Iran and (more) Nuclear Archive

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:23

And I'm Aaron Stein, the director of the Middle East program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Jeffrey 0:30

How you been, Aaron?

Aaron 0:32

I'm tired. It's been a busy week, lots of deliverables, and none of it like intellectually fun, if you know what I mean.

Jeffrey 0:41

I am also tired and cranky. It is rainy here, and I have been just working my butt off measuring that new North Korean missile and processing satellite images, which is not the podcast we're going to do. But boy, when it rains, it pours.

Aaron 0:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one year anniversary JCPOA day. So it's time for Flock of Seagulls version of I Ran.

Jeffrey 1:06

For our listeners, Wednesday is the one year anniversary of the Trump administration's decision to stop adhering to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal. And so the Iranians had some thoughts and feels about that.

Aaron 1:20

Yeah, yeah. It comes on the heels of the American designation of the. Of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a foreign terrorist organization, and the decision to withhold some of the waivers that we had been giving for third countries to implement elements of the JCPOA. So it's been a fun week.

Jeffrey 1:42

Yeah. And also some of the waivers, they reduce them in terms of the time. So, for example, the waiver that would allow foreign companies to continue to work converting the ARAK nuclear reactor. There was still a waiver, but it is 90 days instead of 180 days.

Aaron 2:08

Right. And maybe tell listeners what that waiver was allowing them to do. It was part of the JCPOA's implementation.

Jeffrey 2:15

So the Trump administration renewed... Five waivers that allow civilian nuclear cooperation in Iran to continue, and that cooperation is part of helping Iran comply with the deal. But the waivers, again, were cut down from 180 days to 90 days, which is kind of like just a dick move.

Aaron 2:43

Yeah, it's a giant one-finger slip.

Jeffrey 2:47

You know, because that means you're either going to have to come back in 90 days again and do the waivers, or it's just a way of delaying the announcement that ultimately you're not going to extend the waivers anymore.

Aaron 2:56

Right. And in this case, the waivers were to basically allow, in the case of Iraq, China, the country of China, to help with the conversion. So it creates less plutonium, i.e. The stuff that you want to put in the bomb. And I think for Oman, it was to buy excess heavy water that they produced at their heavy water production plant.

And I think Russia got one, too, for the removal or the taking of low enriched uranium.

Jeffrey 3:25

Right. Which, by the way, then brings us to Iran's response.

Aaron 3:31

Yes. So they came off. Well, they are unhappy, right? They're unhappy that the Trump administration decided to stop implementing the American commitments under the JCPOA and the ramping up of secondary sanctions, particularly on their oil sector, and said some of the voluntary things that they were agreed to within the JCPOA that they're going to stop implementing. And in this case, it is a cap on the percentage purity of the low enriched uranium at 3.67% and this excess heavy water issue.

Jeffrey 4:10

Which, I mean, seems like a fairly proportionate response to if the U.S. is not going to If the U.S. is threatening basically to cease waiving sanctions for those activities, the selling of heavy water and the export of the LEU, then, you know, it's understandable that the Iranian response would be like, then fine. We'll accumulate LEU and heavy water and we'll see if you like that any better.

Aaron 4:38

Right, right, right. And...

Jeffrey 4:41

By the way, we're really showing the Iranians by forcing them to increase their stockpile of LEU that they could use for a breakout.

Aaron 4:48

It's unbelievable. Then people are going to start worrying about the breakout. We'll get to that in a second. As the LEU stockpile creeps up, the breakout is going to get better.

Jeffrey 4:57

I actually think we all catastrophically misunderstand David Albright's hawkishness on this issue. It has nothing to do with anything other than I think he was just bitter that the only thing he knew how to do, which was the same breakout calculation over and over, had become irrelevant under the JCPOA. And now I suspect he'll be delighted because he can release the same report over and over as every month he redoes the breakout calculation.

Aaron 5:20

Yeah, and this... Just spoiler alert, as the amount of Iranian LEU goes up, there will be a proportional decrease in the amount of times it would take them to re-enrich it faster.

Jeffrey 5:33

And a proportional increase in publications by the Institute for Science and International Security. And I suppose they are hoping a proportional increase in their funding as well. Yeah, and then proportional military strike. But all in terms of that, the Iranian... No, then he would be out of the breakout business. I think that's why we misunderstand him. He just...

I think he's just looking for a simmer.

Aaron 5:56

Okay, fair enough.

Jeffrey 5:58

Maybe a rolling boil.

Aaron 5:59

I don't know, but he... I do think that the point is the Iranians also gave a timeline in that, I think it was 60 days, where basically the Europeans have to start doing some of their financial part of the job, i.e. Trying to circumvent American sanctions to bring them back towards, you know, basically the lower level limits within the JCPOA on this LU and heavy water issue.

Jeffrey 6:29

Yeah, which again, I mean, just conceptually, When Iran's covert nuclear activities became public, the international community put sanctions on Iran. The idea being that these sanctions were incentives for the Iranians to stop their bad behavior. And the Iran nuclear deal is, oh, look, the Iranians agree to stop the bad behavior and live with increased monitoring. And so the sanctions come off.

