“Ayatollah, Don’t Khomeini Closer.”

Satellite image shows Natanz nuclear complex in Iran, about 150 miles south of Tehran. The centrifuge program is located at the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Plant, parts of which have been built underground to protect it from air or missile strikes. (AP Photo provided by Space Imaging/Inta SpaceTurk)

Iran's holocaust-denying, apocalypse-obsessed president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today that the country has joined the club of nuclear countries by successfully enriching uranium for the first time. Iran said it successfully enriched uranium using 164 centrifuges at Natanz.

In a lengthy piece “Facing Down Iran: Our lives depend on it,” Mark Steyn today quoted a Daily Telegraph of London report: “Iran’s hard-line spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.” Mark noted it appears that “the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.”

While the international community and every Democrat fervently believe that negotiation is the only option for dealing with Iran, if diplomacy fails, there may be no non-nuclear option to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the Iranian regime's hands. And if anyone wonders what Iran’s crazys would do with nukes, Mark points to five characteristics of Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years: contempt for the most basic international conventions; long-reach extraterritoriality; effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism; a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama); an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action. The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed.

So what are we able to do? The Lefties who called into Hugh Hewitt today insist that the US military is INCAPABLE of taking out the Iranian nuclear facilities. But an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily yesterday described our capability.

The B61-11 is an earth-penetrating nuclear gravity bomb that can be dropped by B-2 Stealth bombers or other planes. It has a hardened casing and hits at bullet speed to drill underground and deliver a delayed mini-nuke blast whose shock waves can destroy a target hundreds of feet underneath. Its yield could be as little as 0.3 kilotons — less than 5% the blast of the Hiroshima bomb. And unlike the atomic bombing of Japan to end World War II, a B61-11 bunker-buster explosion would be partially underground.

Why use it? Conventional weapons won't work against below-ground facilities such as Iran's. In 1996, Harold Smith, then assistant to the secretary of defense for atomic energy, said no conventional weapon could take out Libya's underground chemical weapons factory in Tarhunah, Libya, but that the B61-11 could.

The Pentagon, in fact, wants a bunker buster that would cause even fewer deaths than the B61-11. According to its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, "With a more effective earth penetrator, many buried targets could be attacked using a weapon with a much lower yield." Such a bomb would do the same damage, but produce less fallout (by a factor of 10) than a much larger bomb at the surface, according to the Pentagon report.

Back to Mark Steyn: Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist. A quarter-century ago, there was a minor British pop hit called “Ayatollah, Don’t Khomeini Closer.” If you’re a U.S. diplomat or a British novelist, a Croat Christian or an Argentine Jew, he’s already come way too close. How much closer do you want him to get?