LONDON, U.K.—“Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was … very hard to do,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 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 U.S. President Donald Trump said his bombers “obliterated” in the previous year, or perhaps the nuclear weapons that Netanyahu said Iran would have within one year in 2024. It doesn’t matter, because they are all virtual nukes.

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Virtual, in this context, means imaginary but very useful. Those imaginary Iranian nuclear weapons provided the pretext for the Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran in the Twelve-Day War of June 2025, leading to 1,000-plus deaths. Magically reincarnated, the same virtual nukes also served as an excuse for this year’s much larger U.S.-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........

© The Hill Times