The Big Iran Threat Is Nukes, Not Coronavirus

Because it’s all anyone wants to talk about right now, we’ll start with coronavirus. Admittedly, the videos of body bags on the floor of a hospital in Qoms, Iran, are unsettling, even if we aren’t certain of the causes of death. That the country has confirmed more than 100 deaths from coronavirus (including a top aide to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) yet reports fewer than 5,000 cases total is evidence of incompetent public health services, a government coverup or really terrible math. Travel is being cut off between cities; prisons are being emptied; the health minister is urging people not to use paper money; and hoarding face masks might get you the death penalty.

But the really scary news out of Iran last week involved the regime’s fitful yet determined pursuit of a nuclear arsenal. First, Iran has violated the 2015 nuclear deal by tripling its stockpile of low-enriched uranium over three months, and now probably has enough to make a single bomb. This was perhaps unsurprising, given that President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal in 2018 and European efforts to keep it alive are on life support. The second report was that the regime has been stonewalling International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from sites to which they were guaranteed access under the deal, and where they suspect nuclear-related activities took place in the mid-2000s. That was was more surprising — although not so much to the skeptics who opposed the nuclear pact in the first place and insisted Tehran had never come clean on the history of its weapons program.