When doing interactive maintenance/querying (which I discouraged, but we all know it happens even if only in “break glass” scenarios), I would generally

  select *
  --update <blah blah> [or delete]
  from <blah blah>
  where <blah blah>

which allowed me to execute the entire query as a select (or if I accidentally hit "run the whole buffer" it was safe), but then allowed me to highlight and run just the update (or delete) statement and ensure I had the same where clause as determined by my select statement pre-flighting.

SELECT, wrap it in a transaction, then either look at row count or SELECT again before COMMIT.