Transcript
Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Jeffrey Lewis
0:03
You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk weblog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California.
Aaron Stein
0:18
And I'm Aaron Stein. I'm an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, a doctoral fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy, and a non-resident fellow at the Ripley Career Center with the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C.
Jeffrey
0:37
Hey, Aaron, you're back.
Aaron
0:38
I'm back. I've been gone for four weeks.
Jeffrey
0:41
Yeah, something like that. We missed you.
Aaron
0:43
It's been a while. I have to brush off my arms control wonk podcast bona fides here. But you're done. I am done. So the announcement is as I finished my PhD, I passed my Viva. So I'm now actually Dr. Aaron Stein. I could have said that at the beginning. Yeah, you should have said that. I know. I still feel it's kind of weird to use it because my dad's a doctor and he actually treats sick people, whereas I'm a doctor and I write things down for a living.
Jeffrey
1:06
No, no, no, no. We create sick people.
Jeffrey
1:12
It's symbiotic.
Jeffrey
1:14
How does it feel, Dr. Stein?
Aaron
1:16
It feels really good to be over. I mean, life just all of a sudden seems easier, and I don't have this dissertation hanging over my head every single day so I can focus on nonproliferation, regional security issues, all the fun stuff I actually really enjoy writing, other than theoretical-based political science E PhD dissertation. What's the dissertation called?
Kilowatts or kilotons, Turkey and Iran's nuclear choices.
Jeffrey
1:40
Kilowatts or kilotons. Kilowatts or kilotons.
Aaron
1:45
Turkey and Iran's nuclear choices. So why did Iran choose to proliferate, whereas Turkey did not, even though they faced similar constraints, similar security dynamics, and a similar relationship with the United States, at least before 1979? Yeah.
Jeffrey
2:02
I just like kilowatts, you know, because the American program was megawatts, megatons to megawatts.
Aaron
2:08
It was the inspiration for the title. And I thought it was clever. You know, it looks good on the front of the embossed blue British style PhD binding.
Jeffrey
2:18
Oh, is that how you have a bound copy?
Aaron
2:21
I do. I will. I will. So this blue canvas thing with gold letters, it looks very nice. It'll look great on my bookshelf and collecting dust in the King's College Library where it will never be read again.
Jeffrey
2:32
You got to take a picture and tweet it out.
Aaron
2:35
That's important to me.
Jeffrey
2:37
So you want to talk about regional security, the stability-instability paradox, Dr. Stein?
Aaron
2:43
Absolutely. The things I really care about. To bring me back into the podcast here about the backdrop of the Iran deal, what's going on in the Middle East, all the fun stuff I actually pay attention to every single day.
Jeffrey
2:54
Yeah. So listeners, today we're going to talk about the regional security situation in the Middle East because – We're on the verge of having an Iran deal. I think I hear the date is July 7th they're aiming for. They have to get it to Congress by I think July 9th to get within the window that will allow for a 30-day review instead of a 60-day review.
So that's the deadline. But – While we'll do a podcast about the Iran deal when we have an Iran deal, we wanted to talk a little bit about the regional security situation since that's the backdrop against which the deal is kind of understood and evaluated. And, you know, not coincidentally something Aaron knows a lot about.
Aaron
3:36
Right. So it's a good way of bringing back to the podcast that actually I can talk a lot. Yeah.
Jeffrey
3:41
It's been a while. I'm tired of talking.
Aaron
3:43
It's been a while for me. So I'm good to go. You want to talk about Yemen first? Yeah. Well, no. I mean I think the overarching backdrop to this is this – I think it's unstated, the strategic stability – this stability-instability paradox where the concern is, is that with the ushering of the Iran deal – Is that this will create an instability in the region that will lead to proliferation.
Whereas I'm a little more sanguine about this, where I actually think at the strategic level, so Iran to the GCC or the Gulf states or Iran-Saudi, stability is there because of parity between even balancing towards the Gulf states, if you would ask me, in terms of military capabilities, but at the sub-strategic level. You have incredible concerns on the Gulf Arab sides, particularly the Sunni states, about Iran's capabilities or at least growing capabilities in the region.
