On 1 August, at a business forum in Jakarta, President Prabowo Subianto told a room of executives that Iran already has nuclear weapons, and that a chain reaction was now underway across the region. His exact words, as reported, were: “It is said that Iran already has nuclear weapons. Now Saudi Arabia wants one too. If Saudi Arabia wants nuclear weapons, it’s possible the UAE will also want them, Qatar will also want them, Egypt will also want them.” He did not say who told him Iran had the bomb, and offered no evidence for the domino effect he predicted across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt. He simply stated all of it as common knowledge, in front of business leaders and cameras. The claim about Iran is false, and the whole chain built on it was unscripted and unchecked — a head of state speculating about the world’s most dangerous weapons spreading across a region without checking his starting premise first.
The facts have not moved. Iran belongs to a treaty that bans countries from building nuclear weapons and allows only peaceful uses, like power generation and medical research.
Inspectors from the world’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, have checked Iran’s facilities many times under that treaty and always found the same thing: a civilian programme, not a weapons one.
Even during Iran’s twelve-day war with the US and Israel earlier this year, when Tehran had the least reason to hold back, the IAEA’s head said again there was no sign of a weapon being built. Decades ago, Iran’s founding religious leader also banned weapons of mass destruction under Islamic law, and that ban still stands. None of this is disputed by anyone who reads what the inspectors actually report.
What makes the remark indefensible is where it came from: not Indonesian intelligence, not independent analysis, but a straight echo of a claim the US and Israel have pushed for years to isolate Iran diplomatically — one that outlasted a failed 2018 nuclear deal and hardened after this year’s war. Prabowo did not attribute it or flag it as disputed.
He stated it as settled fact and moved on, and the damage will not stay contained to that one afternoon. Naming Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar specifically was not a small detail — these are three of Indonesia’s most important Gulf partners, all of whom have spent two years quietly repairing ties with Tehran. Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations in 2023, and Gulf governments have largely avoided endorsing the idea that Iran is about to build a bomb, even while staying wary of Tehran generally.
A foreign president casually suggesting three of them are now racing toward nuclear weapons, right as their own governments try to move past that narrative, reads as someone who has not studied a subject they manage carefully — a poor impression to leave on states he may need for trade or diplomacy later.
There is a sharper problem closer to home. Jakarta has spent years building a reputation as a sympathetic voice on Middle East affairs — outspoken on Gaza, critical of Israel’s conduct there, keen to be seen as a bridge between the Muslim-majority world and international forums. That reputation depends on being seen to understand the region with precision, and Iran itself has been one of the more committed state backers of the Palestinian cause Jakarta claims to champion.
A careless, false claim about Iran’s nuclear programme punctures that image, tells the region Prabowo’s grasp of its politics may be thinner than his rhetoric on Palestine suggests, and gives Tehran reason to doubt how seriously that solidarity should be taken.
None of this puts Iran beyond criticism, or nuclear weapons in the region beyond debate — Israel’s own undeclared arsenal, tellingly, never draws this kind of urgent attention. A head of state does not get to guess at claims about the world’s most dangerous weapons, in a region still absorbing a war’s aftershocks, and expect it to cost him nothing.
Ten minutes reading the watchdog agency’s own public reports would have stopped this before it started. The failure to check is Prabowo’s alone, and it won’t be forgotten quickly: every future statement he makes on Iran, Saudi Arabia, or the wider Middle East will now be read against this one.
Credibility in foreign policy takes years to build and one afternoon to spend. Iran’s embassy in Jakarta did not let it pass quietly either — a day after the speech, it stated publicly that Tehran has never pursued nuclear weapons and never will, and Ambassador Mohammad Boroujerdi added that Iran’s own resilience during this year’s war had already answered the question without needing a warhead to do it. Prabowo, in other words, was corrected in public by the very embassy his own remarks had put on the spot.
