Mike Whitney:

The attack on Pickax is going to be used by Netanyahu to draw Trump into a bigger and more catastrophic conflict.
Did you know that Elbridge Colby –Trump’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy– who was the primary architect of Trump’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, is also an ardent supporter of “limited nuclear war”?
So, yes, the US will nuke Pickax Mountain ostensibly to destroy parts of an undisclosed (and purely fictional) nuclear weapons program. But because all 13 US intelligence agencies have repeatedly confirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, is not building a nuclear bomb, and was never found to be in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)– then we must assume that there is some other purpose for nuking Pickax. After all, why would they risk international isolation to nuke a facility the intel agencies have already said poses no national security threat to the US or Israel?

They wouldn’t. Therefore, we should assume that nuking Pickax serves a different purpose altogether. But what would that be?

Once the bomb is dropped, Iran will swing into action launching attacks on all the targets across the region it has already specified including critical energy infrastructure, desalination plants, IT and data centers, communications and transportation hubs, and nuclear reactors in Israel (Dimona). Iranian officials have warned that they will have “no red lines” in their retaliation. And this, I think, is what Netanyahu is counting on; he’s counting on a large enough response from Iran to claim that Israel faces an “existential threat” that must be countered with nuclear weapons. In other words, the nuking of Pickax Mt is not ‘an end in itself’, but a calibrated provocation designed to justify the annihilation of Iran.

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/tucker-says-trump-will-nuke-iran/