Atomic Easter Eggs...Midnight Hammer Hits Rising Lion

 I spent Easter 2005 in the Islamic Republic of Iran.  At the request of the U.S. Government, I went to the heart of Persia officially to speak at the National Research Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Congress.  The subtext of my visit was more nuanced.  Tensions were high between the U.S., U.K., Israel, and Iran regarding their nuclear aspirations.  At the time – as now – the vast majority of “intelligence” on these programs were dueling propaganda machines (carefully orchestrated with France, China, and Russia on one side and with John Bolton and pro-Israel militant lobbyists on the other) churning out equally false information.  Rational actors in the Bush Administration – yes, there were several – thought that having an American in Tehran may afford a perspective not reliant on either dogmatic extreme.  So, yours truly, went.

 

My invited speech was at the Presidential Hall on March 26, 2005.  The place was brimming with religious leaders, Heads of State, the Secretary General of UNESCO, and hundreds of senior officials.  President Mohammad Khatami’s opening address was direct, unambiguous, and clearly evidenced his recognition that the American on the stage was going to convey it back to the Administration of George W. Bush.  The following is part of the speech preceding mine by then-President Khatami.

 

“One of the most important ethical issues which is especially widely highlighted these days and is directly related to science and ethics is the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) such as chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. What is known in the history of science and politics as in the “Oppenheimer Case” is not, in fact a personal, isolated case. Today, the world is seriously threatened by production and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

 

Despite the fact that weapons of mass destruction are manufactured by the express order of politicians and military authorities, they are unfortunately developed and tested in the scientists’ laboratories. The horrible meaning of deviating science from the “truth” towards “power” starting from Bacon’s time, unveiled its horrific reality when thousands of innocent lives were claimed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thousands more were injured and became handicapped for the rest of their lives, and this tragic story still continues.

 

We cannot and we must not oppose weapons of mass destruction simply because of certain interests of ours. This sort of opposition will continue only as long as those hypothetical interests exist. As soon as those interests cease to continue, opposing the weapons of mass destruction will also come to an end. In the name of ethics, in the name of respecting the lives of people all over the world, we must oppose absolutely – with no exception and no precondition – the manufacturing and proliferation weapons of mass destruction at all times and in all places. The opposition of those who openly or secretly produce such weapons is void of any value. Such oppositions are ethical only when they are based on the “Truth”.”

 

On March 27, 2005, I had the honor of meeting with several of the leading scientists and leadership of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).  During my visit to Tehran for the International Congress of Bioethics, I was invited to several meetings and locations that were not commonly accessed by Americans.  Getting to know the extensive research being done on nuclear science – from enrichment and containment to waste remediation – the breadth of exposure I was afforded was expansive.  What I experienced was incongruous with the cacophony of drumbeats for war in the West.  At one point, holding glass vitrified nuclear waste, I marveled at how, in collaboration with Australia, France, and Russia, Iran had figured out some waste remediation technology which could have saved American nuclear programs billions of dollars.

 

Above all, I got to know hundreds of Iranians.  Persians through and through, these people embraced their heritage first as heirs of one of the world’s oldest empires, then Iranians, and then Muslim – In That Order.  While the Shia clerics offer in caricature the villainous hyperbole akin to other eschatologically motivated doomsdayers of every religion, the warmth of humanity I experienced from Tehran to Qom, from Isfahan to Natanz, was no different than Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, or Utah. 

 

And, upon my return, I was told that my briefings contributed to the 20 years of restraint that President Trump broke on June 21, 2025.

 

Now let’s be clear!  If the Operation Midnight Hammer and Rising Lion had truly incapacitated Iran’s nuclear programs, we would be hearing about uranium hexafluoride in the air over eastern Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and southwest Pakistan.  The chest thumping in Jerusalem and Washington D.C. can only echo off the cavernous walls of geographic, meteorologic and scientific ignorance of a populace that has been conditioned to swallow ideological opioids at a pace that would make Purdue Pharmaceuticals blush.  Far from incapacitating any program, what Israel and the United States did was foreclose any meaningful path towards non-proliferation.  By pretending to “show strength”, the political theater in both the U.S. and Israel played to the masses using the only tool they have to distract – shock and awe.

