WSJ:

Thanks to Obama’s deal, it could become the first nuclear power to undergo a violent revolution.

The popular uprisings in Iran make it a sure bet that the Islamic Republic’s government will eventually collapse. That possibility in a nuclear Iran should have many in Washington losing sleep. What will happen to Iran’s centrifuges, enriched uranium, warhead designs and ballistic-missile technologies if the mullahs are toppled? What will happen to Iran’s scientists who are suddenly unemployed? Western governments should prepare.

The Islamic Republic was never the island of stability its Western enablers made it out to be. In the early 1980s, vengeful mullahs purged liberals and secularists who had naively joined Islamists to overthrow the shah. This produced a generation of young Iranians highly skeptical of their clerical elders. Students rebelled in 1999, the middle class in 2009. Last month tens of thousands of working-class Iranians finally decided they’d had enough.

These demonstrations must have been particularly unsettling for the clerical oligarchs, because the lower classes were supposed to be the mainstay of their power. For decades, the Islamic Republic has sought to tether this class to clerical rule by expanding the welfare state. Yet that welfare state is jeopardized by corruption and foreign adventures. Corrupt men of God are always more galling than crooked monarchs and army officers.

The Islamic Republic is no ordinary dictatorship heading toward the dust bin of history. In 2015 it was effectively granted a license by the U.S. and the other world powers to expand its nuclear program. The deal has not impeded Iran’s efforts to modernize its nuclear apparatus. Under the watchful eye of Ali Akbar Salehi, the MIT-educated head of Iran’s atomic program, Iran continues to enrich uranium, develop advanced centrifuges, test ballistic missiles, and train engineers. The regime, which has continuously lied about its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, is determined to build an industrial-sized uranium-enrichment infrastructure equipped with cutting-edge technology and manned by a capable cadre of scientists.

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