Netanyahu and the Atomic Archive

Aaron Stein 0:02

You're aiming for the Yugo of design rather. You are listening to the Arms Control Wong podcast, the leading podcast on the arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Kariri Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:21

And coming to you from an undisclosed location in Carmel Valley, I am Jeffrey Lewis. I am the founding publisher of the Arms Control Walk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron 0:35

What is it about the Iranian nuclear program that always seems to catch you at your undisclosed location so we have to do an emergency podcast style?

Jeffrey 0:43

I have no idea. In fairness, I always plan to work Tuesday mornings out here because my daughter is in school. And I don't feel like driving into the valley and out of the valley and then into the valley again. But it's really aggravating. Screw you, Bibi Netanyahu.

Aaron 0:59

Yeah, I mean, the podcast may come slightly out of order because we did the DPR podcast yesterday. But as we were doing that podcast, Bibi Netanyahu decided to go on, I guess, Israeli television beamed around the world to reveal secrets that we were supposed to have never heard of before about the Iranian nuclear program.

Jeffrey 1:19

Yeah, I don't know. I just watched it on YouTube, but what a pile of horseshit.

Aaron 1:25

I saw it coming, and I was like, you never want to get too cynical right off the bat. I was like, what's going on with this? Then you started to see reports that this would be game-changing, and then the slight walk back that's saying it's going to talk about their... Old weapons programs. You're like, are they going to rehash PMD all over again?

Like what? PMS, possible military dimensions. We're there. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like I was like, we're going back to PMD. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey 1:56

I mean, you know, I think we should walk through it, but before we do that, you know, one of the crazy things is I think the most interesting and telling aspect is how the Israelis got a hold of the documents, which is actually really quite reassuring.

Aaron 2:12

I'm still not convinced that the Israelis are telling us the truth.

Jeffrey 2:17

Oh, see, I believe them. Okay, so the story that the Israelis are telling, and I'll tell you why I believe it, is that these documents, which document the Iranian nuclear weapons program up until 2003, which we knew existed, right? There was a whole NIE on how Iran had a nuclear weapons program, and it was halted in 2003.

A word neither you nor I like. We prefer pause. But whether you call it a pause or a halt, it looks like the Iranians boxed up all the documents, put them in safes, and then put those safes in a building in a nondescript suburb of Tehran, where they basically sat like the worst episode of Storage Wars ever.

That's right. Waiting for the Mossad to come along and break in and steal them and ferret them out of the country. So the reason I believe them is because On balance, this makes it look like the program really was shut down. Because I think Netanyahu referred to it as a kind of lending library, except it wasn't a lending library.

You couldn't actually steal the contents of a lending library if it was being used by people and had librarians present. This really was a storage facility. These documents were boxed up and put away, and the Israelis were only able to steal them precisely because they were put away. So I think if the Israelis were lying, they'd come up with a better lie than that.

They'd be like, oh yeah, they were on their way to the new underground nuclear weapons library in the desert. They wouldn't come up with this lame Providence story.

Aaron 3:55

Yeah, so I'm just slightly skeptical because they look to be Exactly what the 2007 US NIE refers to as, bases its assumptions on, those cache of documents. And then those documents that are later turned over, or at least turned over to the IAEA, that fills out the possible military dimensions that's summarized quite nicely in the November 2011 annex.

So I'm not convinced that nobody's seen these documents before, because I think they're the documents that are already floating around about PMD.

Jeffrey 4:28

I mean, I think it is true that a substantial number of these documents were already in the possession of the United States and other countries. Which, you know, we know they got some of them from the famous laptop of death. But, you know, every aspect of Netanyahu's presentation, you know, he describes the Project Ahmad and its five points.

Every one of those five points is described in much greater detail than Netanyahu offered In the 2015 IAEA report on Iran's pre-2003 nuclear weapons effort. So you're right. All of this material, or virtually all of it, was already known and really formed the reason that we needed a JCPOA in the first place, which is that we believed that they had a nuclear weapons program.

Although I do think, and we can go through it, but I do think when you get to the end, what it What it does is we knew the outlines of the program very precisely, but he kind of colored it in a bit. Inside those lines, there's some new stuff. We got a picture of Mohsen Fakhzada, the guy who ran the program.

Oh yeah. I mean, it was exciting.

