For nearly two decades, Iranian military planners have experimented with the possibility of launching an electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) attack that could instantaneously disable electronic systems across the U.S. and lead to nationwide disaster. The nuclear deal, write James Woolsey and Peter Pry, will pave the way to such an attack:

Iran can threaten the existence of the United States by making an EMP attack using a single nuclear weapon. It may obtain one, relatively easily, by cheating in the use of the nuclear infrastructure permitted them under the agreement. U.S. intelligence cannot meet the impossibly high standard of assuring that Iran cannot acquire a single nuclear weapon and, given the regime’s existing nuclear infrastructure, cannot with absolute certainty guarantee that Iran does not already have one.

A single nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude over the United States would generate an EMP that could black out the electric grid and other life-sustaining, critical infrastructures such as communications, transportation, banking and finance, food, and water. The Congressional EMP Commission estimated a nationwide blackout lasting one year could kill anywhere from two of every three Americans (by a low estimate) up to nine of ten Americans by starvation and social disruption.

[A]n Iranian military textbook . . . describes nuclear EMP effects in detail. In more than twenty passages, it advocates an EMP attack to defeat an adversary decisively. The [book also] advocates a revolutionary new way of warfare that combines coordinated attacks by nuclear and non-nuclear EMP weapons [with] physical and cyberattacks against electric grids to black out, and cause the collapse of, entire nations. . . .

The Congressional EMP Commission found that Iran has practiced launching missiles and fusing warheads for high-altitude EMP attack, including off a freighter. Iran has apparently practiced surprise EMP attacks, orbiting satellites on south-polar trajectories to evade U.S. radars and missile defenses. . . . A single nuclear weapon would complete the list of requirements.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.