Right. But if the U.S. position is no, you stop what you're doing, but the sanctions stay on. Right. Like it's it's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine that the Iranians stay in the deal. So, you know, the desire to see that increased trade and investment, which, of course, is the reason that Rouhani and others in Iran, you know, push the thing through like without that.

I mean, there's just there is no constituency in Iran for being humiliated.

Aaron 7:21

I don't think there's a constituency in any country to being humiliated, but we should also be clear what these sanctions are. We call them secondary sanctions, right? But what they ultimately are is they are potential sanctions on third countries or institutions within third countries primarily based in Europe. That if they do something with Iran, they will then feel pain from the United States.

So they are the threat of sanctions on our allies. I think that's important to actually say, because when we dress it up and call them secondary sanctions, it sounds like we're sanctioning Iran, where we're threatening sanctions on our allies if they want to do business with Iran.

Jeffrey 8:03

I think that's right. Obviously, the We call them secondary sanctions and we talk about the sanctions as being on Iran because the idea is that the threat of punishing your allies will result in them passing along that pain to the Iranians by refusing to cooperate with them. But you're absolutely right, right? These are threats to punish our allies and our partners, which, you know, brings with it its own set of downsides.

Aaron 8:36

Right. And so there was, you know, like, Iran is, I always call it an international irritant, particularly the US, but we blow it so far out of proportion for a number of reasons. Again, that Some people may disagree. My point of this is what the Iranians are asking of the Europeans, and in this case, at this point, the four plus one, now it's the UK, France, and Germany.

In this case, the three American allies, excluding Russia and China for the moment, they're asking them to start shoveling money at them as part of the JCPOA commitments. Otherwise, After that 60 days, the stuff on LEU and heavy water, they'll make go away. Right. Which, honestly, I think is pretty reasonable on their side. It wasn't a wholesale thing, and they're playing off of the Trump administration.

Jeffrey 9:35

Yeah, I mean, it actually strikes me as... Fairly adroit, you know, the way I see it, and I'd be interested in what you think, but Rouhani has this interesting challenge in that he's got the United States attempting to put pressure on Iran, and so on the one hand, he wants to find ways to deliver Improvements in Iran's economy that will increase his political power, but he needs to like hold off the hawks who are quite critical of him in Iran, and they're pretty critical of him and then there's, but it, but to get that trade in right, he has to find a way to divide Europe from the United States. So you know, he, he's not, he's not stupid. It's, I think, actually a pretty clever way.

Of responding in a way that mutes some domestic criticism, makes US allies uncomfortable about the directions things are heading, but doesn't fundamentally break that relationship, right? Because I think it's important to just distinguish how he's playing it from how a different Iranian political figure might play it, right? Like a different figure might just be like, screw this deal, right?

And that's not this strategy, right? This strategy is about putting pressure on the Europeans in order to get some of the benefits under the deal while mollifying his domestic critics.

Aaron 11:19

Yeah, nothing to add there other than, I mean, just real simply, he's trying to gain leverage here. And I think the ultimate goal is to run out the clock. The expectation is that There'll be a new American administration, you know, and if they can just keep kicking this can down the road, but they need to start seeing.

Some, I guess, the Europeans stepping in to try and keep this deal alive. So they're essentially asking Europe to defy the United States on this instance within the broader, to attain the broader interests of maintenance of, you know, in this case, a robust non-proliferation agreement. Because the unintended, sorry, the unstated Threat that he's making is actually that breakout time. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's right. Yes, that's right. Yeah. And so he's saying that breakout time, and all the tension that comes with the break with that breakout time, the once a month reports, oh my god, they're 11 months, oh my god, do you hear the 10 months, oh my god, it's nine months, down and down the road, you know, create sort of an atmosphere of tension about what happens when you get within three months in that breakout time. Does it?

The threats of conflict become more tangible and obviously nobody actually really wants conflict except for a small group of people in Washington.

Jeffrey 12:39

And I have to say here, right, this goes back to a conversation we had a lot in the lead up to this agreement. If the Iranians decide that they are not going to live with this agreement, I don't think we're going to hear about it in a press conference. Right. No. Involving the president of Iran. The model that we have seen in the past and, you know, things can change.

But the model we saw in the past is a covert program that is parallel to the civilian enrichment effort. Right. Which is outside of safeguards that's designed to produce this capability that can be presented at the appropriate time as a fait accompli. Yeah. So when Rohani finally decides he's not going down this road anymore and or he's replaced by someone else, I mean, there may be a political piece of talking about...

Not complying with certain aspects, but I think when this process breaks for good, I, I think you know, they're not going to announce it. They're, they're just going to start digging, which is the nice segue to the second part of this conversation, which is we never had the full frontal arms control wonk.

Aaron 14:07

Deep dive into, what are we calling it? Or what is the lingo? The Atomic Archive? The Secret Archive? The Iranian Nuclear Archive?

Jeffrey 14:17

Right, which Harvard University has now largely made available, which is to say they've made available the documents that they received after their briefing that resulted in their report on the contents of the archive. It's worth noting when you go through it, What they got, and I'm sure they'll object to it, but what the Albright group got was they got a briefing.

