BREAKING: Top Iranian Torturer and Assassin Had Plan to Nuke America

Well, probably. It's the kind of thing those people would do, so I don't think we need to check.

In unrelated news that's barely worth mentioning, a top U.S. torturer and assassin definitely had a plan to use nuclear weapons on Iranian soil. He was Defense Undersecretary "Blowtorch Bob" Komer, who previously ran the Phoenix Program in Vietnam (a giant campaign of political torture and assassination that killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese). This is from the new book The Twilight War by Pentagon historian David Crist:

In December 1980, Undersecretary Komer released a study on the potential use of nuclear weapons to defend the Persian Gulf. … Komer approved three options for employing nuclear weapons against the Soviets in Iran. The first two options used nuclear weapons only within Iran, with the objective to block Soviet forces by destroying the mountain passes on the Iran-Soviet border … If Soviet troops were already in Iran, American bombers would hit Soviet rear echelon units entering Iran, while the U.S. Army's tactical artillery nukes would devastate frontline ground forces … small nukes were to be buried and set with a variable yield, which could create either a relatively small explosion to destroy a large tunnel or a massive detonation to collapse an entire mountain pass.

The one downside, Komer noted, was that this strategy necessitated the first use of nuclear weapons. … No one reflected on how the Iranians might view such a scenario.

This of course was shortly after the Carter administration had given Saddam Hussein a "green light" to invade Iran. More recently, top U.S. officials have spoken of their extensive plans to "completely obliterate Iran," "drill them back to the fourth century" and "crush them" like "ants." Before he retired, Defense Secretary Robert Gates emphasized U.S. willingness to engage in the first use of nuclear weapons against Iran, a policy that was "a decision by the president [Obama]."

However, in fairness to Blowtorch Bob Komer and his fantastic nickname, his plan was not to use nuclear weapons against Iran, merely within Iran. This is a crucial distinction that Americans would certainly understand if some country used nukes within but not against the U.S. "Please, detonate as many nuclear weapons in America as you need," we would say. "Our casa es su casa."

ALSO: Top Iranian generals probably would want to threaten to use nuclear terrorism to prevent a superpower like the U.S. from intervening in the mideast, so there's no reason to notice that top Israeli generals actually did this.

—Jon Schwarz