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GWYNNE DYER: Why Iran's 'virtual' nukes became a target for the US and Israel

Iran didn't have the nuclear weapons that Israel and the US claimed - so how did the country become a target?

“Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was…very hard to do,” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin ‘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.”

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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.

WHAT ARE 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........

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