Aaron 14:46

Yes, that's certainly what it looks like.

Jeffrey 14:48

They didn't get to roam the archives freely because there's a lot of material. They had material that was called for them and then presented to them, which is not, there's nothing wrong with that per se. I think the Harvard report is a little more forthright about What kind of access they had, and the limitations that imposes on their ability to draw certain conclusions.

So, for example, one thing is now that, and to their credit, right, they put these documents online, the Israelis have censored some of them.

Aaron 15:24

Yeah, well, there's weapons of science.

Jeffrey 15:27

Well, I mean, there's a discussion of cooperation with a third country that looks very much like it's North Korea. The Israelis have taken the document from Farsi. They've translated it without providing the original documentation, and then they've deleted or redacted the references to that country.

Aaron 15:45

Right, right, right. Yeah, that's better.

Jeffrey 15:48

Which, you know, it doesn't mean the document's not interesting, but I think it helps illustrate the... Limitations as an analyst in terms of being able to verify the documents, right? Like, none of the folks at Harvard spoke Farsi. It wouldn't really have mattered because generally they didn't interact with the documents in the original language. They didn't really...

There, I believe, are some instances where they were shown original documents, but... The archive is held by the Israelis and some of that information is being provided to external groups. And, you know, again, I think the Harvard team handled it about as well as you could, right, in terms of making that information available. But it's just useful to be...

Direct about what kind of information exists and what kind of access is given to it.

Aaron 16:37

Yeah, and I think for listeners, I mean, the archive refers to the Israelis went into Tehran and they took a whole bunch of documents from a warehouse.

Jeffrey 16:49

Yes, the Iranians had stuck it all in a warehouse.

Aaron 16:52

All in one place. Good job by you, Iran. Well, presumably.

Jeffrey 16:56

You know, life is really far funnier. Life is... Life is not a Mission Impossible movie. It is a Coen Brothers movie. That maybe should be the title of this episode.

Aaron 17:06

That's so true. They took them how they got them. BB did a PowerPoint presentation, and they've made available the document. The way I would classify the documents, all caveats aside that you just laid out, it is the caveats that take you start to finish about how you would build a nuclear weapon. And they are purposely laid out, you know, again, assuming that the documents are accurate.

It shows a very healthy nuclear weapons program that was, you know, close to coming to fruition. I mean, I always hesitate to say that, but, like, they were well on their way towards final assembly.

Jeffrey 17:56

Yeah, I think that's right. Which, I mean, if you go through and read the Harvard report, which I think is quite good.

Aaron 18:05

We'll put it in the show notes, so just look down.

Jeffrey 18:08

Yeah. I mean, it is clearly, it has, I should count how many authors. I have it right in front of me. What does it have? It's got... Six. Six authors, and they clearly do not agree among themselves. It's like a document by consensus, and that's not a criticism. No. I mean, you have six authors who don't agree, right?

I mean, and I think early on they say that they have very different attitudes about the JCPOA. And so I think it's very hard to write a document like that. I think the best part is Appendix A, which I don't fully agree with, but it is four pages of what we thought we knew based on IAEA documents mostly.

Yeah. Versus what the archive would suggest. Right. And I have had several conversations with people involved, and they all summarized the relationship between those two questions a little differently from one another, as you would expect human beings to do.

Aaron 19:15

Yep, Coen Brothers.

Jeffrey 19:18

Well, I mean, it's, you know, but I definitely, now that we have seen the underlying archive, I mean, the detail is kind of interesting in a wonk porn kind of way. I still don't think it fundamentally changes what we knew.

Aaron 19:37

I... Could not agree more. By the way, I love the pictures. You know, like... Yeah, the pictures are great. The pictures are, like, graphic, X-rated, full frontals. They're wonderful. And a lot of, like... I mean, the way I've started to think about it is, like, we had a really good idea about what this program looked like from IAEA documents.

Jeffrey 20:00

Uh-huh.

Aaron 20:03

But you made some sort of, like... Inference assumptions about what the program probably looked like because it was, it was dry bureaucratic text. The pictures and the documents that are provided in the archive fill in details that would make the book like the Iran nuclear program, yeah, like, like you could turn it into a narrative non-fiction, right? You know what I mean? Rather than like a news summary. Does that make sense? I do. And that's the way I think of the archive, or it does.

Jeffrey 20:34

Yeah. So, I mean, I just, we won't go through all of these, right? But I think a good example is, you know, they're what we thought we knew and what our archive briefing suggests for strategic intent. So here's what they say for what we thought we knew. Page 14, if you're following along at home. Right. For strategic intent, right?

It's just easiest to do the highest level one and then maybe we'll nitpick a little bit later. Yeah. But unknown, possibly just a nuclear weapons option for later decision. Activities described as development of a nuclear explosive device or working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons. Okay, and they say, like, what our archive briefing suggests. High-level decision to manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test until stop-work order in 2003.

I actually think we knew that. I mean, I certainly didn't think that it was purely an option. And, you know, we have the... And perhaps I blur the IAEA and the NIE together.

