Iran’s Pathway to the Bomb

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

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

Aaron Stein 0:20

And I am Dr. Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Jeffrey, we have been trying to do this, I think, for three weeks.

Jeffrey 0:26

Well, you've been on vacation.

Aaron 0:29

It was not just me. Sorry. I'm for all the listeners or the viewers on YouTube. I need my pencil. Do you want to know why I have a pencil? Why do you have a pencil? Because I have to mark down every time you swear so that our podcast producer will bleep you out. Yeah. To keep us on the kids show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were also traveling as well.

Jeffrey 0:49

I slipped into D.C. for a double I double S meeting and I didn't have time to see any of my friends. So I didn't even tell my friends I was there. I'm a bad person. I'm sorry.

Aaron 1:01

Well, you know who doesn't need much time.

Jeffrey 1:04

Oh. Oh. That's good. That was kind of tortured, but that's okay. I mean, you're trying. You're still on vacation. You haven't fully recovered. I went to a meeting today that's on Friday, and it was a 30-minute drive. Wait, what?

Aaron 1:20

I thought my lunch meeting for Friday was today. And I'm not going to say the company, but it was a company here in Philadelphia. And I get there, and I check in, and the guy comes down, and he goes... Aaron, it's Friday. What are you doing here? And I'm just like, yep, it's Friday. I fat fingered my calendar.

So yes, I'm still on Caribbean time.

Jeffrey 1:39

I missed an hour long interview on Friday, which was July 4th. So I'm...

Aaron 1:46

OK, well, people have been clamoring online, certainly on the Slack channel, Twitter or X, Blue Sky. What's our take on the 12-day war, as our president calls it?

Jeffrey 1:59

I mean, is it called the 12-day war because that's how long it set Iran's nuclear program back? It's a better transition.

Aaron 2:08

I was surprised it ended when it ended. You know, the Israelis sort of seemed like the entirety of their focus was to get the U.S. to drop. Are we calling it the mop or the MOP?

Jeffrey 2:19

I call it the mop. You mop things up.

Aaron 2:23

To drop mops on Fordow.

Jeffrey 2:26

I think you can use it as a verb. You mop Fordow.

Aaron 2:29

Yeah. And then we got really into the asinine nonsense about damage assessments. So where do you want to start with this?

Jeffrey 2:37

Yeah. Well, actually, I think, you know, I think one place to start is to highlight some work that Sam Lair, my colleague at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies did. I like to think I helped, but Sam did almost all of it. You know, I understand that it seemed like Israel could do this forever. But the level of intensity of that military operation, I think, was ferociously expensive.

Aaron 3:09

On the missile defense side?

Jeffrey 3:10

Well, certainly on the missile defense side. I mean, I think also just in terms of maintaining that level of operations tempo. But yes. And I think what Sam did was he and I have been looking at there's a particular man in Jordan. Yeah. Who has a camera set up that looks at Israel and you can watch all of the Israeli interceptors fly up and then you can watch the Iranian missiles come in and it's a full field of view.

And so we geolocated it precisely to his building. We won't say where he lives, but. Let's not do that. We don't want to get sued by that. I can send him a postcard. And Sam then was able to identify the location of all the missile defense sites in Israel. Yeah. And in particular, you could time the burnouts and identify what kind of interceptors they were using.

Yeah. And he was able to put a floor on the number of interceptors. And it seemed pretty obvious to me the Israelis were Basically out of interceptors because the U.S. deployed a THAAD system. And we could see where the THAAD system was and then went and got from Planet a satellite image of it showing it deployed, which is kind of wild that you can cross-reference these things.

And, you know, they basically used, I think it was 39 THAAD interceptors, which is more than a year's worth of production and is like $500 million or something. Yeah.

Aaron 4:34

Yeah. I mean, I don't have the art club in front of me, but I think it was 39. Exactly. So, you know, I think...

Jeffrey 4:45

I understand the Iranians took it in the face. They did. And not surprising given the crappy air defenses that Sam and I observed that they had. But I also think that repeatedly punching the Iranians in the face was getting very expensive for the Israelis. And it'll be interesting to see that Israel has a damage claims authority, I forget, or an insurance authority where you can submit damage claims.