Aaron 5:46

Yeah. I mean, as much as I diss the presentation, I mean, I am not like going to ever turn down one board. Like, like, like it's, it's different to read it. Right. And it's something entirely to see it. And then when you saw the pictures, cause they talk about pictures. Like, so if you do interviews with people who have seen the PMD documents, as I did for my PhD research.

They describe pictures and videos. You're like, oh, they have pictures and videos, but that's nebulous. You don't quite know what that means. And then you see the pictures and videos in the presentation yesterday. You're like, oh, that's really explicit, right?

Jeffrey 6:17

I need to be careful about how I say this, but I had a conversation with one former official who was looking at the images. And the person didn't really want to say anything, but it was clear that this person was trying to figure out If these were the same images that had been seen on the high side or just very similar images, you know?

And, and so it was like, Oh, that's wait, that's not, that shouldn't be, wait, how did that get out again? You know, it was like that kind of reaction. And it's like, Oh, just publish it all.

Aaron 6:57

It was like, Oh, Oh, that's really interesting.

Jeffrey 6:59

Well, I think that was like a level of familiarity there that, yeah.

Aaron 7:05

It's not that I don't doubt. Well, I guess I, I mean, I don't want to play. I do. I doubt the story. I mean, I don't want to play like conspiracy theorist. I mean, yeah, whatever. It actually doesn't quite matter. Other than like, maybe they were like doing this in a self storage or us, you know, out in the middle of Tehran, which sort of reminds me of the shield, but like the presentation, which we'll get into in a second, like, Overlap so cleanly with what was in the NIE then 2011, then 2015, it's like, these have to be the same documents.

Jeffrey 7:38

So the reason is I think some of them are the same documents. I think the laptop of death represented a significant portion of this archive. You know, those are the same documents. Basically, if you imagine there's 187 CDs, right? Because it was 2003D and people kept **** on CDs.

Aaron 8:01

I know, that's another thing that dates it. It's on USB sticks, which I love.

Jeffrey 8:04

Yeah, I know. It's like, oh, look at this very scary nuclear weapons program on magnetic tape. It's like, okay. But I think that when that person left with the laptop of death, it probably included a fair number of the same files. And so I would expect there to be a significant overlap between the full archive and the laptop of death, which almost certainly contained a significant portion of that archive.

And, you know, I'm sure if you're the Israelis and you come across the storage unit and you're like, oh my god, you know, you're not going to sit there and spend two weeks going through the material, figuring out what's new and what's old. You're just going to grab it and get it out and

Aaron 8:57

And then you put it in a nice room someplace in Israel and go through it very carefully.

Jeffrey 9:03

So I think it's not surprising to me that we would have seen some of these documents before. And again, here's the thing. The Mossad is not against the JCPOA. Netanyahu is against the JCPOA. He is a partisan actor with a certain ideology. But we've seen a lot of former Mossad officials come out and say that they think that this deal is a good one.

And so I think if Netanyahu were to lie, About the providence of the documents, or if he were to fabricate documents, I think it would leak pretty quickly.

Aaron 9:35

So, you know, we'll see. To be clear, I don't think any of the documents are fabricated. You're convincing me. You're making a logical argument that I'm following along with. But, so, okay. All right. I mean...

Jeffrey 9:49

Okay. Yeah, but I've made logical arguments before that fall apart in the face of the entirety of the Middle East. Between Iran and Israel, sometimes logical arguments only take you so far. That's right.

Aaron 10:03

But I think we both agree, and I think it's been backed up. I think The Guardian had a story today with Ali Heinen that said he'd seen a lot of the images before, and if you Again, if you're somewhat schooled in how a bomb goes, boom, you can read the reports and sort of guess about what it looks like, especially with all the other stuff that we know about their weapons design.

But I actually really enjoyed the pictures, and maybe we turn to the presentation. Because I think one of the other substories to this is that the fact that the Israelis made the decision to put out in pretty explicit detail a workable weapons design. Or at least like how it would function.

Jeffrey 10:50

Yeah. I mean, I was really struck going through the presentation at some of the information that was on display. And, and I did wonder about the wisdom of sharing this information, the shockwave data or something like that.

Aaron 11:08

You know, I was like, what are you doing?

Jeffrey 11:10

It's probably fine.

