Trump's Churchillian Decision: Eliminating Iran's Nuclear Sites Means No One Can Use Them Later
by Lawrence Kadish • June 19, 2025 at 12:00 pm
President Donald J. Trump has a problem. If he leaves Iran's major nuclear research and centrifuge sites, such as the Fordow uranium enrichment plant or Natanz, under their protective mountains, the countless centrifuges sheltered there will remain a permanent temptation -- an "attractive nuisance" -- for the Iranian regime to resurrect to terrorize its neighbors with again.
What Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appears to want -- and what Iran's regime has said it wants since the Islamic Republic's founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put it in 1979 – is:
"We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry 'There is no god but God' resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle."
— Quoted on p. 42 of Shireen T. Hunter's The Foreign Policy of Iran: Ideology and Pragmatism (Praeger, 1984).