And you're seeing repercussions of that, I think, in Syria, in Iraq and in Yemen. So just to wrap up on the strategic level. We have stability, but on the sub-strategic level, there are clearly problems that need to be worked out as we move going forward.
Jeffrey
4:55
Aaron, when you think about sub-strategic, are you thinking about conventional proxy conflict? Are you thinking about terrorism? What levels of conflict do you think are not stable?
Aaron
5:14
I think it actually goes down to the political calculations, and let's just use the Saudis for the example, but the other Gulf states are similar. Not all of them, but say the UAE and Saudi are pretty similar to this. It's that... Iran is on the offensive because of the conflict in the region, particularly with ISIS and the Islamic State and other things in Iraq.
And so you have the need on the Saudi side to show resolve to the Iranians, not because they fear an Iranian nuclear weapons program, but rather that the windfall that the Iranians will get from the nuclear deal In sanctions relief will allow them to empower proxies, you know, Hezbollah or the Houthis in Yemen or Shia militias in Iraq that are detrimental to Saudi interests or your Emirati interests or other interests.
And so that's where I think the actual instability comes from. So at the strategic level, you're actually relatively stable, but underneath the countries are fighting proxies actually in third countries that destabilize the region. And To be honest, I don't see a way out of this in the near future. I see continued instability regardless of the Iran nuclear deal or not.
Jeffrey
6:23
Yeah, well, it doesn't seem like the Iranians are going to let any of their proxies fall without a fight, right? So there's going to be a fight.
Aaron
6:33
No, true. And I mean in the past, I mean the way that the Saudis particularly have dealt with this is by exporting or at least funding their brand of political Islam or not even political Islam, of Islam in certain third countries, which has in a way contributed to the – To the growing of radicalism throughout the region.
And this radicalism is what Iran claims to be fighting in Syria and Iraq. And so you have this vicious cycle going on where two sides are weakening each other by empowering third parties or proxies that are actually ultimately leading to them having more tensions and building up defensive capabilities in the case of the GCC or offensive capabilities in the case of Iran with ballistic missiles.
That raise the possibility of conflict below the nuclear threshold.
Jeffrey
7:23
So what do you make of this argument that the administration makes, which I – well, they actually don't make it quite as much as I think they should because it's one I tend to agree with. The scenario that I'm most worried about is not so much that the Iranian economy recovers because I'm not convinced that they're really budget constrained.
But I worry that the – Presence of an Iranian nuclear weapon would actually enable them to engage in even more proxy violence and sort of more outrageous proxy violence and maybe even begin to target some of those Gulf states. So one of the things I find interesting about this discussion is there's this kind of short-term or – Or immediate focus on the recovery of the Iranian economy and what that might do for regional security in terms of the violence the Iranians could engage in.
But I'm much more worried about an Iranian nuclear weapon. And so it would seem to me that a deal that heads that off – Avoids an even greater problem for regional stability. But I guess those are different perspectives on the problem. How do you kind of referee those?
Aaron
8:28
I agree. I mean the argument that I always hear is that by agreeing to the parameters of the deal that are released out there is that you incentivize the Saudis or the Emiratis or anybody else to sort of flirt around the edges of a nuclear weapon. And therefore, you're incentivizing proliferation. And if you're not incentivizing proliferation, you're incentivizing...
But the counter argument to that is without this deal, there are no restraints on the Iranian nuclear program. And so... What is it that you're actually incentivizing the Saudis to do, particularly if they're worried about proliferation? So if there are no restraints, you have an ever-growing number of centrifuges, so the Saudis may have to respond to the nuclear level.
Whereas if you constrain it, you can maybe force it to the proxy level, which is not that dissimilar from at least the dynamics that underpin the Cold War.
Jeffrey
9:17
Yeah, you know, I sometimes hear that argument, and I know that there is – I mean I understand it's a very natural thing to say that, well, if the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, then its neighbors need to counter that with their own nuclear weapon. But the way that I conceive of the problem of proliferation, it's that having a nuclear weapon allows you to engage in all kinds of proxy violence, right?
