Pakistani President Shehbaz Sharif needs to be commended for his attempt to bring the US and Iran together to forge lasting peace. As was widely expected, he failed, but the effort and the cease-fire that had to precede before the talks, gave the world time to contemplate the precipice of nuclear war towards which Israel has been dragging it for some time. That nuclear war, were it to take place, will not be started by Iran but by Israel. Iran had attained 5% enrichment of Uranium 238 with U-235 – considered the threshold for the production of nuclear weapons – as far back as in 2003, but deliberately gave up the option of creating nuclear weapons and instead approached the US for reconciliation that the latter spurned. Israel, on the other hand, launched a secret programme to produce nuclear weapons with technology stolen from US laboratories by a battery of agents and American Zionists that included Zalman Shapiro whose company, NUMEC, located in Pennsylvania, diverted 200-600 pounds of highly enriched uranium to Israel’s Dimona reactor with the help of high-level Israeli intelligence agents operating in the US. Another American Zionist, Arnon Milchan, smuggled 800 krytrons (nuclear triggers) to Israel through a company he owned, and Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy intelligence analyst passed thousands of highly classified documents to Israel in the mid-1980s. Today, Israel is estimated to have around 90 Plutonium-based nuclear bombs and an unspecified number based on Uranium 235. It is this Israeli stockpile of death, on the basis of which US President Donald Trump acted tough in the Islamabad talks. He believed that it had given him a Sword of Damocles that he could hold over Iran in the negotiations.The sword is obviously that if Iran does not agree to at least the substance of the US’s 15 points, it will have provided some moral justification for Israel to use nuclear bombs to save its people from extermination or face yet another diaspora. The world is now perilously close to this horrific possibility because, despite Netanyahu’s increasingly desperate efforts to keep Israelis from knowing about the casualties their fellow Israelis are suffering, the damage Iran has been doing to Tel Aviv, Haifa and key locations in the Negev, have become impossible to hide or ignore. To counter the rising panic in Israel, Netanyahu on March 29 ordered the Israeli Defence Force to invade southern Lebanon and annex the entire area up to the Litani river. This was a clear sign of rising panic in his government. Tel Aviv claimed that it was doing this only to create a buffer zone against future Hezbollah attacks, but no one was fooled because this was the precise area that Israel had invaded and occupied in 1978. It had finally vacated the area in 2000 under sustained pressure from the UN and increasingly costly attacks by Hezbollah. Israel has always coveted this area – a 19 km swathe of Lebanon that is by far its most fertile and beautiful part. On March 24, and in subsequent statements through early April, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, announced plans to permanently annex South Lebanon. By the time the annexation orders came, Israel had already killed 1,238 Lebanese citizens including 124 children, injured 3,000 more persons, and forced 1.2 million Lebanese to flee from their homes in southern Lebanon. But the Hezbollah that Israel encountered this time is not the same Hezbollah it had faced a quarter of a century earlier. In 2006, when Israel had attacked Gaza and invaded Lebanon, during a failed Israeli ground offensive known as “Operation Change of Direction 11”, Hezbollah had used wire and laser-guided missiles to trap and destroy a column of Israeli tanks in a wadi (narrow valley) near the village of al-Qulay’ah . This time, when Israel invaded Lebanon, Hezbollah did the same thing, but using precision guided missiles and Iran-supplied drones to incapacitate the front and rear tanks in a column of Israeli Merkava tanks. This immobilised the entire column, turned the wadi into a shooting gallery, forced the crews to abandon their tanks and run for cover in the surrounding hills. The final pill in Netanyahu’s cup of bitterness came on April 9 when the Jerusalem District court began a trial on three charges of corruption levelled against him that had been repeatedly postponed. Netanyahu’s legal team had requested a two-week delay for him to give his testimony, citing the need to focus on security and diplomatic matters, but the request was turned down. It is against this background of military failure and increasing desperation that one must assess Netanyahu’s decision to launch the all-out bombardment of South Beirut on April 8 that killed 182 innocent civilians including women and children, and wounded 890 others. Its express purpose was to derail the peace talks that had been so painstakingly arranged by Pakistan.One of Iran’s express conditions in its 10-point proposal had been that whatever agreement was reached had to apply to Lebanon as well. Netanyahu’s attack had no other purpose than to force the US to choose between it and Iran. A politically illiterate and fanatically Zionist group of President Trump’s advisers made sure that he rejected Iran’s demands and stated that the peace talks would not include Lebanon. From that point on the peace talks were a farce and it is no surprise that they ended on the very first day. We are now in that dangerous political vacuum, between the failure of one initiative and the launch of another, in which rogue nations and rogue prime ministers have a chance to push decision making in any direction they choose. Netanyahu is in that moment of political vacuum, and has only one card left up his sleeve – to launch a nuclear war on Iran. In fact, it is possible that he had prepped Trump for it, which made him threaten the obliteration of the Iranian civilisation on April 8. Netanyahu was able to make this threat because he believed that Iran has no nuclear weapons and that Russia and China will not exact revenge for a nuclear attack on Iran, as that could trigger a nuclear world war. But he could be catastrophically wrong. Theodore A. Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering has warned that the assumption that Iran has no nuclear weapons could be catastrophically wrong. In two recent podcasts, a visibly worried and sleep deprived Postol warned that Iran can convert its 403-plus kgs of 60% enriched Uranium, stored as Uranium Hexafluoride, into 11-13 nuclear bombs – the size of those the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – in as little as five weeks. After describing the stages of conversion through which the Uranium Hexafluoride has to pass and the time each stage takes, he used detailed studies of what happened at those cities to predict the devastation that a single ‘low kilotonne’ nuclear bomb could wreak on Tel Aviv. In sum, beginning with a ball of fire in the first thousandths of a second that would be ten times hotter than the sun, the resulting heat and shock waves would destroy a third of Tel Aviv within five minutes. Netanyahu has already launched two surprise attacks on Iran while peace talks were under way with the express purpose of forcing the US to join in. He has launched an unbridled attack on civilians in Beirut, killing and wounding thousands, to sabotage the peace talks that were about to begin in Islamabad, and has drawn support, not censure, from Trump and his coterie of Zionist backers and advisers. Netanyahu cannot therefore be blamed if he now believes that he has nothing to lose and everything to gain from initiating a nuclear attack because it could be his last way of avoiding a trial that will almost certainly land him in prison as it did one of his predecessors, Ehud Olmert. So can anyone in the world guarantee that Netanyahu will not launch a surprise nuclear attack on Iran in the next few weeks, if not days? And if not, then can anyone with an iota of shame still demand that Iran should abide by its 2003 and 2015 commitments never to make nuclear weapons? The world may be closer to a nuclear war than it ever was during the Cold War. Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist and commentator.