WHEN YOU ARE UP AGAINST the most worrisome modern security threat there is–the spread of nuclear weapons–history becomes more than an academic pastime. Get it right and you avoid the errors of the past. Get it wrong and the worst of the past is almost certain to rhyme into the future.

Take the Sunday Washington Post report, “Past Arguments Don’t Square With Current Iran Policy,” in which Dafna Linzer describes a nuclear negotiating strategy President Ford “reluctantly” endorsed for Iran that would reap U.S. nuclear vendors over $7 billion. Under this deal, which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger laid out in a memorandum in 1975, the United States, according to Ms. Linzer, would supply Iran with reactors and try “to accommodate Iranian demands” for plants to separate plutonium chemically from spent reactor fuel, even though the plutonium produced could be used directly to make nuclear weapons.