And so the famous case is the way that the Pakistanis have behaved in terms of – Whether it's conventional operations, you know, shelling the Indians in Kashmir or continued support for groups like the one that carried out the Mumbai terrorist attacks. And the interesting thing about that is if a country gets nuclear weapons and then decides that it's going to kind of spend that security benefit on being more aggressive, you getting your own nuclear weapons may enable you to engage in the same kind of proxy violence, but it doesn't offset their nuclear weapons, right?
It doesn't deter... The proxy violence precisely because, you know, the state feels relatively secure that you're not going to have a nuclear war over a terrorist attack.
Aaron
10:30
I would argue that's already ongoing. But I would say that the problem is, and it's not even really a problem, is that the conflicts that are taking place in the Middle East, so Syria, Iraq, Yemen being a caveat, which I think we'll talk about in a second. But the Iranians are all in on Iraq and Syria, where the Saudis or the Emiratis are actually divided on strategy in Syria, for example.
But let's take the Saudis because they're the ones most talked about. In a way that the Saudis are not. The Saudis are working through proxies, or the Iranians are working through proxies, but with embedded Iranian advisors with them, directing battlefield operations in a way that the Saudis are not prepared to do. And so the way the Saudis are counteracting this, and this, again, I almost feel like this is completely irrelevant to the nuclear deal.
And I'm convinced it's actually irrelevant to the nuclear deal, although the nuclear deal feeds this. Is the idea that the Saudis have to make a stand against the Iranian advances, perceived or real, however you perceive it. And so they've really ratcheted up in Yemen, not really because they have a viable political solution to ending Yemen. They do not.
And that their actual policies before did not enable where we are today. And even they're flip-flopping. But nevertheless, they're using a proxy to show Iran that they won't be pushed around in the region any longer. And in doing so, they've helped enable the new collapse of the Yemeni state. I mean, just today, I think it was deemed a tier three humanitarian disaster by UNHCR, up there with Syria, Sudan, I believe, and a few others.
Jeffrey
12:21
Man, did you see that explosion in Sana'a? I did.
Aaron
12:24
I did. And I know you did a lot of work on that. So I defer to you here. Oh, it was big. Right. So part of the air campaign, this massive explosion that just popped up right outside Sana'a.
Jeffrey
12:35
You know, we were able to geolocate almost the exact impact point because the Saudis released the gun camera footage.
Aaron
12:43
Yeah. And you were able to do that. I did not have the time because I was finishing up my PhD at the time. But you were able to put it together.
Jeffrey
12:52
Education. Get in the way of your education.
Aaron
12:54
I know. So you did all the open source work to which I'm just free-riding on right now.
Jeffrey
12:58
Well, I mean it was really crazy because they used penetrating munition. It went into the side of the mountains. Really? I didn't know. Yeah, and the size of the explosion is enormous. I mean, it's at least a few hundred tons, maybe a kiloton. Really? Well, what we did was we did a couple of things. I tried, along with my colleague Melissa Hanham, and we should be publishing this as a blog post pretty soon.
I've just been so busy. We timed the blast wave. Like how quickly the wave will arrive to the people filming it because the site had been bombed before and there was a bombing campaign that had begun. And so as soon as the Saudis started bombing this site, people took out their cell phones. But this one was really big and so there are a bunch of cell phone footage or there is a bunch of cell phone footage from various locations.
And you can see the explosion and then the person is holding the cell phone and they don't think to get out of the way and then they get hit by the blast.
Aaron
14:04
Right. They get hit by the blast wave and they – I think they fall over.
Jeffrey
14:06
Yeah. Well, the phone moves really wildly, right? Right. And so we geolocated the three – We geolocated three videos and measured the distance and measured the time down to about a tenth of a second. And there's a lot of uncertainty, right? So I don't want to overestimate how certain this is. But we got something like somewhere between a few hundred tons and a kiloton.
And another colleague who looked at the size of the fireball and kind of got a similar number sort of at the lower end of that. So that's big. Big, right? That's really big. And I think they must have hit a munitions store.