Sounds like California. Yeah. Yeah, so we'll in the end, even though censors have been pretty tough, you know, keeping information getting out about how much damage, like, we'll get some sense of it. Like, wasn't anything like what the Iranians experienced. But on the other hand, you know, I don't know how long the government really wanted to sustain that.

Well, I think— Plus, Cheeto Jesus told them to stop.

Aaron 5:38

He did. You know, he did. But he couldn't help himself dropping the MOPs, the mops, so he mopped up. And, I mean, I would call, based on everything that we have, the strike successful. And I don't actually doubt—I don't know what word we use, obliterate or something along the lines—is that the mops did what they were designed to do.

Does that make sense?

Jeffrey 6:06

Yes, they had a model of the facility. There was a target. They hit the target. The mop exploded with the power that was expected. And the model is probably right. And the facility is probably real messed up.

Aaron 6:22

Correct. So this entire week long back and forth we had over that leaked DIA assessment, I found to be just completely annoying because it was focused on the wrong thing. Does that make sense? It was focused on, because the administration made it about the destruction of Fordow. I do believe Fordow was severely damaged. Right. I don't think the damaging of Fordow has really anything to do with the breakout timelines of this.

And so we were talking about two different things, and it was this asinine Washington, D.C., Bull feces that had no effing, I'm trying not to swear so we don't have to believe anything. Come on, you know you want to do it.

Jeffrey 7:06

Come on.

Aaron 7:07

No, no, I don't want to use the pencil. Come on. No fucking relevance to like what was going on. I was just watching this going like, that's not the issue, you dumb motherfuckers. Like, that's not the issue.

Jeffrey 7:18

Did you watch the US men's national team's game against Mexico yesterday?

Aaron 7:25

No, I was.

Jeffrey 7:26

So I most certainly did not. The way the Trump people talked about the strike, it's as though the U.S. had walked around saying we scored a goal. It was a beautiful goal. It was a great goal. It's like, I know. But what was the actual score at the end of the game? Like we scored an amazing goal.

Aaron 7:43

Yes, it is. It's not just the Trump people. It's all of it. It was all of this focus on the DIA says, you know, blah, blah. I'm just like, come on, guys. The issue is we don't know where 600 kilograms of their HEU is. We think we know where it is. Wait, is it 600?

Jeffrey 8:06

Isn't it 400?

Aaron 8:08

Is it 400? Okay, I'm sorry. We're doing this off the cuff. Okay. Their stuff that we're concerned about in HEU form

Jeffrey 8:17

Nine nuclear weapons worth if it were to be further enriched, which is a little bit like your grandmother having balls. But, you know. We think we know where it is, maybe. Right. I mean, that's that's a thing worth talking about. Right. So the material still exists. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious about Isfahan because in their three tunnels.

I think we had a podcast about those tunnels years ago. I really think we did. We probably did. Zach Cohen at CNN got U.S. officials to say the reason that they didn't use a mop on the tunnels they just found is they were too deep. And I know they allegedly T-lambed the entrances, but that's pointless because the entrances are covered with dirt.

One of those tunnels looks open to me, although I will admit I don't know the interior layout. I don't know if all the tunnels connect to one another. I've seen a ton of trucks on site. And so, you know, the Iranians apparently told Grossi, Rafael Grossi, the very fine director of the IAEA, that the material had been moved.

Whether they were telling the truth or not, I don't know. But like, it's not like it's permanently buried. Like the Iranians put the dirt in the tunnel. They could just take it out.

Aaron 9:38

Oh, yeah. I mean, they're digging a hole across the street from me right now to put in a new house. I can see how much earth they can move with just one dirt loader per day.

Jeffrey 9:48

Yeah. So, yeah, we don't know where the material is. I mean, that's a serious consideration. And we could go through and talk about all the other facilities, but there is this, as you say, there's this weird kind of double game going where You know, there are different measures. So, you know, the measure I'm interested in, which is how quickly could Iran build a nuclear weapon if that's what it wanted to do?

