and the Resilience of Iran’s Nuclear Program (1957–2025)

Abstract

The resilience of Iran’s nuclear program despite domestic upheavals, economic sanctions, and recurrent external pressures poses a persistent challenge for nuclear proliferation studies. Majority of the existing literature relies on rational choice and materialist explanations of the nuclear program thereby ignoring ideational interpretations. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by arguing that Iran’s nuclear trajectory can be better explained through what we term Heterarchic Strategic Culture (HSC); a socially constructed framework in which religio-historical norms about dignity, resistance, and technological self-sufficiency are strategically employed by competing actors at crunch phases of nuclear decision making in an overall environment of diffusion of power (heterarchy). Drawing on process-tracing of nuclear decision-making episodes from 1957 to 2025, we elucidate how the Supreme Leaders, presidential candidates and small military-technocratic bodies interpret shared cultural claims to justify divergent policy strategies ranging from hedging and negotiation to defiance and acceleration. The article contributes to existing literature by advancing a unique and pluralistic interpretation of strategic culture through its unison with heterarchic decision making, and how they shape nuclear outcomes.