Aaron 11:12

I mean, it wasn't, you know, I,

Jeffrey 11:14

I am not one of these people who believes that there are a ton of secrets about nuclear weapons anymore, that it's mostly just engineering and practice. And so, like, you'd never use someone else's shockwave data. You'd go get your own. It still was weird for me to see it. Like, oh, that's, wow, okay.

Aaron 11:32

That's right. It's a subtext there.

Jeffrey 11:35

So that's declassified now, huh?

Aaron 11:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 11:38

I wonder how the IND people feel about that. Yeah. There are definitely some people in Langley and Liberty Crossing right now looking at the presentation. You son of a bitch.

Aaron 11:50

What's funny is, like, people are doing calculations on Twitter. You know, like, basic weapons design.

Jeffrey 11:55

George Herman. I know. George is working. George is working through it like, oh, you know, it's really strange to see that particular approach to multi-point initiation. It's like, George, stop. Stop.

Aaron 12:05

His Twitter thread is now up to 56 tweets. Go check it out if you haven't seen it. But yeah. But let's start, okay? Why don't we just go through it sort of picture by picture?

Jeffrey 12:15

Okay. I'm sitting on a telephone in a parking lot, so you're going to have to drive this part of the conversation. Sure, sure.

Aaron 12:23

I mean, well, I mean, let's just start, like,

Jeffrey 12:27

Unless you see my tweet stream, my tweet storm, where I very painstakingly cross-referenced each of Netanyahu's five aspects of Project Ahmad to the relevant portions in the 2015 IAEA document, where those things are discussed in far greater detail than Netanyahu offered.

Aaron 12:47

I mean, do you want to just start with Project Ahmad itself? I mean, I think that's a logical place to start in what Project Ahmad actually sort of entails about a weapons program.

Jeffrey 12:58

Yes. So, you know, one of the interesting things is we knew the project had a name, and we knew that name changed, and we knew that that project evolved over time, and we knew that it had certain people involved with it. And he kind of presented that, Netanyahu presented that evidence as though that was something that we hadn't seen before.

But in fact, you know, there have been, like, profiles of Fakrizade and, you know, all kinds of details. And, you know, I think the reality is, like, It's unclear to me that people have a good mental model of what it means to shut down a nuclear weapons program.

Aaron 13:31

Or even how a nuclear weapons program is actually structured, because I think so much of the mythology is wrapped up in the Manhattan Project, is that people have this mental model of this is how you build a nuclear weapon.

Jeffrey 13:43

Yeah, this was, I think, a much more diverse endeavor where he was overseeing a series of projects. I think the way the IAEA described it was a coordinated effort across a range of activities. And that's really... Really, what you were saying, but it, you know, it, it raises this interesting question, like, okay, if you, you know, if you give it a name and then all these people are working together and Ollie Heinenden used to point this out, you know, that what was really incriminating about it was the administrative connections across this whole project but you know, like, how do you shut that down? Like, it's not like you're gonna go out and shoot Fakrizada in the head, you know.

And it's not like scientists aren't still going to continue working in their areas. I mean, they may not be doing weapons work, but they will still, I mean, their expertise will naturally mean that they are working in related areas. So it's actually a little difficult, you know, I think, to know when something like that ends. You know, you can kind of sort of observe that people start working on slightly different topics, but they're still there.

But I think, you know, the point for that is at least You know, when Netanyahu introduces it, he's like, you know, there is this weapons program. And nothing that he provides, you know, does anything other than advance our knowledge beyond, yes, there was a program up until 2003, and it had that name. Like, we'd heard that name before, Project Demise, and we had certainly heard Mohsen Fakhrizadeh's name before.

And frankly, I think the IAEA section is a little bit more detailed. It is. About the nature of those administrative interactions, because they were so important to the IAEA's early suspicion that Iran had a nuclear weapons program before 2003.

Aaron 15:27

Yeah, I mean, I think for me, when I was doing work on this, it's always important to conceptualize the nuclear weapons program as a bureaucracy. You know, and it's an overarching program with multiple interconnected components that are working together to get a bomb. And so it's not just one thing that hangs out there that may or may not be construed as weapons-related, but it's all building towards one thing.