Aaron
14:49
Yeah, I mean, so... I mean, it just raises the question of what was in there and how many munitions were actually in there. And what I'm curious about, just from my own knowledge, is how you were able to calculate the time. So you got the length. Yeah, just frame by frame in the video.
Jeffrey
15:08
Just count the frames.
Aaron
15:10
So you were able to backtrack and then do some sort of blast simulation. That's really interesting. But you know what? It's not like the only thing. I mean I guess the Saudis in the opening airwave were completely concerned about what you would expect them to be concerned about, which was Scud missiles.
Jeffrey
15:28
Yeah. Well, so but just to finish up on that explosion, I should say that there's a whole – I don't know if you saw this. There's a whole conspiracy theory that it was a nuclear weapon.
Aaron
15:37
Oh, right. So I was going to go there, but I thought it was implied. But yes, the conspiracy on my Twitter timeline immediately popped up that the Saudis had used a tactical nuclear weapon.
Jeffrey
15:45
So the good thing about doing a yield estimate is you can tell that's not true because it's a few hundred tons to a kiloton, which would be a small nuclear weapon, right? A very small nuclear, much smaller than what was dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And the U.S. does have nuclear weapons that are that small, but it would be very small.
But it's large enough that if it had been nuclear, the CTBTO would have detected the fission products. Because you can actually look up what the sensitivity of the international monitoring system is in that area, and it should be able to see something that big. So it's not a nuclear explosion. I don't know, Aaron, have you noticed this?
Every time there's a big explosion, people are like, oh my gosh, it's nuclear.
Aaron
16:32
Anytime an explosion somewhat resembles a mushroom cloud – in Syria, for example, my Twitter timeline goes crazy that somehow the Israelis have nuked somebody.
Jeffrey
16:41
Yeah, and in fact, there's no radionuclides and it's not even that big. I don't think people realize how big nuclear explosions are and – Yeah, it's dismissive. And I should say, you know, we have other munitions depot explosions. You know, there was the one in Cyprus and there's the famous Port Chicago during World War Two. And there's the Halifax explosion, I guess, in World War One.
And those are all kind of in the hundreds of ton to kilotons range. So it's not not unusual for when a munitions depot goes to go that big. But yeah, scuds.
Aaron
17:20
Scuds, yeah. So the other thing that we love to dig into are – the Saudis went scud hunting.
Jeffrey
17:25
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they got most of them but not all of them. You know, that makes sense. It's hard to find these since they're mobile, right? Well, actually – so the base that they hit in Sanaa, right, which – by the way, I was remiss in not noting – like the reason we're really interested in that is because it was such a humanitarian catastrophe because it was so much larger.
It was a missile base and they thought they were killing scuds. And instead they hit a munitions depot and it created an enormous amount of damage in Sana'a itself, which was kind of a public relations nightmare for the Saudis.
Aaron
18:01
Yeah. If you haven't seen the video, again, it's not the size of a nuclear explosion, but it's a big effing explosion.
Jeffrey
18:12
Not the size of a typical nuclear explosion.
Aaron
18:15
You could make one that small. Yeah, the one we typically associate with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yeah, much order magnitude or two smaller than that.
Jeffrey
18:23
Right. Yeah, so they didn't get them all, right? And the Yemenis are now firing scuds into Saudi Arabia. Yeah.
Aaron
18:34
Yeah, which is a big deal and I would have to say is embarrassing for the Saudis because they went on national television. I would presume local television and they said that they had eliminated the Scud threat and they haven't, which is nothing against the Saudi Air Force, by the way. It's hard to find Scud.
Jeffrey
18:49
Well, and that's why deterrence works, right? You run this air campaign trying to kill all of their scuds and at the end of the day, a few of them get through.
Aaron
18:56
Although they shot – did they shoot one or two down? The Saudis said they shot some of them down with – So there's one – there's multiple reports that one was shot down by Patriot, meaning that A, that our missile defense system maybe works and at least tactical battlefield missile defense system may work and that they join a club.
