Atomic Jihad

Why we must never allow Iran, an absolutist theocracy whose leaders see martyrdom as a sacred calling, to obtain nuclear weapons.

Still from a propaganda video posted by an Iranian state media outlet, showing a hand stroking what appears to be a mock nuclear bomb, accompanied by the word “maybe.” Shared via @iraninarabic_ir on X.

When India tested its first nuclear device in 1974, the test was codenamed Smiling Buddha and billed as a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” though no one was fooled. Delhi was clearly staking its claim to be a world power. Two decades later, in 1998, Islamabad unleashed its own nuclear weapons project—Chagai-I—with a flurry of underground detonations in the Baluchistan desert. The “Islamic Bomb,” as some Western commentators called it, had arrived. The Clinton administration condemned both sets of tests, levied sanctions under the Glenn Amendment, and warned of an arms race on the subcontinent. The US knew that it could not uninvent the bomb but the logic of mutually assured destruction safeguarded the two countries. India and Pakistan, it turned out, preferred tense coexistence to mutual annihilation. In each case, the world adjusted. India was eventually welcomed into a strategic partnership with the United States. Pakistan, while unstable, is treated as a necessary evil.

Then came North Korea. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left Pyongyang isolated, economically crippled, and geopolitically paranoid. The Clinton administration brokered the 1994 Agreed Framework, offering fuel oil and civilian reactors in exchange for a freeze on North Korea’s plutonium program. But by the early 2003, the deal had unravelled. George W. Bush labelled Kim Jong-Il’s regime part of the “Axis of Evil,” and Pyongyang, feeling encircled, withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Three years later, it tested its first nuclear weapon. The global reaction was swift, but mostly symbolic: sanctions and international condemnation. Yet North Korea endured, sustained by Chinese supplies.