And that's what the Ahmad plan more or less was. It's the bureaucratic relationships between these different projects, that this is the design of a fizzle core, this is the design of a weapon to fit inside of a warhead, and this is the subsequent warhead work, and then the warhead will fit on these missiles in Iran's arsenal. And that's the way I've always thought about it.

Jeffrey 16:16

And Netanyahu went through each of those, each of those steps. And again, we knew about each of those five steps.

Aaron 16:24

Right.

Jeffrey 16:24

Again, often in quite a bit of detail.

Aaron 16:27

Right. And the nuclear weapons program is ultimately political more. I mean, it's where politics meets science is another thing. We can talk about the weapons design, too. I mean, there's some interesting things in there because it matches with what we already knew.

Jeffrey 16:39

Yeah, I mean, I think it was sort of, I don't know if people want to go through all five of them. But, you know, in each case, there was a visual, which often was kind of an interesting detail. So, for example, I think the, was it the third point? Was a multi-point initiation system. And this was the work that Dan Alenko had seems to have done with them.

Yeah. And we actually got a picture of the thing.

Aaron 17:10

Yes, we did. And the shockwave.

Jeffrey 17:13

Yeah, and the shockwave. So that was one of George's calculations. George was going, ah, this is really not all that impressive of a shockwave because they were going for a low-yield, not low-yield like tiny, but they were going for a crappy yield device. So there were five, I think in Netanyahu's plan I have in front of me, there were five steps, again, all of which the IAEA had reported.

That was one, Weapons design, which actually I think was a hodgepodge of a few things, but really was about, I think, modeling and simulation. There was two, the preparations to learn how to cast uranium cores. There was three, a multipoint initiation system, which was developed with the help of a foreign scientist. There was four, scouting for a nuclear test site.

And then five, integration work. For the warheads to put on the Shahab three. Did I, did I get that right? Yeah, that's exactly right. So I think we knew far more than Netanyahu said about each of those points in writing. You know, for the nuclear weapon simulation his, he's actually pretty vague. It actually took me a long time to figure out which section he was referring to because he was so vague.

But the IAEA report is actually really detailed about the simulations they were doing, although he does have like a cool picture.

Aaron 18:41

Yeah, he does. And the picture suggests something about the warhead design. What does it suggest? Oh, I mean, it just has a slightly levitated pit and it's just not it's just not nothing. Nothing's all that.

Jeffrey 18:52

Oh, yeah, that's right. It does. It does. It shows it has a levitated pit. Yes. Oh, yeah. I forgot all about that. That's right. No, no. Well, this is why I'm not looking at it. Yeah. I mean, that's actually, so that's an example of like, that's a kind of like a slightly more interesting, like wonky detail. Although, you know, George was noting that he thought these space sorry, a levitated pit is famously Ted for listeners who were like, what the hell are you two idiots talking about?

A levitated pit where you have like a little gap between the lenses and the actual this whole core. That gap makes the implosion more efficient. And Ted Taylor famously revealed this by asking if you're going to hammer a nail, what do you do? Do you put the hammer against the nail and push, right? It's like, no, you, you, you have a, you have an air gap.

But George Herbert was moaning that the air gap wasn't the right size. It could be that they're... Again, I'm sure the IND people were delighted to see disgust publicly.

Aaron 20:01

Right, right. But what the documents do show is, again, that they had a levitated pit going off for their warhead design.

Jeffrey 20:12

By the way, this is one of those nice data points for the future, when we're not screaming at each other about how Iran are liars. No one does Fat Man anymore. Everybody goes to a compact device, and the way you get to a compact device is by first-generation design innovations like levitated pits. And everyone tries to go to that right away, which is why I think the first North Korean nuclear test in 2006 was a disappointment.

Aaron 20:40

Yeah, and then as you said earlier, and what you noted in your tweetstorm about this, is that the IAEA report actually has a lot more information about this because it's an example of how much we already knew about the program, but how the pictures sort of fill in some of, it helps you visualize it.

Jeffrey 20:57

Yeah, well, I'm a visual learner, so that part was pretty exciting for me.

Aaron 21:01

Right, and then so as we move forward, I mean, it also had really nice pictures about how they were trying to cast their cores.

Jeffrey 21:08

Yeah, you know, again, that one is a little bit tough because the IAEA uses that weird phrasing, which I think is something like nuclear weapon components.