Aaron 21:46

2007 NIE, by the way.

Jeffrey 21:47

Right. But, you know, the... 2007 NIE says, we assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons. Like... Yeah. That... It's a high confidence... Under government direction to develop nuclear weapons. It doesn't say bomb option. Right? And... All of the laptop of death material. Right. It had the information about testing in it.

Yeah. You know, so we knew that a test was a thing that they were going to want to do. So, you know, it's not that I don't. You know, like high level decision to manufacture nuclear weapons is a thing that the briefing suggests. I have an NIE that says that there is a government direction, which, I mean, maybe high level is, like, slightly new, but I don't think anybody thought that, like, An effort of this size was being carried out without...

I mean, I don't know what high level, I guess, means, but I don't think you could do it without a high level. I don't know that anybody is... I guess I don't know anybody who said this was a low-level program that was just kind of meandering along. The other thing, which has always been something that annoyed me about the way that the IAEA used to phrase this, but they used to say...

Right, that the range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device were conducted in Iran prior to the end of 2003 as a coordinated effort.

Aaron 23:28

Yeah.

Jeffrey 23:29

Right, so that's a coordinated effort. To develop a nuclear explosive device.

Aaron 23:34

Right, right, right, right, right. Exactly, if you were to rephrase.

Jeffrey 23:37

You know, I mean, I get the way that I understand they wanted to describe the range of activities relevant to development of a nuclear explosive device. But this is kind of my nitpick with a lot of these things where the what we thought we knew and what our archive briefing suggests I think sometimes are presented as being A wider gap than at least existed in my mind.

I never doubted that this was a high-level decision, and I think the NIE is clear that this was a directed choice.

Aaron 24:17

Yes, 100%. I guess what they are being overt about with the archive is that there is this idea that elements within the Iranian system wasn't aware of the extent of the weaponization program, even if they were aware of the fact that they had intent to build a nuclear weapon. The idea that the Supreme Leader wasn't briefed before we actually do this always struck me as farcical.

This is a multi-billion dollar thing here. It's not as if you can get away with this by charging us on the company credit card and claiming its gas receipts. This is a big deal. And so I This just strikes me as nitpicking phraseology in words rather than just using your brain.

Jeffrey 25:10

I guess my concern is what we thought we knew in this report is sometimes, I believe, a straw person. Yes, yes, exactly. It's not that the report inaccurately summarizes the material. It's that I... There were a variety of opinions prior to the release of the archive, and some of those opinions were silly at the time, and they remain silly, and they remain silly in light of the archive, and they make their appearance here, but it kind of implies that everybody, it really, for example, I mean, that's why I keep going back to regime intent. Like, it's a, it's a perfect example where yes, there were people who claimed Iran never intended to build a nuclear weapon, but like.

Like, those people were insane, right?

Aaron 25:55

Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Jeffrey 25:57

You know, I think if you read the NIE and you read the IAEA report, it is clear that there is government direction. And, you know, we can quibble about how high level is high, but like, you know, as a practical matter, I don't think there was ever any serious consideration that this thing was just running without much top cover.

Aaron 26:21

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And... i mean just keep going down a little bit... Maybe, do we get into the timing now? You know, because one of the things is, like, there's the halt. I mean, to use the U.S. phrase. I know, it should be a pause. It should be... Pause would be a better word, because they meant halt, and as if people were marching, and they stopped.

But you can keep marching again, right?

Jeffrey 26:47

Right, so that is a thing that people don't understand, is halt was meant to mean pause, because the people who wrote it had... Yeah, well, assuming no, they weren't, but, but, but I, I, I think that you know, in that culture and environment, when I mean, I know, I, because I had this conversation, they thought of halt like march, yeah, like you're marching, and, and those of us who've never marched, they weren't in the marching band, they weren't in the military.

Right. And, you know, we like made mixtapes instead because we had other things going on in high school and college. And I would have thought of a tape player or a CD player pausing.

Aaron 27:32

A Spotify playlist for the youngins.

Jeffrey 27:35

Right. Although I guess you can pause. Yeah, you can pause. Well, does it stream? Does it pause? Or does it break the stream and then you come back in? It's specific to you, right? I don't use Spotify, so I don't know. Anyways. We're clearly old. Anyway, the point being... Right. It says nuclear weapons program halted in fall 2003.

And then they say, right, confirms major activity stopped in late 2003, but reveals coordinated efforts to fill in technical gaps continued, divided into overt and covert portions, no information on activities after the mid-2000s. When you go back and read the IAEA, and they mention this in what we thought we knew, right, is that there's no credible evidence of activities after 2009.

So we knew stuff kept happening.

Aaron 28:25

Yeah, and I think they talk about it within the IAEA. It's the band. I call it sort of like the weaponization band secunded themselves into universities and probably continued some level of studies.

Jeffrey 28:39

Right. So I guess if you took what we thought we knew, nuclear weapons program halted in the fall of 2003. Yes, we still know that. Weaponization was a coordinated effort prior to the end of 2003. Yes, we still believe that. Some activities thereafter, but not part of a coordinated effort. No credible evidence of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device, what they're saying is like, well, there was an effort to fill in gaps, right?

