Rezaei Says Iran Is Designing Nuclear-Powered Ships and Submarines

The comments were made in a televised interview with Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen on Wednesday, Nov. 11, the same conversation in which Rezaei warned that Iran would strike distant U.S. bases if attacked again and said Israel was threatening Türkiye.

According to a transcript published by the Iranian daily Hamshahri, Rezaei said Tehran “is even in the process of designing nuclear-powered ships and also nuclear submarines,” and that this was why it needed its enriched material. He said Iran might also want, “at some stage,” to produce small reactors of the SMR type, and would need the same material for that as well.

Designing Nuclear Ships and Subs

Those remarks are a claim of ongoing design work. They do not show that Iran has built a nuclear-powered vessel. Mehr News Agency quoted him as saying: “We need enriched materials to design nuclear-powered ships and submarines.”

Iranian officials have floated naval nuclear propulsion for years, usually as a statement of intent rather than a demonstrated program.

Enriched Material Will Stay in Iran

“Not even a particle, however slight, of enriched material will leave Iran, and all of this material will remain in our possession,” Rezaei said, according to Hamshahri. He said Iran had informed “our Russian friends” that the material would stay in the country and be used by Iran itself. Russia has often been cited as a possible destination if the stockpile were moved abroad. Rezaei also said the nuclear file was not currently the subject under discussion.

Washington has demanded that Iran ship the stockpile out of the country. Before U.S. and Israeli strikes on three major Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency had estimated that Tehran held about 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent. Inspectors have not since verified how much survived or where it is stored.

In June 2026, the IAEA’s Board of Governors passed a resolution demanding that Iran report on its uranium stocks.

Earlier Propulsion Plans

In December 2016, then-President Hassan Rouhani ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to plan the production of nuclear fuel for naval transport, after what he called U.S. violations of the 2015 nuclear deal.

In January 2018, Tehran informed the IAEA of a “decision that has been taken to construct naval nuclear propulsion in future.” The agency asked for further details. A diplomat at the time told Reuters the communication referred only to the future, and that actual designs might not yet exist.

In April 2020, then-navy commander Rear Adm. Hossein Khanzadi said developing nuclear-propulsion submarines was on the navy’s agenda. Rezaei, the Supreme National Security Council secretary since August, did not say how far that work had advanced.