Aaron 21:18

How did they say it in the IAEA document? And the production of hemispherical enriched uranium metallic components.

Jeffrey 21:27

Right, right. You know, it's, you know, I... Whenever you think about Netanyahu, that nuclear weapons course is a little bit easier to understand. That's right.

Aaron 21:38

That's right.

Jeffrey 21:39

But it's the same thing. I mean, but the cool, you know, so we, that was actually, you know, one of the documents that the Iranians accidentally forked over, right, was a document that AQ Khan had given them about how to cast hemispheres.

Aaron 21:54

Yes. And in previous IA reports is that they're able to match this AQ Khan things to stuff they got from the Libyans. And so they know that it comes from the same place. Right.

Jeffrey 22:01

I mean, you really only cast uranium metal into a hemisphere for one reason. A marble, right? But, you know, you know, and again, like, again, so we knew this and there are several paragraphs dedicated to Iran's development work because it didn't just it wasn't just the document. It was a whole program. And the IAEA knew about the whole program.

But again, like even though we knew the lines of it very clearly, he colors it in like they've got that cool video of what looks like an underground casting facility, which I'm going to guess is probably it is fine.

Aaron 22:31

Yeah, I think that's right. And then as we move forward in sort of the main components is then we get to the multi-point initiation system.

Jeffrey 22:42

Right, which is all the Danilenko stuff. Right. Which we knew about because they interviewed Danilenko.

Aaron 22:49

Right. Danilenko is actually interviewed by the IAEA. I forgot which in year, but he's included as listed as the foreign expert. And his writings are all over the place, if you Google his name. He's quite proud of his implosion work to create nanodiamonds.

Jeffrey 23:04

Oh, yes. Nanodiamonds, which are the only kind of diamonds that policy wonks can afford. That's true. Might not have been a funny joke.

Aaron 23:13

Yeah, I mean, it's just things, because when he was involved in the Soviet atomic weapons establishment, he did shock implosion to create these nanodiamonds, I think of carbons. And you, they have very limited industrial use, but somehow he thought he could make money off of it. And the Iranian said, sure, we can employ you. Oh, sorry. So we, we, we, we, we actually buy that story now.

Jeffrey 23:36

That's what I'm pretty skeptical of. He's like, oh, it's for Nando diamonds. And everyone like giggles and then they go ahead and, you know, let's try it with some, let's try it with some uranium first. But, you know, again, they have a picture of the damn thing, which is, you know, we, we, we'd never seen a picture of.

Aaron 23:54

That's right. And it looks like a nuclear weapon. It looks like what you would expect, yeah. Right. And then you see the diagnostics. I love the diagnostics because that's explained in a lot of detail in the IAEA reports. It's not just that they ran a shock implosion test. It's that they had all the diagnostic work built up around it.

Jeffrey 24:16

Oh, with that terrible little video?

Aaron 24:19

Yeah.

Jeffrey 24:20

They showed us the diagnostics.

Aaron 24:24

The shockwave isn't very uniform, but it'll get the job done, right?

Jeffrey 24:28

Yeah, I mean, they really, it was like a hobby shop bomb. I mean, they really weren't very ambitious. I mean, I know we're leaving that to the end, but like, wow, yeah. Try harder.

Aaron 24:40

It's like the definition of like, good enough.

Jeffrey 24:46

Which I guess if you're having it dropped on you, you're like, that was a really un-uniform implosion that incinerated my family.

Aaron 24:53

Your U-235 implosion was not very efficient. You could have gotten more yield out of this, boys. And then we got the test site. Them scouting the test site.

Jeffrey 25:04

Now, this one is really interesting because, again, we knew about this. This definitely came off the laptop of death where they had diagrams of the test site. But Netanyahu showed a map of the locations they scouted. And we're now, I mean, we've actually sort of transposed those map locations into geographic coordinates. And two things pop up, right?

One is when the laptop of death came out, the US officials who commented on it made it clear that the test site was never constructed. And sure enough, we can verify that. Like we went and looked at all of those sites and we can't see any evidence that a test site was ever built. So that part's good.

And now we're kind of puzzling over trying to look and see, it doesn't? Doesn't exactly look, although we're not 100% sure of this, we're trying to compare it to see if they had any plans to test in salt. Because that was always the big fear, right, is the Iranians would dig a big cavity in a salt dome and then do a decoupled test that we might miss.