So the idea was that it was not completely uncoordinated. It's like, that's a... That's a really... tiny... Question of emphasis. And I am not even sure, you know, that the IAEA report is, you know, I mean, there's probably a question of how they're using coordinated, right? I mean, you're really turning on really simple word choices made in detailed documents.

Yeah. You know, and so it's like, well, between 2003 and 2009, the big difference is the IAEA says they were not coordinated, not part of a coordinated effort.

Aaron 29:55

And, you know, we want to quibble with that because they maintained an organizational structure.

Jeffrey 30:01

Like, it's not clear to me that the underlying evidence is any different. It's it really is just like interpretation.

Aaron 30:09

Yeah. Yeah. Does that make any sense? No, it does. It does. It does.

Jeffrey 30:12

It just it just feels so small to me. Like when you really put them side by side.

Aaron 30:17

You're quibbling over language. You're quibbling over definitions of what coordinated means. Yes, which just is not... It's similar to the halt. I mean, it's in much the same way. It's how you choose language. Like, halt was not the best word. They should have used pause, and you hit pause.

Jeffrey 30:34

Yeah, you literally could have said, well, the NIE said halt, but the archives shows that they just paused. Yeah. And, you know, but the answer is like, well, that's kind of what they meant by halt, but it was a bad word choice. And like, pause and halt are metaphors and what we're really interested in what they actually did.

And, you know, I mean, I give the Harvard folks a lot of credit. It's hard to summarize this stuff. So it's not like I think that they're doing it badly or in bad faith. But I do think when you really look at the kind of stuff side by side, you can see how six authors...

Aaron 31:09

Look at the archive and like none of them come away feeling differently about the JCPOA, right? The ones who hated it still hate it, and the ones who don't hate it still don't hate, right? and I think, I mean, one of the, the interesting parts about the the archive within the documents is like they make reference, they make references to more foreign assistance, I mean, you reference it up top.

Than we previously knew about.

Jeffrey 31:31

Right, because it's more foreign experts than was previously... Right.

Aaron 31:36

Yeah. That's right. Which is interesting. And the explosive developments were also pretty interesting, even though we knew about a lot of those things as well.

Jeffrey 31:45

Yeah, I don't really know how to make that, because, like, if you look at... I mean, there are different pieces of explosives in the... You know, there's the... There's the explosives testing, right? But the one I was kind of interested in was the shock-driven neutron initiators, right? Because they say what we thought we knew was some member state information indicates work on shock-driven neutron initiators, but no clear IAEA conclusion.

Aaron 32:20

Like, that's fair, right?

Jeffrey 32:24

But what the original paragraph says is, additional information provided by a member state prior to November 2011 indicated that activity in this area may have continued in Iran after 2004, and that from around 2006 onward, Iran had embarked on a four-year program on the validation of shock-driven neutron source design, including through the use of non-nuclear material to avoid contamination.

Iran stated during a technical expert meeting in September 2015, they carried out no activity practical theoretical related to shock-driven neutron sources. Like, it is true there's no clear IAEA conclusion, but like...

Aaron 32:58

They're talking about their experimentation with shock-driven deuteron sources.

Jeffrey 33:03

Yeah, and then what the archive shows is that, like, yes, there were shock-driven uranium deuteride initiators. So it's... It's like... It's nice to know that the member state was correct, but did we not believe the member state? I did.

Aaron 33:23

Maybe that's the point. We believe – I know you believe this. We talked about this on the podcast. We believed – we don't have to be convinced that Iran – Had a well-developed, full-scale, top-down nuclear weapons program with everything that entails to build a nuclear weapon and the delivery of it. So I didn't have to be convinced that Iran was acting in bad faith in terms of its nonproliferation commitments.

I assume have internalized and accepted that Iran was acting in bad faith. And therefore, the archive complements or supplements so much of what we knew in the IAEA report that just says, oh, yeah, that's really interesting. That's how a state would go about building a nuclear weapon. Do you know what I mean?

Jeffrey 34:16

Oh, totally. I mean, and I think it all comes back to the simplistic presentation that Netanyahu made at the beginning, right, where he said Iran lied. And I think those of us who support the deal are like, of course they lied. That's why we needed a diplomatic solution because the other option was worse.

Aaron 34:32

Yeah, it was bomb scopes.

Jeffrey 34:34

It was Iran building a bomb or us attacking Iran. And since we didn't want either of those things, the JCPOA seems great. Right. This administration would rather move aircraft carriers around and, you know...

Aaron 34:49

Bombers.

Jeffrey 34:49

Do other things. Bombers. Right. We got the B-52. That's just... Right. So, you know, I... I guess I mean, again, I have to say, like, I really I'm impressed that Harvard decided to make that evidence available so everyone could see why they drew the conclusions they did. But I just don't. What I cannot conceive is if you take the outline of the reports that you that we had prior to the agreement and then you take the new information.

You get some additional level of fidelity and maybe a date here or there moves or you have a better understanding. But it doesn't change the story. No. If you believe that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons program prior to 2003, which was halted or paused or reorganized or suppressed under international pressure and the Iranian government's response to that, and you also believe that what the IAEA was told by member states and was able to find on its own was, you know, A pretty decent summary of where the Iranians were, then I just don't think you're going to read the documents and be shocked.

