I normally try to discuss controversial and important ideas and events, like binge drinking and speed dating, but this week’s Iranian demonstration of prospective nuclear capability is too historic to ignore. It is the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.

Despite what was otherwise a nice spring day, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took to international camera screens on Tuesday to announce that his nation ‘has joined the club of nuclear countries.’ I was unaware before then that nuclear capability was an international chemistry fraternity, but when you think about it, the idea of a brotherhood of bombs explains a lot.

According to the International Atomic Energy Association, a total of nine countries currently have the capacity to manufacture nuclear warheads. Five of those are ‘legitimate’ nuclear states: the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France and The Peoples Republic of China. The other four – India, Pakistan, Ukraine and North Korea – have yet to be initiated and receive hoodies with their letters. Meanwhile, other nations have long since been suspected of ‘dirty rushing’ the worldwide fraternity, a crime the Global Panhellenic Council of Nuclear Obliteration takes very seriously. Iran and Israel risk not being invited to the annual DKE volleyball party if their proliferation pledging is discovered.

Iran’s step closer to world domination comes even after the U.N. Security Council suspended it from school for the playful pledging stunt of kidnapping uranium in the middle of the night, a practice also in vogue here at Syracuse University. Despite disapproval from the United Nations, the press conference in which Ahmadinejad presented his ‘project’ proceeded merrily, featuring native women dancing provocatively on stage with vials of uranium to ‘The Thong Song.’

Since Tuesday’s press conference, Ahmadinejad has pouted to Western critics that the country’s program is purely peaceful and aimed solely at producing energy, which is roughly as likely as ‘dry pledging,’ whatever that is. The United Nations either agrees or likes playing the role of Mean Pledge Master, because to date, the organization’s nuclear watchdog agency has been barking loudly, albeit to no avail. This is not surprising, as real-life watchdogs have similar efficiency; they usually just make lots of unnecessary noise, piss off the trespasser, get shot at and end up at the pound snarling at cats. We’re all going to die.

Meanwhile, there are the political avenues to explore. Does it seem ironic to anyone that the United States went to war in Iraq because Saddam was supposedly making lots of weapons of mass destruction, yet the White House knows Iran is definitely trying to build them and it isn’t sending troops to play in their sandbox? The White House claims the enrichment ‘shows that Iran is moving in the wrong direction,’ which of course is any direction that threatens to undermine/blow up the Bush monarchy. Jeb in 2008!

The United Kingdom seems to agree, and as usual our overseas allies have been instrumental in the aversion of crisis. In a statement issued after Ahmadinejad’s Iranian enrichment notice, Britain’s Foreign Office made the intelligence breakthrough of the century by revealing that the development ‘is not particularly helpful.’

Luckily for President Bush, his administration will be able to maintain its argument that global warming is theory instead of accepted fact, because before glaciers start disappearing, the entire world will freeze from nuclear winter. When that happens, it will be up to the weather-hardened residents of Syracuse to repopulate the planet.

Published on April 12, 2006 at 12:00 pm