Somewhere in the Situation Room this week, someone had to hold two different nuclear policies in their head at once. The US is closing in on its second week of nightly strikes on Iran, some of them aimed squarely at nuclear infrastructure (satellite photos of the damage to Bushehr made the rounds a few days ago). And today: reports that Washington is about to announce a deal letting Saudi Arabia build a civilian nuclear program, enrichment included, worth billions to American companies.

I keep trying to find the version of this that isn’t funny in a bleak way, and I can’t. “Civilian” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: uranium enriched for a power plant and uranium enriched for a warhead start from the same centrifuges and diverge only at the point someone decides to keep spinning. Israeli officials, the US’s closest partner in the region, are reportedly the ones raising the alarm here, which tells you something. This isn’t paranoia from Tehran, it’s paranoia from people usually on the same side of the argument.

None of this is really about nonproliferation. It’s about who gets to hold the technology and who doesn’t, and that list tracks alliances, not chemistry.

Meanwhile in Kyiv, Zelensky fired his army’s commander-in-chief today, days after firing the man who built the drone program. Two of Ukraine’s most visible wartime figures gone in a week, mid-war, after street protests. I don’t know what’s driving it from the inside, only that it’s the kind of shakeup normally reserved for peacetime cabinets, not year-four command structures.

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