Aaron 26:13

Right. But it doesn't really look like they planned to do that.

Jeffrey 26:21

And so just like we talked earlier about how nobody does Fat Man anymore, You know, it doesn't necessarily look like new nuclear states, like, if they're planning to test, like, they're planning for us to know about it. They're not actually planning to decouple them.

Aaron 26:38

Right, and because this work, we're told, was paused or halted, whichever way, this is very much, it seems like, if you hit pause on the DVD player and you have just a still screen of what a nuclear weapons program looks like, because They had to rapidly wrap it up and put it, I guess, in the U-Haul, you know, and truck away all these things.

You know, but like, because they could have built it later, right? You know, if it had remained undetected. But I think one of the documents I actually liked the most was the, well, they were all good in terms of wonk porn, but the nose cone on the missile. You know, that was really interesting because that was for a

Jeffrey 27:20

Early-generation Shahab-3 nosecone.

Aaron 27:23

Yeah, I mean, if you look back...

Jeffrey 27:24

It was a surprisingly, surprisingly chubby nuclear weapon that they were envisioning for a compact device.

Aaron 27:33

Yeah, I would... I mean, I think the assumptions, at least I made, was always that it was for one of their more advanced warhead designs on a missile, so the triconic one, so they get a little more range out of it. But when I saw this... But no, you know, it's just the regular old, you know, triangle, triangle of death.

Jeffrey 27:55

Ye olde Shahab 3. Yeah, it's just, it's old. It really is interesting because, I mean, they were, they were, I mean, the Shahab 3 is a no-dong. It's a s*** missile. Like, it doesn't have that much range. Right. It's got, like, 1,200 kilometers range. Maybe, like, that thing could maybe get to Israel. Maybe. You know, and I know they shifted over probably to an aluminum airframe, and they have a slightly more powerful engine, so I think that theirs kind of can just get there, but, like... Blah!

Aaron 28:31

Don't you people have any self-respect? Yeah, I mean, I was trying to explain this to people yesterday. Like, I was like... This nuclear weapons program is insulting to... The idea of nuclear weapons programs. I was trying to explain this to some non-Wonks yesterday. I was like, it's a really crappy design, and that's a first-generation warhead. It's a nuclear weapon on a missile.

I was like, the Shahab-3 doesn't have very energetic propellants. I was like, this can't go very far. I was like, what is this thing? But I think... This is like you're aiming for the Yugo of design, rather.

Jeffrey 29:10

It really is.

Aaron 29:12

Kind of sad. Even just like the Honda Accord. You're not even getting up there in terms of technical proficiency. But that's where we want to go, right? Right, right, right.

Jeffrey 29:23

I documented all of this stuff, and we knew it was happening. But when you see it in detail, it really is kind of sad. And then one of the things that is new, Maybe the only thing that is new is we actually have the document that outlines the yield and number of devices. And they were going to go for a South African-style recessed deterrent of five, just five, 10 kiloton devices.

And it seems like they weren't going to test them unless they needed to disclose the program. Otherwise, they were going to keep the program. They're basically going to put the fives in some underground bunker and not tell anyone about them unless it got real.

Aaron 30:14

Yeah, I mean, maybe just for the listeners, explain the way the South Africans built their bombs. Because it's different, but more or less the same concept.

Jeffrey 30:22

So, you know, most countries, most self-respecting nuclear weapons programs envision an arsenal. And that arsenal is integrated into some kind of national strategy. You know, you can you can go whole hog like the Soviets, in which case you've got thousands of tactical nuclear weapons that you plan to use on day one. Or, you know, you can go strategic like the Chinese and then you can go with a much smaller force that, you know, you plan to use as a last resort.

But the kind of the redheaded stepchild of the nuclear universe of the South Africans who went with an opaque deterrent, which is to say that they built the weapons but never admitted they had them. So like South African 1980s had nuclear weapons and no one knew it. And they were locked away in a bunker. And the South Africans were only planning to disclose the existence of those weapons if they found themselves under serious threat.

And then they were going to do a test.

Aaron 31:24

Yeah.

Jeffrey 31:24

Right. And the test would be like, oh, my God, they've got the bomb. And then if that didn't stop, then, you know, they were prepared to engage in the limited use of nuclear weapons. That seems to have been the Iranian plan. Which is a really stupid plan, but like, OK, you know, not for me to tell you how to like.