Yeah. Of a very select few nations that have actually used Patriot in combat and shot down scuds.
Jeffrey
19:21
Yeah. Although I have to say, and I, I don't, I'm not, I'm not picking on Patriot, but it is so hard to know whether a missile defense system kills a a target, right? Because all, all you know is that the target didn't land on people.
Aaron
19:37
Right. That's why I say report.
Jeffrey
19:39
I mean, I mean, you can, you can, you can detect it and you can fire and you can, you know, think that, The Patriot itself can explode, and so you have a sense that it must have engaged the target, and the target may not hit anything. And so you can infer from that that it worked, but you can never exactly be sure.
It's always one of these debates. Right.
Aaron
20:00
And I think in the past couple of days, one did sneak through and hit an air base in the Wadi al-Dawazir.
Jeffrey
20:05
Yeah, I can't tell what kind of base, but Wadi al-Dawazir, and I'm in arms control wonk fashion massacring yet another foreign place name, is one of their strategic missile bases. Ah, I see. I didn't know that. Oh, so this is why – so the question is why – like first of all, that's a waste of a missile because the strategic missile base is – all those bases are very dispersed.
For obvious reasons. And the missiles themselves are quite inaccurate. And so you're really unlikely to do any damage. I mean, I guess unless you fired it at the residential area. And even then, I think you wouldn't be confident of hitting it. But it raises this question of like, well, why would you waste a scud, right, on a base?
And I don't like the answer that has been suggested. Well, what is it? Because something immediately popped into my mind. The two answers are, well, one, it's in range. Okay, yeah. And there's actually kind of a shortage of targets, right, that are within range of Scud missiles fired from Yemen. But the other one is, you know, some genius published the lat-long.
Aaron
21:15
Oh, really? I published the latitude and lunge.
Jeffrey
21:17
Oh, you did?
Aaron
21:17
So you're responsible for the Yemeni strike on Saudi Arabia?
Jeffrey
21:20
I deny it. But yeah, people are like, you know, Lewis, maybe the reason... So they went online and they typed Saudi missile base and some genius published the latitude and longitude of all of the launch areas. They call them the tactical areas and the – And the residential areas.
Aaron
21:38
It has to be a big airbase for the Scud even to get close.
Jeffrey
21:41
Oh, it's enormous. I mean, that's the thing is I didn't – and I don't – I mean, I'm kind of joking. I don't worry about them using the latitude and longitude to target it because it's enormous, you know, kilometers, not tens of kilometers. It's really big.
Aaron
21:57
And the stuff's underground and –
Jeffrey
22:01
You know, hardened. And I mean, to, to fire one scud at that base, they're way more likely to kill somebody in a nearby town by going off target than they are to kill anybody, what they're aiming at. So.
Aaron
22:14
Sure. What popped into my mind is that the base was there and they sort of knew about it and they aimed at the general direction and, and, and fired. But yeah, And the fact that they did only fire one Scud, and there have only been a very few Scud attacks, means that the Saudi Air Force probably did do a pretty good job of locating the Scuds and taking them out.
Jeffrey
22:36
But still, Scud hunts are hard, right? I mean, Scud hunts are hard.
Aaron
22:41
Yeah, no, I did research into this like sort of at the opening of the Syrian conflict to whether the Turkish government could actually go and get them because they were very concerned in Turkey about this. So I was reading all the old US Air Force logs about how hard it was for us to go and find these things.
So yeah, it's hard.
Jeffrey
22:57
I mean I keep pointing this out, right? This is why mobile missiles reinforce deterrence at least at the moment, right?
Aaron
23:06
Yeah, because you can't find them, especially if they're nuclear-tipped. If you can't find them, then that raises very serious questions about whether or not you should escalate. Well, anyways, I mean – but it's not the only proliferation concern that's going on in the region or at least that people are talking about in the region.
Jeffrey
23:24
Yeah, you want to talk about the mess that is Syria-Iraq or as I like to call it, Siroc.
