This week, America, France, and Britain will unveil an Iran resolution at the 15-member U.N. Security Council. The proposal will shy away from imposing sanctions on the country, but according to America’s U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, will make “mandatory” past calls for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and allow inspections of nuclear facilities.

The threat of a nuclear Iran, whose mullahs have declared publicly their intention to spread Islamic revolution and wipe Israel’s Jews off the map, is akin to that posed by Germany on the eve of World War II, according to a 90-year-old Middle East scholar, Bernard Lewis.

Will the world, then, take the Neville Chamberlain “peace in our time” approach, or that of Winston Churchill? Chamberlainian calls for diplomatic engagement with Iran are being met by Churchillian voices that say military measures ultimately could save lives.

Air strikes on nuclear facilities are not the only option. Acts of resistance by oppressed minorities, such as Iran’s Kurds, might impress upon ordinary citizens that the mullahs cannot survive for much longer, an intelligence source, who asked not to be identified, told me.

“The U.S should not attack Iran, because it will be a mess,” an activist with the Iranian National Council of Resistance, Reza Alizadeh, told me last week. Instead, his organization – with tacit American support – could overthrow “this cancer” in his country, he said.

Mr. Alizadeh’s organization, led by the Paris-based Maryam Rajavi and known as the Mujahideen, has laid bare Iranian nuclear secrets in the past. But it remains on the State Department’s terrorist list, and these days, American backing for Mujahideen of any stripe may be condemned, unlike the Allies’ support for anti-Nazi partisans in World War II, which historians now praise.

The Bush administration is bound to face criticism, however, whatever action it takes. Any council-imposed sanctions will have to appeal to Russia, which is eager to sell weapons, as well as to oil-hungry China. Further sanctions might be imposed without the backing of the council, but some in Europe fear the words “coalitions of the willing.”

China and Russia this week will undoubtedly push proposals designed to take diplomacy away from Turtle Bay, where punitive measures can be imposed, back to the IAEA. Iranian representatives in Vienna have been hinting that their government might allow surprise inspections and re-examine a Russian offer for a joint enrichment program.

The offers indicate that Tehran is aware of the implications of sanctions and international isolation. Then again, the mullahs’ insistence on their “right” to nuclear capabilities show they have yet to feel any penalty.

In the days before the 2003 Iraq war, even those who questioned American foreign policy did not rule out a military option. The “use of force can only be a final recourse,” France’s foreign minister, Dominique De Villepin, told the Security Council in February 2003.

Now there is a debate between those who clearly see the danger posed by a nuclear Iran, increasingly backed by missiles greater in range, accuracy, and quantity than ever before, and those who think an American-led military action is more dangerous. America’s staunchest European allies, including Britain’s foreign minister, Jack Straw, have called for the military option to be taken off the table.

A New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, is so upset with President Bush that he would rather live with a nuclear Iran than support another military involvement.

Disarming Iran peacefully would be preferable to doing so by force, but as Senator McCain, a Republican of Arizona, said over the weekend, “There is only one thing worse than military action, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran.”

In Israel, “people are not sitting on their hands,” a former Mossad chief, Ephraim Halevy, told CNN yesterday. American military planners prepare contingency plans as well. The military options are not perfect, but nor are the diplomatic ones. For now, both Washington and Jerusalem prefer the diplomatic route, but they also say nuclear Iran is not an option. They should not abandon that vow.