I mean, you know, I'm a I'm a I'm a North Korea guy. Like, I'm I'm I'm I'm expecting, you know. I'm expecting a self-respecting arsenal that you've got some freaking plan for. And it really is interesting because you and I have been so critical of the whole breakout discussion. The Iranians would scream, we are building a bomb and we are going to use our declared facilities.

And in fact, now you understand, or at least I understand, why they kept building covert enrichment plants. Because Even once they had enough material for five nuclear weapons, they didn't plan to tell anyone about it.

Aaron 32:28

Yeah. And this is actually hinted at quite strongly in the 2000 NIE, is that they've always strongly hinted, at least in how I read it, is that there is your sort of overt one that was covert for a while, but largely tied to prestige civil nuclear projects. And that's largely housed at Natanz. And then there's a second one that was destined for Fordow.

And that second one, this is the enrichment cycle, was for the weapons program. And Like for dough. And cause there's also a, maybe we should touch on this too. Like for dough, there was also a, a, a, a, a sketch of the, the innards of for dough, like in, in the presentation.

Jeffrey 33:05

Right. Which we could not figure out how to align with that mountain. Although George Herbert did.

Aaron 33:10

Yeah. And it's small. It's, it's, it's, it's a small facility. You know, and, and, and, but anyways, the point is, is, is now that all makes sense.

Jeffrey 33:23

So, you know, it, It's not really a conversation for this podcast, but there is a whole academic universe that opens up about states that want threshold nuclear capabilities. It turns out that the Iranians like the South African model, and they probably aren't going to be the last state to do that. And maybe even the North Koreans spent a brief period like this, where they're happy to pretend to be non-nuclear and keep their five bombs in the basements.

Aaron 33:55

Right, which suggests an extremely paranoid outlook on the world.

Jeffrey 33:59

I mean, it's very strange, right? Yeah. It's like you don't want to pay the international costs of having nuclear weapons, but you also don't want to not have them. And so you settle for this arsenal, which, frankly, if you were a classic IR guy, which neither of us are, you would look at this arsenal and be like, this thing invites attack.

Because God forbid somebody should find out that you have the five bombs and guess where they are.

Aaron 34:23

Yeah, it makes you more vulnerable to a first strike.

Jeffrey 34:27

Yeah, so it's a very odd kind of arsenal. But, you know, if you ask me, it perfectly illustrates the value of the JCPOA, which is, as we said, they had a nuclear weapons program before 2003. As we discovered with both the revelation of Natanz and then subsequently the revelation of the Fordo fuel enrichment plant, they were attempting to build covert enrichment facilities.

Probably also at Lavizon. I don't know.

Aaron 34:56

Yeah. Well, that's a park, Jeffrey. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I'm sorry. It's a park. It's a park. It's a municipal park. Municipal park. And when was that raised, by the way? When did that thing start to be destroyed?

Jeffrey 35:10

When the IAEA asked to go see it. Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, that was, I mean, that was precisely why we, you know, I think one of the cool things that happened with Paul Kerr and I early on Imagined that the nuclear weapons program had halted under international pressure in 2003, precisely because they raised lobbies on it.

They didn't want the IAEA to see it, but they did knock it down. And that was sort of the point at which Rouhani became, currently the president, became the nuclear negotiator, because he was sort of put in charge of things. It looked to us like there was Signs that they had bureaucratically reshuffled. And then later on, the NIE came along and proved that, right?

And so, I mean, I think what this really shows to you is that Iran was this kind of interesting case where there were definitely people who wanted a nuclear weapon, definitely, I think, a belief within their nuclear energy program that they should support that goal, but they weren't willing to pay tons of costs for it. Like, they kind of wanted a nuclear weapon.

But they weren't willing to overtly do it. And they did pause the program, and sanctions did make a difference. And in the end, the deal we struck did get us a much better monitoring environment and create incentives that discouraged them from sneaking across. And you should be super worried that, you know, if that loosens up at all, if the monitoring goes down, Or the sense of incentives for them goes down, they're going to try to sneak across the line again.