If you were one of the people going through this who believed that this was completely invented by some global cabal, then yeah, I think the archive would come as a great shock, but then again, you're a jerk and you'd probably just assume it was fabricated, right?

Aaron 36:22

Yeah, you got a good prime three-minute slot on Russia today.

Jeffrey 36:29

But if you weren't in that category, I mean, I think you kind of go through it, and it's like, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, like, it is cool to see the stuff up close.

Aaron 36:37

Yeah, I love the pit design.

Jeffrey 36:39

You know, but I'll tell you the perfect example of this. Do you remember there was the mock-up of the cylinder for doing explosives testing at Parchin? Yeah, I modeled it during my dissertation. Right, and we all kind of, like, we accepted it was it. Yeah.

Aaron 36:55

But it was just so weird because it had that little...

Jeffrey 36:57

The little door. Yeah, right. It had the Oompa Loompa door. It's the Oompa Loompa door.

Aaron 37:03

It's a very small door.

Jeffrey 37:04

And so you get the picture out of Parchin, right, which, you know, Harvard notes, many photographs.

Aaron 37:10

And there's an Oompa Loompa door. It was right. And I remember at the time people were like, well, this has got to be fabricated because the door is so wrong. And so that was the RT, the Russia Today truthers were like, it's wrong because of the door. Yeah.

Jeffrey 37:24

Yeah, it's funny. I was making light of that at the time, and now I think I should have been, like, absolutely more clear, since I've always thought they did those explosions at Parchin, right? Yeah. But, like, you know.

Aaron 37:40

It's a door.

Jeffrey 37:41

Door in the animation. They really had a tiny little door.

Aaron 37:44

It really is a tiny little door. It seems like a design flaw. There might be a reason for it that somebody can tell us either in Slack or on Twitter.

Jeffrey 37:55

For the record, at the time, I said we have pretty decent evidence the Iranians must have some sort of detonation chamber on site at Parchin. There's no question that they had one. We just didn't understand the issue of scale. Like, why is the door so little? So the answer is, I don't know. We actually never got to the bottom of that mystery, but we do know it did have the little door.

Aaron 38:13

Yeah, but the scale is just built around the explosives. It had to be larger to contain the explosion. It's something.

Jeffrey 38:20

Anyway. I think the archive would be a big deal if people didn't believe that there had been explosives work at Parchin.

Aaron 38:27

Yeah, but you'd have to be an idiot. But in fact...

Jeffrey 38:32

There was a lot of documentation there had been explosives work at Parchin, and the Iranians had an explanation for what was going on in that building, which, by the way, when the IAEA did the environmental sample, they made sure to look. For samples that would confirm the Iranian story, and they found none. And while it was pretty heavily sanitized, they still picked up some uranium particles.

Aaron 38:52

This was the famous self-inspection, the Obama capitulation to the self-inspection.

Jeffrey 38:57

Yes, the self-inspection that actually showed the Iranians were lying, right? It was great.

Aaron 39:01

I love that.

Jeffrey 39:02

That was the best part. You know, and so like, oh, here's now a picture inside the building. It's like, well, that's great. And I love seeing that picture. But I always believed there was a detonation chamber there.

Aaron 39:11

Yeah. And I mean, maybe we should talk about like the recent events, you know, like because like things have been turned up. Right. Like like we were just made light of it. You know, there was the. I guess Bolton issued a statement from the White House. My days are running into each other. I think it was Monday night announcing the movement of an aircraft carrier that had long been planned to go and a bomber task force, which is four B-52s.

And if they keep to the task force, they should only be there for a couple of weeks. But who knows? We're just sending four B-52s out to the Middle East.

Jeffrey 39:46

Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I wonder how much of this is previously planned and how much of this is just, you know, like how much of this is previously planned and then being depicted.

Aaron 40:01

I think the carrier, I think the bombers were something new, but I think the carrier was previously planned.

Jeffrey 40:05

Well, because do you remember we went through this with North Korea with the, was it the Carl Vinson? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, where Trump was like, I'm sending an armada or something. Oh, yeah, the armada.

Aaron 40:16

That's right. I forgot about the armada.

Jeffrey 40:18

And it was like, no, actually, it was going in the other direction. Wasn't it in the Strait of Malacca and they had to turn it around? You know, this whole thing is now, like, lost on my memory. Like, I just remember it being this, like, farce where, like, whatever they said initially later turned out not to be true, and then they had to, like... Yeah, that's right.

Okay, here it is. There was an armada that was going to signal resolve, and then it was photographed heading in the opposite direction. Yeah, I love resolve. Yeah. And then they decided to send it back? Yeah, they had to turn it around. They had to turn it around?

Aaron 41:05

They really had to turn the aircraft carrier around.

Jeffrey 41:09

President Trump said the United States was sending ships, an armada. Very powerful, he said. So the way that the Navy made this all true was saying it wasn't untrue, it's just that the change of course had not yet happened.

Aaron 41:26

Well, he was similar. Like, these guys were in the Med, and then they got new orders to head out to the Persian Gulf, or at least get close.