Aaron
23:28
Yeah, Siroc. That's – yeah. Yeah, so sort of – that's a very French-sounding name and me being in Geneva – Yeah, you know, we have the Syrian North Korean reactor in the deserts of Deir ez-Zor and the phantom fuel supply. Right.
Jeffrey
23:50
David Albright and the rest of the folks at NotTheTerroristISIS.com.
Jeffrey
23:58
Right, just released a report on the terrorist ISIS overrunning nuclear sites in Syria. It's really funny because in the report they call them ISIL or Daesh. Yeah.
Aaron
24:09
Right, because you can imagine the headline, ISIS! ISIS overruns! Well, ISIL, to be fair to them, is what the U.S. uses.
Jeffrey
24:18
Oh, yeah, I know, but it's also just funny because there was a story a couple of months ago, maybe it's a year ago now, on how, like, Groups that had the name ISIS innocently, like the Institute for Science and International Security, were having this branding problem because they're these horrible beheading guys. Right. Yeah, the head loppers. Well, and you know this is allegedly why in Downton Abbey the dog Isis gets killed off with a maudlin death from cancer.
Aaron
24:48
Are you saying – I haven't watched Downton Abbey since the dude died in the car crash.
Jeffrey
24:54
Oh, yeah. Yeah, the dog was named Isis and they had to get rid of the dog. So the dog came down with a serious illness. Oh. Oh, really? Had to kill him off like everybody else in the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it can't be – normally it's because they're leaving for bigger and better things. But in this case, they just couldn't have a dog named Isis.
So I think – He was all the other – I think some people are overreacting to the report. But it's a reasonable question to ask. Yeah. Yeah. There had been – We got to start at the beginning. Right. So there was – There was a North Korean-constructed reactor at a place the U.S. intelligence community calls Al-Kibar, but everybody else calls Deir Ezzor?
Aaron
25:37
Deir Ezzor. It's a district. It's the district in Syria.
Jeffrey
25:41
And the Israelis bombed the reactor, and there had been no fuel that was installed. And so the natural question arose, well, what happened to the fuel? And that fuel, which by the way is natural uranium. So, you know, as a premise of this entire thing, even if, even if ISIS gets it, the only really way they're going to kill you with it is if they like strike you with fuel rod.
Aaron
26:01
Yeah. It's, it's naturally random in uranium metal in pellet form in a fuel.
Jeffrey
26:05
Yeah. It's, you know, I mean they could drop it on you or I, you know, how big is the fuel rod to just for the listeners? I, They're big. Oh yeah. We know exactly how big the fuel is. I just, I don't, I, I'm actually staring at the good ISIS book North Korea's nuclear program, which has the precise dimensions of the fuel in it.
But it's out of reach and I'm tethered to my computer with my like, no worries. No worries.
Aaron
26:32
It'd take a very strong man to swing that around.
Jeffrey
26:34
Yes. Yeah, that's right. You, yeah, I was being funny when I say you can hit somebody with it.
Jeffrey
26:42
So when the reactor got bombed, the IAEA wanted to know, was there a load of fuel? What happened to the load of fuel? And there was speculation that it was moved to this place called Marj al-Sultan.
Aaron
26:53
Yeah, which is in the south.
Jeffrey
26:55
Yeah. And interestingly, and I tweeted them at the time, but nobody seemed to care. In November 2012, the Free Syrian Army or some subset thereof overran, I'm just going to call it Marj. And a couple of months later, in either late 2012 or early 2013, they overran Al-Kibar and sort of videos came online in early 2013. And so it naturally raises this question like, did they overrun the fuel?
Aaron
27:28
Right. So those elements are subset thereof of the Free Syrian Army and all that entails have access to very large fuel rods. Right.
Jeffrey
27:37
Which is not – again, it should be natural uranium. So it's not really all that interesting. Right. But it's an – but it is interesting if you're an arms control walk. I should say there are two other pieces, right? Der Spiegel had this story about an alleged nuclear site near Al-Qusayr. Yeah. Which is like in Hezbollah land.
Aaron
27:59
It's in the western part of the country boarding Hezbollah stand. Yeah.