Aaron 36:58

Right, without bearing the cost. So don't blow up the JCPOA! It's unbelievable. I mean, we've talked about this so many times. They will restart this weapons program! I know. I mean, it's like, when you put, I mean, to bring this full circle, when you collect all the documents and you put them under lock, okay, I'll take the Israeli version of events, and you put them under lock and key in storage R.S.

In downtown Tehran, There's nothing else you can do with a nuclear weapons program.

Jeffrey 37:27

Oh, man, I thought it was in suburban Tehran. Do I have the location wrong? Is this like when I relocated the Salisbury attack to London?

Aaron 37:37

Yeah, no, it is suburban. But in Tehran, that's the best you can do, unless somebody's going to go around and shoot every single atomic scientist in Iran. And I don't think anybody's proposing that.

Jeffrey 37:53

Well except maybe for bb.yahoo yeah yeah yeah i mean i think that's exactly right well it goes back to this really annoying op-ed that condoleezza right rice wrote on the the verge of the iraq war where she said we know what disarmament looks like and it was like no actually you didn't like disarmament was staring you in the face and you f***ed it up And I think we're back to that again, where people say, oh, we know what disarmament looks like.

It's the Iranians are really apologetic for what they did. No, that is not what disarmament looks like. The South Africans, by the way, still not apologetic for what they did. You should read South African scientists. They're pissed that they gave up the bomb. You know, like, I'm not looking for remorse. I'm just looking for a verifiable gap between their bomb option and their bomb.

Aaron 38:44

It's to verify the political decision they made not to weaponize. We can clearly see now. I mean, we already knew it, but we can clearly see in more vivid detail that they had a craptastic bomb design that would have worked. It was really underwhelming, as we continue to say, but they would have gotten over the goal line.

They made a political decision to stop, and we are verifying that political decision. Why in the world would you take on verification and say, like, oh, no, we're just not going to look that hard anymore. You can go sort of figure out what to do with this stuff. It's absurd.

Jeffrey 39:17

Although, I mean, it's exactly what we did with North Korea. You know, we had a freeze on their plutonium program. It turns out they had an enrichment program, and our response was to tell them to go f*** themselves and make as much plutonium as they wanted, which, like, okay. I mean, I do say I have to take all of this, like, I have to take this in stride because the reality is nothing would be better for the Monterey Institute career-wise or the Middlebury Institute than a resumed Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Aaron 39:47

Stop it.

Jeffrey 39:49

So, you know, if these jackasses want to screw it up, I'm happy to keep writing op-eds.

Aaron 39:58

I think it's a happy note.

Jeffrey 40:00

Yeah, you know. You know what actually the seriously happy note is? We had a much bigger net than we realized. I think we were all terrified that the Iranians were going to build a nuclear weapons program like the North Koreans. Although at the time, the North Korean one wasn't that big. But we thought, big nuclear weapons program coming.

And it turns out that if the Iranians sneak out, their initial plan is to sneak out like the South Africans, which means Even if we really screw this up, we've got a little bit more time because the resulting arsenal is not something that they want to wave around. It turns out the fatwa is only half the ****.

I used to think the fatwa was 100% bullshit, and now I realize the fatwa is like, well, you don't mention the bomb in front of the neighbors.

Aaron 40:56

It's not okay.

Jeffrey 41:04

They build a bomb and life goes on. We learn to deal with an opaque proliferator. At least they're not detonating the thing every third Tuesday of the month.

Aaron 41:16

It's not suited for an EMP attack. Had to do it. Here we are. Oh, he's going to, he's going to pull out.

Jeffrey 41:32

He's going to pull out. The Iranians are going to resume this program and no one is going to believe us because we're the ones who sabotaged the deal. We get to write op-eds saying we told you so.

Aaron 41:42

Yeah. Well, I think with that, you know, I assume that the Slack channel is live and kicking. And if you would like to join that conversation and get more in depth with this podcast, you know, you can head on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And if you are a student, it costs you as little as $3 a month to join our private Slack.

And for you regular folk, it's $5 a month. And Jeffrey, I think that you can send you back to your latte now.

Jeffrey 42:11

My latte and the op-ed I need to write for Foreign Policy.

Aaron 42:16

Well, we'll look forward to that. And Jeffrey, thanks for joining me.

Jeffrey 42:19

Thanks for talking to me.

Aaron 42:20

And thanks, everybody, for listening.