What Cannot Be Bombed: Iran’s Logic of Self-Reliant Development
On February 28, 2026, a joint U.S.-Israeli force invaded Iran while the country was actively engaged in negotiations with the United States. That same day, Iran’s Supreme Leader and several other senior officials were assassinated, and a school in the southern city of Minab was struck, killing over 168 schoolchildren. Shortly afterward, a video circulated on social media showing an American woman expressing shock that girls even attend school in Iran. “I always imagined Iranian girls in burqas,” she said, “staying at home and doing housework.” Her comment, however uninformed, was not merely personal; it reflected a much broader Western failure to see Iran as anything more than a caricature.
A few days later, as Israeli and U.S. forces intensified their bombing of Iran’s infrastructure, the scale of the destruction became clear. The historic Pasteur Institute, where Iran had produced all its major vaccines, was targeted along with the country’s advanced laboratories, universities, pharmaceutical companies, the longest bridge in West Asia, and its railroads. The assault was not limited to the military; it was an assault on knowledge, on health, on the very fabric of a functioning and thriving society.
While these events were painful, they also revealed a different image of Iran, a country that has endured some of the most brutal sanctions in modern history. Yet the reality of Iran, its universities, its vaccines, its research labs, its infrastructure and its quiet resilience had been so deeply buried under Western media propaganda that the nation had been reduced, in the outside imagination, to little more than a nuclear site and a backward land. In this essay, I argue that the Islamic Republic of Iran, from its very inception, built a logic of sovereign development rooted in self-reliance, a logic that transformed education, medicine, agriculture, and military capacity, and that ultimately enabled the nation to withstand an all-out war by the United States, Israel, and their regional allies.
The Assault on Knowledge
The joint U.S.-Israeli invasion made it brutally clear that they were waging a systematic campaign against Iran’s intellectual infrastructure: its universities, its research laboratories, and the very minds that powered its scientific renaissance. They struck Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, one of the most acclaimed scientific institutions in the world. The blast collapsed the Faculty of Civil Engineering, the Nanotechnology and Environment Research Institutes, the Convergent Research Institute building, and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Days later, the Laser and Plasma Research Institute of Beheshti University was hit. In Isfahan, the university was attacked twice. Iran University of Science and Technology also saw its physics laboratory targeted. The invaders deliberately targeted institutions that had produced generations of Iranian engineers, physicists, and medical researchers, the very people who had made Iran's drive toward self-sufficiency possible.
But the campaign did not stop at buildings. In a coordinated series of assassinations, Iranian scientists were systematically killed. Israel has a long history of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, dating back to the 2010s, and this campaign followed the same grim pattern. Some were killed in their houses alongside their families. In certain cases, an entire civilian building block was destroyed, killing innocent men, women, and children who had no connection to any military or scientific program.
Pharmaceutical companies that provided vital medications for patients with chronic and incurable diseases were also targeted. U.S. and Israeli forces struck Tofigh Daru, a strategic manufacturer of cancer drugs, anesthetics, and medications for special diseases. By destroying it, the invaders were directly attacking the health and livelihood of Iran’s most vulnerable populations.
The pattern was unmistakable: those who had built Iran’s capacity for independent innovation were being systematically eliminated. By targeting the entire knowledge ecosystem from university classrooms and advanced laboratories to the scientists themselves, the invaders sought to cripple not just Iran's defenses, but its capacity to think, to invent, and to train the next generation of engineers and doctors.
From Revolution to Self-Reliant Development
At the heart of the 1979 Iranian Revolution lay a single, powerful idea: genuine independence cannot be borrowed or bought; it must be cultivated through self-reliant development. From its very first days, the revolutionary government dedicated itself to this task, seeking to build a society capable of determining its own fate. This self-reliant development would come to shape every major sector of Iranian life from education and medicine to military defense.