Right. Using what survived. And we can talk about what survived and we talk about what kind of nuclear weapon. And, you know, but the answer to that is like less than a year, I think. Yeah, well, that is what the assessments say. And that's why DIA was like a few months, right? Right. But what I love, did you see what CIA did, is they figured out how to make spray tan Caligula right.

They said, well... How long would it take for Iran to rebuild the facilities that we obliterated? Definitely saw that. Not what not what they're going to do, but that's one to two years. And that's that's that apparently satisfies the political need of the moment. So like decimated is to reduce by one tenth obliterate now means to delay by one to two years.

Aaron 11:04

Right. And so, again, just to finish my rant, because you just sort of articulated what I meant, is that everybody was talking about whether or not Fordow was destroyed, obliterated, decimated, severely set back, and that's not the issue. The issue is the metric of time with which, from existing facilities or potentially new facilities, Iran could build a nuclear weapon to choose.

Jeffrey 11:27

And keeping in mind that we always preferred breakout, or we preferred rather sneak out to breakout... They've cut off cooperation with the IAEA. Exactly.

Aaron 11:39

And so the big problem with this is now that our- We have no idea what's going on. We have no idea. So we have no idea. And let's lay this on top. They had told us, this was part of their mucking around and screwing around, right? During the, when we left the JCPOA and before the 12-day war, they were incrementally mucking around and screwing around to include the highly enriched uranium, I believe up to 60%, right?

The other one was the modified Code 3.1 and not announcing that they were building a new centrifuge facility until the day before it was supposed to be open. They're like, hey, guys, grand opening tomorrow. Come check it out. And so there is another enrichment facility, at least one.

Jeffrey 12:24

And I don't think the Israelis hit it. Yeah, I don't either. You know, it's complicated because Grossi said the facility was severely damaged. And he said it was in Isfahan. There are things that were severely damaged. But there are other large underground facilities that I shouldn't say too much about because we're still trying to understand what they are that weren't.

And I think that maybe the simplest thing I can say is there are a lot of underground facilities that are as deep as the tunnels at Isfahan, if not more so. So, like, what do we think is going on there? We have no idea. I mean, boy, it would be great if the IAEA could go look, wouldn't it?

Aaron 13:21

It would have been nice. It certainly would have been nice and interesting. I'd like it too, because we have no idea. And we are now arguing about obliterate, decimate, or destroy.

Jeffrey 13:34

Yeah. So the other two facilities, by the way, that I keep pointing out to people, and for whatever reason, I can't get people to sort of wrap their head around it. Next to Natanz, and maybe because everything is close to one another and it has the same name, there's Pick Axe Mountain. It's a huge underground facility. We know that the Iranians had a centrifuge production line there.

So I presume sitting in that facility, there are at least a bunch of components for replacement centrifuges, the sensitive ones. There may well be fully assembled centrifuges for all I know, and they have the ability to make more. Plus, we calculated the size of the spoil using radar imagery. And it's – What's the spoil? Tell people what that is.

Oh, when you dig a tunnel, you got to dump the rock at the mouth of the tunnel. It's the dirt. It's the excess dirt. Right. So then you can – if you know how big that is, you know how much space you have underground. And it's not very precise. But we were consistently getting like twice as big as Fordow.

Aaron 14:40

Well, Ferdow was supposed to be the sneak-out facility.

Jeffrey 14:42

Right. So, like, I mean, there are other tunnels, and plus this place is really big, and, you know, maybe it's just for centrifuge production, but maybe it's for centrifuge production and some other stuff. And then at Parchin... Good old Parchin. ...where the Iranians had literally built a tunnel to do uranium metal, and then the casting of the pits...

They finished that tunnel. It's there. It's fully complete. Now, they said there was nothing in it, and maybe there was nothing in it, but like there could be something in it now. I mean, James Acton did a really lovely analysis. He went back to his roots. Yeah. Well, he looked at how quickly in the Manhattan Project the U.S. was able to scale up production of uranium metal, and it was like at like Iowa State.

Aaron 15:39

Using 1920s technologies and techniques developed in the labs at Iowa State.

Jeffrey 15:46

Yeah. I mean, it was a much nicer example than the one I use, which is people forget that from 1995 to 2000, Iran had a different uranium metal production line at a place called the JHL Multipurpose Laboratory. So, you know, I would just be like, look. They've had other facilities in the past. I presume they could just set one up.

And but James, I think, really, really did the yeoman's work of going and showing how easy it would be, which is important because what the administration has said is, OK, OK, well, we still have the material, but they don't have any enrichment. They have a bottleneck. And they don't have any ability to make metal. And it's like, OK, well, that's Wrong.

They have the ability to make more centrifuges. They probably have some centrifuges in reserve and they have plenty of underground locations where they could be enriching the material further. They also have the ability to convert it to metal or at least very quickly reconstitute that. By the way, also, which I never mentioned, but I should, I don't think the Iranians would do this, but you know, you can make a crude gun type device with 60%.

Aaron 16:53

Yeah, I mean, look.

Jeffrey 16:55

I don't think they'll do it, but... You could. You could.

Aaron 17:00

You could. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what else to say. I mean... I mean, I know what to say.

Jeffrey 17:10

I mean, I'm going to say the same thing I said at the beginning. And then I know, like, Barack Ravid, who I think is a very valuable reporter and I have a lot of respect for, got real mad at me and called me a conspiracy theorist. But I think the Israelis knew they couldn't wipe out the nuclear program.

They're not stupid. They knew they needed the U.S. to hit the harder sites and And I think that at the end of the day, this is not really about the nuclear program for them. They want the regime gone and they were hoping the regime would fall. And they were hoping to entangle the US and it didn't work.

Aaron 17:48

I think so too. I think that's exactly right. I mean, I don't have, yes.

Jeffrey 17:53

They called it freaking rising lion. The Israeli national animal is a gazelle. It wasn't Prancing Counter-Proliferator. It was Rising Lion.

Aaron 18:08

I completely agree with you. I do think that the challenges that they face were that the Iranians have been preparing, have been listening to Bibi Netanyahu. Have been observing what we do around the world and said, they're one day potentially going to bomb us, right? And we want to protect this vital thing. And so we're going to put it deep enough In most cases, to where they can't hit us.

And Fordow was built, when did Fordow get revealed, 2009? 9, 10, yeah. It was, yeah, I thought it was 08, 09, but okay.

Jeffrey 18:44

I mean, I think maybe the revelation happened in late nine and then maybe that Paul played out in 2010, but it was- Could be. It was Obama. It was Obama.

Aaron 18:55

That's 15 years ago when it was revealed. So when was it developed, started to be built?

Jeffrey 19:02

I mean- 20 years ago? Yeah, the Iranians had a- So the Iranians lied about that because it was a violation of modified code 3.1. Fordow was the sneak out facility. It was where they were going to do this. Totally the sneak out facility. So one thing that people forgot is, do you remember when Fordow was revealed, the Iranians said, well, if you don't like that, you're going to hate learning that we're going to build 10 of these things.

I do remember. And people laughed at them. But Salehi, the head of the AEOI at the time, Came out and said that in the next year they were gonna start construction on two more. And maybe this is a little bit inferential, but given that they were consistently lying about construction start dates because of modified code 3.1, I think next year we're going to start two more might usefully be translated as last year we started two more.

Could be. So I think there are other underground facilities that were built in that period. Oh, I did. And they are available to the Iranians. Now, you know, I mean, one useful thing was to. Have an agreement from the Iranians that they couldn't enrich anywhere else and to have the IAEA have the ability to go look at places that one suspected, but... Well, that's...

Okay. I mean, I think you've been saying it online. Knowing where all of the machines that make the centrifuge components was, that was useful, tagging all the centrifuge components.

Aaron 20:38

This was the most obnoxious part about the JCPOA debate because the regime chambers advocates, and that's what they are, Would fixate on breakout. They fixated on an easy number to understand. It's really easy to understand that the Iranians can build a nuclear weapon in theory, right, in three weeks, in three months, in three years. Whereas if you're actually a knee subject matter expert, you're like talking about like, well, we can now see where the bellows are made.

And so we know where this is. And like the hexafluoride gas is counted like this, not like that. And we get into these circular arguments or sort of things about like why the JCPOA was great. And then the other side would be like, at the end of 10 years, they can build a bomb in less than a year.

Now, at the end of bombing, they can build the bomb in less than a year. And we have no idea what they're doing.

Jeffrey 21:35

I mean, the fact that they complained about sunsets. Yeah. Right. The very same people who were like, oh, my God, this only keeping in mind that which, you know, much of the agreement never sunsetted.

Aaron 21:49

No, the importance of never sunsetted. But yes, there were certain limitations on that number, on the breakout number.

Jeffrey 21:55

On breakout, sunsetted. And they were like, ah, it's too short. And now it's like, oh, we set it back for one to two years. So that's great. Yeah. Right.

Aaron 22:07

It really is baddening because we don't know if Iran will build a bomb, right? We really don't.

Jeffrey 22:13

This is a political decision. They've been months away for almost 20 years. So it's a political call, not a technical one. The barriers are political, not technical. That's right. This is a political question that they're facing.

Aaron 22:24

The Supreme Leader's old. He could die tomorrow. And that would be statistically on the mark, right? With no external intervention whatsoever. He has more days behind him than he does in front of him. He's been pretty cautious since the revelation of the program in 2003. Is he still going to be cautious? I don't know either. There's people that claim it gets in the mind of that man.

You know, they also got, you know, some sort of thing to sell you, you know, in some bazaar somewhere.

Jeffrey 23:00

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, one thing that I've often wondered about is, you know, that Israelis will say when you really push them like, well, you know, we've we've penetrated the Iranian regime so effectively, which I mean, it looks like they did.

Aaron 23:15

The opening days of that campaign were pretty amazing. I mean, tactically, the campaign was executed really well.

Jeffrey 23:23

Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah.

Aaron 23:25

We got a whole other. The internal drones, the airstrikes, the left of launch with the scud hunts. Although, you know, I mean, this is a whole other podcast.

Jeffrey 23:34

We got to do another podcast. Yeah, yeah. But like, I mean, that's probably the most extraordinary counter-missile campaign I've ever seen. And they still got hit with... Couple hundred missiles they did and and they ran out or ran very low on interceptors so I mean I guess I guess if you get to the end of this and you want to do Iranian nuclear force sizing that's a good point you can do it now and it's you know it's not that big it's yeah That's a good point.

But yeah, they think that the program is penetrated. But on the other hand, like you've cashed those chits in, right? So I assume maybe they're total idiots, but I assume the Iranians will be able to work backwards a little bit and figure out like what the security flaws were. You know, like the Egyptians did real better the second time in war with Israel, right?

Because they learned their lessons.

Aaron 24:40

Will the Iranians learn? I don't know. I mean, we'll see. The Iranians are really weak. I mean, I think we need to say that because we're sort of like giving them all the credit in the world. They did basically launch everything they got. I will say the one-way attack suicide drone, different pod, that one just doesn't get me up in the morning.

That one seems like we have really effective sort of – takes a lot of work.

Jeffrey 25:06

You know who seems to have their stuff together? The Houthis.

Aaron 25:09

The Houthis do, too. The Houthis do. Or – I mean, I don't want to make this pod about Saudi Arabia Air Force versus Israeli Air Force. Well, we're about to find out, right?

Jeffrey 25:20

Because the Israelis have started... I think, isn't there some indication that the Israelis are looking at, like, taking swipes at the Houthis? Like, okay, good luck, guys. Israelis are off their rocker.

Aaron 25:34

I mean, I don't know what else to say. What they have been doing since 10-7, which, look, 10-7 was horrific. It really sucked. There's a long-lost podcast in there that we thought would just get us canceled or actually nailed the current situation that we're in. But I don't want to give too much away because we were using a certain amount of language.

Yeah. Grief is real. Grief, anger, it's real. Grief, anger, and fear are very real. I mean, as those of us from the 9-11 generation can attest. Oh, yeah. We went crazy. We invaded two countries officially. Officially. I get it. But what's going on is just a wild, wild thing. Well, I think also. Now we could force. We'll go ahead.

Oh, I said that would be a good project. You know, Iranian four sides. Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey 26:23

I mean, I'm yeah, you know, I think thousands about the right number.

Aaron 26:28

Write that one down.

Jeffrey 26:29

Yeah. I think partly also Netanyahu's political situation is. It all goes together. You know, I'm and this is not I'm not saying this about just Netanyahu. Like, I believe domestic politics always come first.

Aaron 26:43

Well, that's how you get an intelligence estimate that's sort of like curtailed to what the leader wants. The CIA is not lying.

Jeffrey 26:50

No, they're not lying. They figured out how to say what the president wanted while still telling the truth. Good for them.

Aaron 26:54

The president wanted something that said the program was set one back to two years, one to two years. And they said, OK, it'll take one to two years to rebuild facilities. That's not the question. This goes back to the original DIA battle damage assessment that was about a specific thing. And then they extrapolated how far it would set the program back.

And we descended into, I still think we're still doing it. He had the B-2 fly over the White House for the big, beautiful bill signing. I mean, that was a great image. By the way, are we out of mops? You know, I've seen conflicting reports on that.

Jeffrey 27:25

I thought the original buy was $20,000.

Aaron 27:30

I've read other places that they're – they tucked away that there were increased buys throughout. But I don't know. I mean I know there's a way to go look.

Jeffrey 27:38

By the way, the one thing I don't like about all of this and like A, people like leaking the DIA estimate. Please don't leak SIGINT.

Aaron 27:50

I mean they did that. I mean you know why they did that. I know. We all know why they leaked it. Don't tell the Iranians you're on their phones. Yeah. Well, that was a follow-up in the Washington Post, wasn't it?

Jeffrey 28:00

Yeah. Don't tell the Iranians you're on their phones. And then – but the other thing is – the one thing I don't like about this is given that we now realize that Fordow is the edge case and that Isfahan is too deep. Like everybody in North Korea, China, Russia now have a very good idea of what the limit on the mop is and they're going to have to do a follow-on if that's – Of course.

Aaron 28:24

But you know who does like it?

Jeffrey 28:27

Ditra.

Aaron 28:29

There's more money for Ditra. Come on. I mean, I like Ditra. Keep giving those guys money, guys and gals. Follow on to mop, fat mop. Fat mop. I like that. You can even think the fractional.

Jeffrey 28:45

Okay. All right. Did you just fobs a mop? All right. You are off the rails. You are off the rails. No, no, this would not work.

Aaron 28:54

Rod from God, right? If you actually drop it from lower orbit.

Jeffrey 28:57

This would be so heavy. No, you have to get energy to get out of orbit. Well, I guess if you don't go into orbit. No, no. No.

Aaron 29:06

Okay, this is going to be gone for us. People want an estimate. The people want us to tell them when the run can build a nuclear bomb.

Jeffrey 29:14

I think if it's purely a technical question. Not not a political question, purely a technical question. And, you know, the people who like the strike will be like, but we would know and we'd attack them again. Like, OK, sure, guys, maybe. I'm not sure you would, but whatever. I assume they need to get the material out if it's not already out.

So let's call that a day or two of digging. Max? I mean, assuming it's there. Right.

Aaron 29:41

Let's say consolidate the material in one place.

Jeffrey 29:43

You know, I mean, that's days. Do you have the centrifuges or not? If you don't and you have to install them yourselves, they can install a cascade and a half a week. And, you know, so you probably want a four-dough replacement. So that'd be a couple months. And then simultaneously, I guess you'd be setting up your covert conversion and casting facility, which you probably could do it inside that same time period.

So a couple of months to set it up. You'd have your first bomb in a day or two, but it'd probably take weeks, maybe a month or so to run that material through. I mean, I assume you're going to want to make 10, right? You're not just going to want to make one. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, six months, maybe a year at the outside.

If they're in a hurry, it's like six months. And maybe they run into some problems. Maybe you discover it and bomb them. You know, maybe they go slow because they want to be careful. But like... They can make centrifuges. They have some centrifuges in storage, I think. They have the material. They have lots of underground facilities. And, you know, like, they killed, what, 12 scientists?

