45 years ago, Iran waged its own preemptive strike

In ordering a preemptive strike aimed at significantly setting back Iran’s nuclear program, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was following in the footsteps of two of his predecessors. Menachem Begin ordered an attack in 1981 that destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor. And a quarter-century later, Ehud Olmert gave the green light in 2007 to destroy a nuclear reactor in its last stages of construction in northeastern Syria.

But Israel was not in fact the first country in the Middle East to take aim at an enemy’s nuclear facilities.

That distinction belongs to Iran.

On Sept. 30, 1980, just eight days...