Arthur Herman: When Iran Gets Nukes

Arthur Herman's Gandhi and Churchill was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009.

Barack Obama surely wants to be remembered as the president who got Osama bin Laden and passed the nation's first universal-health-care plan. Instead, history may well mark him down as the leader who let Iran get the bomb -- and so doomed the Middle East to a new Dark Age.

Events in Egypt, Libya and Yemen have pushed Iran out of the headlines -- but RAND Corp. analyst Gregory Jones is on the case. Using the latest data from the International Atomic Energy Agency, he recently concluded that, if Iran's centrifuges continue to produce enriched uranium at current capacity, the regime will have 90 percent of the 20 kilograms it needs to produce a nuclear weapon within two months -- certainly by summer's end.

Even if Jones' timeline is off, and it's actually six or eight months, we may be confronting a nuclear-armed Iran -- what everyone has feared but failed to prevent -- before Christmas. This will radically reshape the Middle East in directions we don't want, and need to prepare to prevent.

It will surely accelerate the regional arms race, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even Jordan all scrambling to join the nuclear club. But the trouble won't stop there...