Defense Minister Ehud Barak says Iran has been waiting 4,000 years for the bomb, reports the New York Times:

“You don’t wait until they acquire the capability and they build it and they deploy it—then it’s too late, you cannot act,” Mr. Barak said. “The Iranians are patient. They say to themselves, ‘We waited 4,000 years until we have a nuclear power, we can wait another four weeks or four months or four quarters.’ ”

In other words, Darius and Xerxes were centuries late themselves in acquiring nuclear weapons.