You Can’t Bomb Knowledge

There is something obscene in the way bombs illuminate the night. A bloom of fire rising like a malignant flower, choreographed to the applause of flags and press conferences, as if destruction could ever be confused for progress. The American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, carried out under the cocksure bluster of Donald Trump, was not a surgical strike; it was a political tantrum, a monument to imperial ignorance dressed in the language of national security.

It is said that the bombs struck deep underground targets, that they silenced centrifuges and vaporized data banks. And yet, despite all the fireworks, Iran's nuclear program is not a building or a blueprint. It is not a bunker that can be breached, nor a switch that can be flicked off. It is a body of knowledge, passed from hand to hand, from one mind to the next, across borders and generations. You can bomb a laboratory, but you cannot unlearn uranium enrichment. You can assassinate a scientist, but you cannot dismember memory. You can wage war on matter, but thought is another thing entirely.

Iran has lived under the shadow of American sabotage for decades. Sanctions, cyber-attacks, covert assassinations. And through it all, the nuclear program has endured: not in defiance of diplomacy, but in response to a foreign policy that has always mistaken coercion for conversation. Each new act of aggression deepens the resolve of a people who remember the coup of 1953, who remember the Shah’s Savak secret police, who remember chemical weapons provided to Saddam Hussein and never condemned. History, too, is a form of knowledge. And the Iranians remember.

Trump, for all his grotesque candor, is not exceptional. He is simply the most naked expression of what American foreign policy has always been: a theater of domination. The strike on Iran was not a policy decision. It was a campaign ad. A pyrotechnic distraction in the twilight of an administration drunk on grievance and celebrity. But even as the hangover sets in, the damage persists. Concrete has cracked. Lives have been lost. And the political terrain in Tehran has shifted further toward the very hardliners Washington claims to oppose.

No, this was not the end of a threat. It was the beginning of a new phase in a long, cynical game. Iran’s nuclear program will recover, if it was ever meaningfully interrupted at all. Scientists will return to work. Blueprints will be redrawn. And perhaps now, after the illusion of diplomacy has been so thoroughly shattered, there will be even less incentive to restrain ambition. The lesson, as always, is clear: America punishes cooperation and rewards confrontation. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA was shredded not by Iran, but by Trump, with the clumsy pride of a man tearing up a contract he never bothered to read.

And what of the rest of us, watching from the sidelines of empire, clutching our smartphones like rosaries? We are told that the bombings were necessary, that they made the world safer. Safer for whom? Not for the families living near Natanz or Isfahan. Not for the diplomats scrambling to salvage what remains of international law. Not for the world’s people, who live with the terrifying knowledge that nuclear capability is no longer the exclusive domain of great powers, but the shared inheritance of a deeply unequal planet.

What we are witnessing is not the elimination of threat but the escalation of danger. Not containment, but provocation. And it is being done in our name.

There is a story, rarely told in polite circles, about a young Iranian physicist named Majid Shahriari who once studied in Paris, then returned home not to build weapons but to teach. He believed in science as a force for national dignity, for independence. He is dead now: blown up by a magnetic bomb on his morning commute, the work of foreign agents who believed his knowledge made him dangerous. And perhaps it did. Perhaps all knowledge is dangerous in a world ruled by fear.

But that physicist is not alone. There are others. There will always be others. Because knowledge, unlike oil or land or loyalty, cannot be occupied. It spreads. It evolves. It survives even the heaviest bombs.

So what now? More sanctions? More assassinations? Another war to end all nuance?

There is no military solution to a crisis of imagination. And there is no way to disarm a mind.

If the United States truly fears nuclear proliferation, then it must look inward: at its own stockpiles, its own unratified treaties, its own refusal to imagine security as something other than supremacy. Until then, every bomb dropped in the name of peace will only fertilize the soil from which new dangers grow.