Jeffrey 41:35

Yeah, I just—I just—one, right, they're liars, which is hard to deal with because you don't necessarily know when people are telling the truth. And then the other thing, which is a serious point that I think people often don't understand, you know— The U.S. military has dedicated units whose job it is is to take pre-existing exercises and tests and figure out how to present them.

Okay. So, you know, like, there will be an ICBM test scheduled, you know, a year in advance. And they will make a decision as the test comes up, like, how do you frame it? And so sometimes they will say, you know, if there's a particular crisis going on in the world, this shows our continuing ability to deter.

And then, you know, reporters will kind of gullibly say, like, oh, the U.S. did this test in order to show. Right, implying a causal relationship. But in fact, the test was already planned, but there was a decision to frame it in this way. And in other cases, they downplay, right, because they don't want to send certain messages.

So it's always very hard to tell out what was preplanned and what's new and what's preplanned and framed in a certain way and wasn't.

Aaron 42:58

Can I break some news here on the pod? This is Wednesday, 2.50 East Coast time. Sure. Sure. AFP news agency breaking. Trump says he hopes to, quote unquote, someday to meet Iran's leaders to seek a new deal.

Jeffrey 43:14

They got to they got to get on that ICBM and nuclear.

Aaron 43:18

I will say across my Twitter, too. It seems like. Brian Hook said the same thing, so there may be some sort of coordination here. But I think the point is that we're sending the carrier, the bombers are going ostensibly...

Jeffrey 43:31

This was all a prelude to give him another summit.

Aaron 43:34

It may be a summit. Maybe it's at the UN. Maybe it'll be in New York, Trump Tower, who knows.

Jeffrey 43:40

The idea that all of our sad little lives are hostage to the vanity of this one lunatic is just incredible. It's tough.

Aaron 43:52

But we should say that ostensibly they're sending these things out there because they got intelligence. There's debates about how credible it is that the Iranians were planning something either directly or through their proxies to target Iranians. Americans, there have been reports that it could have been some people firing at us from Yemen. Pompeo shows up in Iraq, so that makes me think that there may be something in Iraq.

And I will say this, we do give them a hard time. Signaling that an Iranian proxy would be treated the same as an Iranian if they kill Americans is fine with me. I'm not sure we needed the Armada to do that, but that's fine with me. But one of the things that I think that CNN subsequently later reported is that there was scuds on ships.

Jeffrey 44:39

Yes, scuds on ships, my friend Mark Shands and I. For nearly 20 years, not quite 20 years, I think we've known each other since, I want to say maybe 2004? So 15 years? 15 years. For 15 years, Mark and I have collapsed into laughter anytime someone mentions Scuds on Ships. Why? What's the backstory here? So in the late 90s, early 2000s, when countries weren't capable of building ICBMs, the big missile defense, like the desperate missile defense argument was.

Aaron 45:26

The Rumsfeld.

Jeffrey 45:26

The North Koreans would put a scud on, yes.

Aaron 45:28

The Rumsfeld, the Missile Defense Commission, or the ICBM Commission.

Jeffrey 45:34

Scuds on ships.

Aaron 45:34

Scuds on ships. Oh, my God. That's so right. Oh, man. Yeah.

Jeffrey 45:39

And so, now, of course, Scuds are... Not on ships.

Aaron 45:46

Well, yeah.

Jeffrey 45:46

Well, I mean, Scuds are transported by ships. Right. And I do think that they have put Scuds on ships, but basically, from the reporting I have seen... And who knows if any of this is true, but the reporting is that they saw them loading full scuds onto ships. Because previously, when the Iranians sent scuds to Yemen, they cut them up to make it easier to smuggle them.

Aaron 46:23

In this case, it's the super scud Qiyam.

Jeffrey 46:26

Right. And so when they arrived in Yemen, then the Yemenis had to re-weld them back together, which, by the way, you can apparently do.

Aaron 46:33

Yeah. And you can see that at the Iranian materiel display.

Jeffrey 46:36

Yeah. It led to my like one of my all time favorite Carmel moments. We have a friend who's a metal artist. I know this story. And I'm sure I've told it before. He actually is the person who helped us do the museum quality cutaway of the Thor turbo pump that now sits in our office.

Aaron 46:55

Because you guys could do this at C&S. It's one of the ultimate reasons why you have the best job in the world, or at least one of the best jobs in the world.

Jeffrey 47:02

There are aspects of it that make it tolerable, yes. The ocean view. But, you know, make me an offer. There are other oceans. I can look at other oceans. I was at a party with Taylor. The welder. And I showed him the welds. And he took one look and he's like, oh, that's aluminum. I was like, what?

He's like, well, it's the color of the metal and the type of weld. We thought the welds looked messy, but that's apparently what a field weld with aluminum looks like. Oh, really? So, yeah, it was actually not bad.

Aaron 47:39

Oh, interesting. Because I've done welding for... I've looked at welds, I should say, for Volkswagen Karmann Ghia pans. They rust out, so you have to weld new ones in. I thought that they were real shitty.

