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The unprecedented protests now occurring across Iran have reignited international concerns about the looming danger of Iran’s nuclear program.

The public is invited to The Iranian Uprising and the Nuclear Threat: How Should the West Respond?, a presentation by German political scientist and historian Dr. Matthias Küntzel on Thursday, Nov. 17, at 6 pm in the Pugh Hall Ocora.

Dr. Küntzel will address the history of Iran’s relationship with the West, and explain why measures by the international community to avert Iran’s nuclear threat have failed. He will also speak about the recent uprising by Iranian women, and its impact on the nuclear debate.

The talk is part of the Bud Shorstein Speaker Series and co-sponsored by the UF Center for Jewish Studies’ Norman and Irma Braman Chair in Holocaust Studies; the UF Center for European Studies; the UF College of Liberal Arts & Sciences; and the Bob Graham Center for Public Service.

This is an in-person program that is free and open to the public. An alternate livestream link is provided.

About the Program

Iran’s nuclearization is the beginning of a very great change in the world,” then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened in 2007. It would be placed “at the service of those who are determined to confront the bullying powers and aggressors.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was succeeded by new presidents such as Hassan Rohani and Ebrahim Raisi. But Iranian Revolutionary Leader Ali Khamenei, the highest authority in the country, has remained. What has also remained is violence against critics of the regime, the rejection of liberal democracies, and the desire to destroy the Jewish state of Israel.

It is not the technology that makes Iran‘s nuclear program dangerous, but rather the ideological mix in which the nuclear option emerges. Never in the history of the nuclear age have religious fanatics been so close to the bomb.

Matthias Küntzel will explain how this came about and why all measures and resolutions of the international community to avert this danger have failed. He will also report on the uprising of Iranian women and its impact on the nuclear debate, and discuss possibilities for preventing the Iranian bomb.

About the Speaker

Dr. Matthias Küntzel is a political scientist and historian. He worked as a non-proliferation and nuclear expert for the Green Party’s parliamentary group in the German parliament from 1984 to 1988 and wrote his doctoral thesis on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the nuclear option. He has since published several books on Iran and German-Iranian relations in English, Farsi and German. He is a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the advisory board of the US organization United Against A Nuclear Iran (UANI). In 2011, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) honored his commitment against anti-Semitism with the Paul Ehrlich-Günther Schwerin Human Rights Award; in 2022, he received the Theodor Lessing Award for Enlightened Thought and Action in Germany.