The Gods of Irony certainly were on their game when they had the Iranians interrupt their plot to acquire an atomic bomb so they could seize a ship flying the flag of the Marshall Islands. The Marshalls are levying a lawsuit at the Hague against the nine nuclear powers* for failing to live up to their obligations to reduce their arsenals and prevent nuclear proliferation. In the midst of this the Iranians are forcing the Marshalls to test the defense obligations of one of the lawsuit defendants, our own America. Maybe settlement talks could be held at Bikini.

We were alerted to these ironies by a diplomat we admire, the Honorable Stuart J. Beck. He is Ambassador of the Republic of Palau to the Oceans and Seas. He is a lawyer who, despite being educated at Harvard and Yale, still talks out of the side of his mouth, always with wit and insight. It was he who lawyered the Compact of Free Association under which Palau and the Marshalls emerged from trusteeship after World War II and became independent nations associated for their defense with America.

Mr. Beck worked on that project with, among others, Tony De Brum. He is an anti-nuclear activist and now foreign minister of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Mr. de Brum is also suing America in federal court in San Francisco, animated by the fact that, among others, members of his own family have come down with leukemia. His politics and our own are not aligned on all matters, but he is a remarkable figure. He likes to ask his interlocutors whether they have personally witnessed nuclear detonations.

The foreign minister put that question only yesterday here in New York to the 9th Review Conference of the States Parties of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement. He reminded his conferees that he had witnessed such an explosion as “a young boy at Likiep atoll in the northern Marshall Islands, during the time in which 67 nuclear weapons were tested between 1946 and 1958 — at an explosive scale equivalent to 1.6 Hiroshima Shots every single day, for 12 years.” He was nine years old. What he witnessed he referred to as “the 1954 Bravo shot.”

Mr. de Brum was referring to Castle Bravo, which took place at Bikini and was the first American test of a dry fuel hydrogen bomb. On Tuesday Mr. de Brum described it as the “largest detonation the world had ever seen, one thousand times the power of the Hiroshima blast. It was the morning, and I was fishing with my grandfather. He was throwing the net and suddenly the silent bright flash — and then a force, the shock wave. Everything turned red — the ocean, the fish, the sky, and my grandfather’s net. And we were 200 miles away from ground zero.”

We caught up by phone with Mr. de Brum this afternoon. He was at San Francisco airport, en route back to the Pacific. He is still being briefed on Iran’s seizure the Maersk Tigris. Our advice would be for him to return to New York, so he can go before the United Nations. He’s been a supporter of President Obama’s negotiations with Iran, but maybe his own story can help the world to see whether it’s logical for America to ink a pact that would pave the way for the Iranian mullahs to get a nuclear bomb. The Sun sees the American arsenal as a sacred trust, matched by the non-proliferation treaty. So by seizing a Marshall Islands vessel, Iran presents us with a moment of truth, however ironical it might be.

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* The Marshalls name America, Britain, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.