Speaking during a White House Cabinet meeting as the Trump administration kept up pressure on Tehran, Vice President JD Vance said the United States had to think beyond conventional terrorism and imagine what could happen if a regime like Iran's had access to a weapon capable of killing "many, many tens of thousands of people."
At the meeting, Vance described a hypothetical attacker entering a supermarket with a vest, saying that in an ordinary bombing "a couple of people get killed," but warning that the stakes would be exponentially higher if "what's on the vest" were nuclear. The comment appeared to be part of the administration's broader effort to justify its hard line on Iran by presenting Tehran not merely as a geopolitical adversary, but as a uniquely catastrophic nuclear threat.