In 1976, three years before the revolution, only 46.4 out of every 100 male Iranians over the age of 15 knew how to read and write. For women, the numbers were even worse. The new government’s first priority became a nationwide effort to tap this vast reservoir of unused potential. The results have been extraordinary. Today, female literacy has soared to 93.5%. In rural areas, the transformation has been nothing short of remarkable, literacy rates among women have leapt from a mere 4% at the revolution’s outset to nearly 90% now. Walk into any major Iranian university, and you will find that women make up the majority of graduates, a fact that shatters the crude stereotypes common in much of the Western imagination.
This newly educated generation became the engine behind one of the modern era’s most remarkable transformations: the rise of Iran’s pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Before the revolution, Iran’s drug sector was weak and subservient. Pharmacists were few, and those who existed largely worked for foreign companies. Local factories produced barely a quarter of the medicines the country needed. The post-revolutionary state, driven by its ideology of self-sufficiency and backed by public investment, propelled the industry forward at breathtaking speed. Today, Iran manufactures over 90% of its own medications domestically. In the field of nanotechnology, Iran ranks among the world’s top nations in both scientific papers and registered patents. When crushing sanctions descended, this reservoir of human capital, decades of skilled specialists, scientists, and engineers became Iran’s most valuable currency.
Self-reliant development was not limited to civilian sectors. The Iran–Iraq War taught Iran a painful lesson that defense had to be built at home, beyond any embargo’s reach. Over forty years under the harshest sanctions ever imposed, Iranian scientists did exactly that. They reverse-engineered foreign hardware, mastering solid-fuel motors and then liquid-fuel engines for longer-range missiles. By the 2020s, Iran unveiled hypersonic missiles, drones, and the Bavar-373 air-defense system, all built entirely by Iranian engineers. Every major weapon was now Iranian-designed, Iranian-made, and Iranian-sustained. No foreign power could sabotage it, cut off spare parts, or disrupt its supply chain.
The Unbreakable Thread
The 40-day war that followed the U.S.-Israeli invasion on February 28, 2026 was not, as many had predicted, a swift collapse of the Islamic Republic. It was, instead, the ultimate test of a project that had been more than four decades in the making. When the bombs fell on bridges, factories, research centers, and universities, the outside world expected shortages, panic, and surrender. But ordinary Iranians faced no such unraveling. The country did not break, because it had long ago learned to provide for itself. Neither sanctions nor airstrikes could bring it to its knees. What outsiders had always dismissed as weakness, a nation perpetually under sanction, had quietly become its most formidable weapon.
The speed of recovery was itself a testament to this self-reliance. All railway lines destroyed during the bombardment were repaired and brought back into operation within 48 hours to a maximum of five days, relying entirely on domestic capabilities. Meanwhile, universities kept their classes running online, ensuring that education continued uninterrupted even as buildings lay in ruins.
Yet the resilience Iran displayed was not merely a matter of supply chains, repair crews, or digital classrooms. It ran deeper. Unlike countries that outsource their research or depend on foreign-trained scientists, Iran had built a distributed, self-replicating system of knowledge. The scientists who were assassinated had trained hundreds of students. Those students, scattered across the country, had themselves become teachers. The universities that were bombed had long ago spun off smaller research centers in provincial towns. The laboratories that lay in rubble had already transferred their essential work to other sites. The scientists who were killed had passed their knowledge to a generation that now carried it forward.
The invasion was designed to decapitate Iran and to destroy its leadership, cripple its economy, and erase its scientific and military capabilities. But a nation that has learned to produce its own food, manufacture its own medicines, design its own weapons, repair its own infrastructure within days, and educate its own people cannot be defeated by sanction or bombardment. Its strength is not imported. It is grown at home. And what is grown at home can never be uprooted. What the U.S. and Israeli militaries failed to understand is that knowledge, once planted, cannot be bombed into oblivion. It will never die.
Zeinab Ghasemi Tari is an associate professor in the Department of North American Studies and the Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran.