Don’t Panic!: What’s next with Iran?

The West’s nuclear standoff with Iran has been going on forever. OK, maybe not quite forever, but it sure feels like forever. It was 2002 when the world figured out Iran was building a secret uranium-enrichment facility. Just think about how different the world was in 2002.

Back then, Barack Obama was still an Illinois state senator. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an engineering teacher. A solid majority of Americans still thought “retarded cowboy” was a winning foreign policy. Instead of Nickelback, we had Creed. And back in ‘02, it was difficult to get through a day without hearing the phrases “J. Lo,” “hot in here,” or “voted off the island.”

Much has changed, but the Iran situation persists. Iran swears to Allah its nuclear program is for peaceful power-generation and that the rest of the world should mind its own effing business.

Meanwhile, the U.S., Europe and the United Nations claim Iran’s nuclear program already has broken too many of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s rules to be trusted with a nuclear fuel-enrichment program of any sort. Even if Iran has no intention of building a nuclear weapon today, the process of enriching radioactive fuel for nuclear power reactors is so similar to the process of making fuel for nuclear weapons that it doesn’t matter what Iran intends to do.

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(Photo illustration by Andisheh Nouraee)