 

While I cringe to think that President George W. Bush was somehow more capable of nuance and restraint than President Donald Trump, I find the public’s acceptance of this action repulsive.  We’re better than this.  The days of “regime change” through covert operations and bellicosity should be behind us.  Iran, in all likelihood, moved most, if not all of its strategic material from Fordow (Qom), Natanz, and Isfahan.  Now, in collaboration with fully nuclear armed Pakistan, China, Russia and North Korea, Iran solidified its alliances faster than a B-2 could scramble from Missouri to Guam.  While U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth celebrated an “incredible and overwhelming success,” he failed to qualify to whom that success would inure.  And as Dr. Anthony Fauci did in his first coup d'état in Trump 45, 47 is getting played again by forces that he doesn’t even recognize.

 

Men I know likely died in the campaigns executed by the United States and its proxies in the last few days.  I’ve long celebrated the fact that my life has carried me to so many places around the world that war, disaster, and crisis seldom can touch a place on Earth where I don’t have a cherished friend.  And many more will die in the days to come.  But the greatest casualty in this recent campaign is the conscience of people of goodwill who are now emboldened to question food additives and toxins labeled as “medicine” but still are blind to the fact that our entire political sphere is predicated on internal corruption and external acquiescence.  We The People should demand better. 

The parable of American foreign policy is not written in truth but in theater. And like all enduring theater, it thrives not on fact but on feeling—on the orchestrated pulse of patriotism, the tremble of fear, and the redemptive illusion of purpose. The recent narrative choreography surrounding Iran is not a new script. It is, in fact, the revival of a passion play with ancient lines: Us versus Them. Order versus Chaos. Good versus Evil. In this ritual, the actors change, but the lines remain.

In Sa’adi’s Gulistan, we read: “The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.” But modern geopolitics teaches us to forget this kinship. Instead, it arms us with hammers and calls us righteous when we strike.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the public has been conditioned to accept manufactured certainty: A virus has a single origin. A vaccine is unassailable salvation. A government is a benevolent protector. These were not discoveries—they were dogmas, forged in think tanks and sold through the high priests of media. The deep psychological impression left by COVID's theater was not about biology—it was about obedience. It was about narrative submission.

And now, we are invited once more to submit. This time, the virus is not microscopic, but national. It wears the face of Iran.

The imagery of “47’s COVID” is not a prediction—it is a metaphor. It calls attention to the cyclic pattern of engineered crises used to galvanize attention and obedience. President 47, whomever he may be, will be handed a ‘problem’ already written in the code of psychological manipulation. And the algorithm will be ancient:

1. Reveal the invisible enemy. 2. Declare your divine right to confront it. 3. Silence dissent as dangerous. 4. Deploy the hammer.

But who forged the hammer?

It is forged in the same smithy as the mythology of the masculine: valor through violence, clarity through conquest, identity through enemy. Our hammer is not strength—it is amnesia. It forgets that true strength is restraint. True clarity is reflection. True identity is forged not in opposition, but in union.

Rumi writes: “Don’t get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure.”

What if Iran is not our enemy but our mirror? What if the narratives we fear “them” for—religious extremism, control of speech, gender repression—are in embryonic or overt form present within our own society? What if we are not confronting Iran, but refusing to confront ourselves?

The hammer falls hardest when it is swung without self-awareness. And the gospel of misrecognition has told the West that its blindness is vision.

This is not a condemnation of America. This is a call for her initiation. The lion of her mythos was never meant to devour truth, but to guard the sacred.

There is another way.

Let us take this moment not as an opportunity to reinforce the walls of suspicion, but to dismantle the architecture of illusion. Let us reject the seductive simplicity of enemies and return to the sacred complexity of kinship.

As Hafiz whispered:

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living In better conditions.”

And so, to those who would lead, and those who would follow: put down the hammer. Pick up the mirror. The lion is not your prey. It is your reflection.

---

Written in the spirit of remembrance, For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

 

x