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Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranian regime had two choices when their blatant rigging of the election was met with massive street protests. They could stand aside, a la the decrepit regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989; or they could send out uniformed thugs to beat, kill, and intimidate the protesters until their movement buckled, a la China's Tiananmen Square strategy.

They chose the latter, and we will all pay the price.

For more than 60 years, missiles have been a symbol of international power. Influential nations have them, and others want them. As early as the 1950s, ballistic missiles served as a principal component of European security, with U.S.-made Thor and Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles deployed in NATO countries such as Britain, Italy, and West Germany. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Soviet-made Scud, SS-21, SS-23, and FROG rockets were deployed to nearby Warsaw Pact countries.

President Barack Obama has an ambitious agenda on nuclear weapons issues that will take a long time to implement. For example, the earliest the Senate is likely to vote again on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is 2010. Likewise, a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty is at least three years away. Ditto for the president's goal of safeguarding all vulnerable nuclear weapons and nuclear materials worldwide. And then there is his most ambitious goal of all--a nuclear-weapon-free world, which even he has suggested probably won't take place in his lifetime.

President Barack Obama recently spoke of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's (NPT) importance, as has every president since Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the treaty in 1968. Yet they have all, to a lesser or greater degree, weakened the treaty, through lax enforcement, by carving out exceptions for certain countries, or by just ignoring it. We have come to the point now that North Korea, which signed the treaty in 1985, is now mocking it.

About 15 years ago, a reporter at the Albuquerque Tribune discovered evidence that during the Cold War, the U.S. government carried out radiation experiments on U.S. citizens without their knowledge or consent, all under the shadow of classified research. When the story hit the newswires, the U.S. public was outraged.

Since the Second Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1986, States Parties have made suggestions for how to educate life scientists about and raise awareness of the dual-use implications of their benignly intended work. But little truly has been done to engage scientists on the subject.