That program probably numbers in the thousands? Thousands. Like, have you ever seen, you know, like... Think about, like, when the North Koreans... Like have like events, you know, for like their nuclear program. Like that's, it's not a, they didn't kill like 12 of the 50 people involved. And by the way, they killed senior people, which I mean, I know you and I, now that you're the president of FPRI, you may disagree with this.

Senior people are very important. But I think if you wipe out the senior leadership, productivity goes up.

Aaron 31:35

Not everywhere, amigo. Not everywhere. No, I mean, you could easily see why that estimate of like months. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. You just start adding it in your head. I'd say six months for them to sort of get geared up. If they want to do it. And then six months for them to sort of refine practice.

And so I'd say 12 to 18 months. But who knows?

Jeffrey 31:56

Yeah. I mean, it depends. Are they in a hurry? Or maybe they just don't want to do it yet. We don't know. Right. I mean, I think they're more likely to do it now than they were before, and it would be harder for us to see. So, like, that's all bad.

Aaron 32:12

And we should talk that they're going to attend nuclear talks with Witkoff.

Jeffrey 32:17

I mean, sure, why not?

Aaron 32:20

Let's do it.

Jeffrey 32:21

I mean, if I'm the Iranians, I mean, like, oh, look, it's obliterated. You're right. Totally obliterated. All gone. Nothing to see here. You know, they're like, let the IAEA in. And I probably would let Grossi, like, walk around the ruins. Sure. You know, I'm not going to, like, let him go anyplace new.

Aaron 32:44

Oh, this was really dumb. It was fun. As we said at the first podcast, it was really cool to watch it analytically. And we're not rooting for the Iranians here. They certainly had a nuclear weapons program, and it was a bad thing. I don't really trust those guys with the nuclear weapon. I don't really trust anybody with a nuclear weapon.

No, but especially not those guys. Not those guys. Those guys just – those guys and I do not vibe. Nope. On multiple different planes. Nope. So I simply wanted – once we sort of went, it's like you might as well do it. Do it right. I mean, well, yeah, and you hope the regime goes, but – And you hope the regime goes and none of that happened.

Jeffrey 33:27

I mean, yeah. Like I do. I always have a real – I find those kinds of things emotionally difficult because on the one hand, I want the good outcome. On the other hand, I don't believe in miracles. And I, and I, I find people who engage in like magical thinking very irritating. So like, I want the world, I want, I want the world to work the way that I expect.

But unfortunately what that often means is that means I'm expecting a bad outcome, which I don't want.

Aaron 34:01

They were accused of being cynics, hippie cynics.

Jeffrey 34:04

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Somehow we must like Iran because we think that they can still build a nuclear weapon. Maybe I have just North Korea on my brain. But like we did this. We did this once. We didn't bomb them. We didn't bomb them. That's true. But we did. We did. We walked away from agreement.

And the North Koreans were smarter than the Iranians.

Aaron 34:21

They were. Well, well. They did send the letter covered in uranium particles to the United States. I mean, you can never forget that.

Jeffrey 34:36

We didn't trust the Bush administration to tell us the truth. Drenched in highly enriched uranium.

Aaron 34:41

After the Iraq fiasco, now we're off the rails, we're going to end this. But after the Iraq fiasco, we were all like, they're saying the North Koreans have an enrichment program. It's like, I'm not sure. They need to convince me. And they're like, guys, the letter has drenched in uranium particles.

Jeffrey 34:55

Well, you got me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I will. Yeah.

Aaron 35:01

Oh, the North Koreans. So I think there's different levels of incompetence that permeate all systems.

Jeffrey 35:07

Yeah, fair enough. All systems. Okay.

Aaron 35:13

We are off the rails. We are off the rails. Ditra, if you do want to use a fractional orbitable bombardment moppy, You know the address if you want to fund the study. That's armcontrolwonk.patreon.com slash acwpodcast. Patreon.com slash acwpodcast, where you, Ditra, can join our Slack channel and express your interest in any future-funded study for Jeffrey and I to take on rods from gods with big bombs.

That didn't rhyme, but I'm trying. Patreon.com slash acwpodcast. $3 if you're a student, $5 if you're not. Join the coolest party in the world. And with that, Jeffrey... It's nice to see you again. It's great to see you, Aaron. Welcome home.