Jeffrey 47:51

No, no, no. Aluminum is just tough to weld, and you make a big, messy weld like that if you don't have the right tool. Oh, cool. So that was a great Carmel moment because I'm at this party, and it's like he visually identifies the airframe as being aluminum and then explains that that's not as messy of a weld as I think it is, and he'd like to see me do a better job welding aluminum.

Aaron 48:11

Yeah, especially in the field. But the idea is that they cut these missiles up because they transfer them to smaller ships to smuggle them ashore, or some people say they go over land.

Jeffrey 48:19

Or when they're ashore, right. On trucks, yeah. But what was different this time is they were shipping full scuds. And so the simplest explanation is they just aren't worried about the scuds being interdicted. Or whatever they're shipping. I shouldn't say they were necessarily, because they were missiles.

Aaron 48:38

Yeah, some people just said short-range missiles. That could be like the Zelzal.

Jeffrey 48:42

Well, because if they're solid fuel, you can't do this. Yeah, you can't cut them off. You have to assume they're liquid. Correct. But if they've switched over to sending Fatah 110s or even Zolfgars, they're not going to be able to cut those up. So they're putting full missiles on ships. The simplest explanation is they either can't cut them up because they're solid or they don't want to cut them up or they don't care anymore because they're not going to be interdicted.

But there was this other idea that they were pre-positioning them for some kind of attack. Which I mean, I suppose is possible, but as Fabian Hins points out, who used to work with us and we hope will someday work with us again, he, you know, they already have U.S. bases in range, right?

Aaron 49:39

Adam Ronsley had a great picture on Twitter yesterday where they're literally on Iranian TV just like showing a U.S. base. Next to their missiles, saying that this is what our missiles are aimed at.

Jeffrey 49:50

They've got, you know, plenty of range, so I don't really know what, if they're going to Yemen, where those things are going to be launched that would be any different than Iran, I mean, unless it's what we've been seeing, which is allowing the proxy forces to rocket the Saudis. So, you know, it's, like, not nice that they're doing it, and it's kind of interesting that they're full missiles, but, like...

You know, I think the Scuds on Ships fixation seems to have overtaken good judgment. Yeah, and look. I say this, and then tomorrow they're going to launch all these Scuds on Ships. Yeah, I know.

Aaron 50:31

They do. They launch Scuds on Ships. Like, you're going to have to do something. Like, I don't know. But, like, I'm not too worried about this.

Jeffrey 50:39

You know what I'm going to do is I'm going to call Mark Shands up, which is going to make an appointment to, like, You know, go drink.

Aaron 50:47

Yeah, you could have a party. I was going to say you could have a Northern California party. I am fairly convinced that there was some intel that some of their proxies in Iraq were going to up the mischievous activity. Here's where I want to quibble. Like even if it was actionable – How different is this from the last time we got Intel of this nature?

The last time we got Intel, I mean, they rocketed Camp Taji a couple of, it's about 10 days ago and sort of passed underneath the radar, except for us really big Middle East nerds. You know, how is this different? And was the threat so great as to justify the memo And then the dressing up of a carrier movement, and what I think is probably like a rapid movement of the bomber task force, which is what they're designed to do, but you're taking B-52s from Barksdale, and you're like going to ship them out to the Middle East.

What are they going to do out there? They're going to fly racetracks, you know, on deterrence patrol? Like, I just don't understand.

Jeffrey 51:55

They're going to send a message, Aaron.

Aaron 51:58

Do you think they'll leave their transponders on so that we even ratchet up tensions further so we could watch B-52s doing racetracks just outside there? That's what I'd do if I was Bolton. I would order the transponders on so that you can see when the B-52s fly.

Jeffrey 52:15

I really don't want to give the man ideas. No, that's not what I would do. I would, because their goal is to blow this up. No, I would do the PSYOPs campaign that the U.S. did against the Soviet Union in the early 80s and that I include at the beginning of the 2020 commission. Which is I would have aircraft fly up until the Iranians could see them, and then I'd have them make a hard turn and come home.

This is not a good idea, by the way. No.

Aaron 52:47

Your phone is ringing. Big picture. I mean, this has been a long one, but we started at the waivers, the Iranian response, the archive, and now we're at B-52s. And racetracks and what they may be able to do. Where is this going? I mean, there's no secret to anybody on this podcast that we both support the JCPOA, but things look very, very grim.

And I think that's very, very bad. And why I'm actually not all that concerned about an unintended escalation at the moment, like Trump, breaking news aside here on the podcast, I sort of really simplistically, you either get the JCPOA or you get the Singapore summit. And I would just rather have the JCPOA. And I just don't know what the alternative is here if the regime doesn't collapse.

With that, that's our nice sign off. Thank you everybody for listening. Jeffrey, thank you for joining. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can head on over to patreon.com. And if you are a student for as little as $3 a month, you can sign up to support our Patreon page. That gives you access to a Slack channel where we also have a separate short podcast where we talk about...

Things that are interesting in the disarmament, non-proliferation, nuclear weapons world but in smaller bites not, not the full podcast, and that's five dollars for everybody else if you're not a student. So with that it is actually the sun has broken through in the clouds, and it's iced coffee time for me. Thanks everybody for listening.