Iran’s ‘virtual nukes’ have provided a long list of excuses

“Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was… very hard to do,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu told the United Nations General Assembly last month, “but for me it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead. ” Really? Everybody dead? All at once, everywhere? Those Iranians are evil geniuses. It’s not clear whether Netanyahu meant the nuclear weapons that Israel and the United States claimed to have destroyed “just in time” last February, or the ones that Donald Trump said his bombers “obliterated” in the previous year, or perhaps the nuclear weapons that ‘Bibi’ said Iran would have within one year in 2024. It doesn’t matter, because they are all virtual nukes. ‘Virtual’, in this context, means imaginary but very useful.

Those imaginary Iranian nuclear weapons provided the pretext for the Israeli-US assault on Iran in the Twelve-Day War of June 2025 (1,000-plus deaths). Magically reincarnated, the same virtual nukes also served as an excuse for this year’s much larger US-Israeli surprise attack (Iranian deaths so far around 3,500). Weirdly, the fact that thousands of real people are now being killed in the name of eliminating these non-existent nuclear weapons lends weight to Netanyahu’s and Trump’s persistent claim that they really exist. People find it hard to accept the idea that their leaders would kill all those Iranians if the ‘nuclear threat’ is false. But of course it is. Bibi has been warning that Iran is on the brink of getting nuclear weapons for the entire length of his political career. In 1992 he predicted they would have them by 1995-97, and he has made similar predictions at frequent intervals in venues like the Knesset, the US Congress and the United Nations,…