Jeffrey
28:02
Yeah. Hezbollah stand. Is that what we call it? Yeah. Shorthand. Yeah. I called it Hezbollah land, but I like Hezbollah stand. And Der Spiegel reported like, oh, it's maybe a secret reactor. It actually had been previously identified by Janes as a missile base. And honestly, it kind of looks like a missile base to me. Yeah. You can see it on Google Earth.
Yeah. I mean, but it might be where they moved the fuel. They may have moved the fuel there. And then there were also some pictures from opposition groups that went into Al-Kabar probably of the water reservoir because it was – he used water as a secondary cooling loop. So like – yeah, right. I'm just kidding. Right. Yeah.
So like the rebels are overrunning really interesting places and it seems like the Syrians are moving stuff around. Right. It's probably not best to be too alarmed by it, but it is interesting.
Aaron
29:03
Yeah, but then the new report is ISIS, the headloppers. Now control the area where al-Kabar is, leading ISIS-DC to write the report.
Jeffrey
29:15
I guess that – actually, the report has a lot of really great details. One of them is that we finally get an answer on what we think about – Right. Creating plutonium isn't going to help you unless you can reprocess it. Right. You got to separate the plutonium from the fuel. Yeah, that was the interesting part. Yeah.
And so Institute for Science International Security, ISIS, says that they had selected a site for a reprocessing facility and they'd fenced it off, but they hadn't hadn't started building it. But I guess what prompted this is that. There are a lot of rumors, which they say are like very unconfirmed or some structure like that, that indicates that ISIS is kind of poking around these sites, you know, eager to see if they get their hands on some radioactive material.
I guess in the same way that they paraded their own little scuds. Yeah, look, if ISIS really – They like to show this stuff off.
Aaron
30:05
Yeah, I think it would actually help our bombing campaign if they tried to do this themselves. They would just all die themselves.
Jeffrey
30:09
Hey, can we just pause and say that now that we had that pride parade in London, every time I see the ISIS flag, I just think of dildos.
Aaron
30:18
And podcast veteran Max Fisher wrote the best piece on this.
Jeffrey
30:21
It was spectacular. It was.
Aaron
30:23
So Max, if you're listening, that piece made me laugh just completely out loud. It was majestic. I used to live in San Francisco, by the way. You got to know the difference between Arabic writing and Dulles.
Jeffrey
30:39
I would think. Yeah, my wife was in San Francisco on that day to meet some friends. You reported that the celebrations in the Castro were everything that you would expect they would be.
Aaron
30:53
They are. They really are, as a veteran of a few. They are everything they would expect.
Jeffrey
30:58
Sorry, the Pride event immediately followed the same-sex marriage decision. Right. So it was a big party. She said it was a very large party.
Aaron
31:08
With ISIS infiltration in London, allegedly.
Jeffrey
31:11
Yeah. So the best part of that Max Fisher piece, which I'm going to use all the time on the podcast so we can just in case people wonder when I say it, is it's now going to enter into the lexicon of journalism, right? Because anytime you have a story that may turn out to be balderdash, right? The question you have to ask yourself is like, are we sure we're not just reporting on a bunch of dildos here?
You know, it's like you look at a report and you're like, ah, so, you know, you know, does ISIS have nuclear weapons? Like, no, it's just a bunch of dildos. And that's it just shows shorthand for like there's a sort of innocent explanation that's been overlooked. Right.
Aaron
31:53
So now I'm actually hoping that some journalist picks up on this and writes a story so I can tweet that. No, it's just dildos.
Jeffrey
31:59
Yeah, that's right. I can't wait. Yeah, just a bunch of dildos, guys.
Aaron
32:04
So a collective thank you to CNN first for just your colossal screw-up and then to Max Fisher.
Jeffrey
32:09
Well, somebody else – and I feel so bad I can't give them credit – tweeted it and Max Fisher said – because it was in this wonderful kind of question and answer format. It's like – Can this be integrated into the language of journalism? And it's like, yes, it can. And he repeats the tweet.
Jeffrey
32:28
Yeah. No, no. ISIS does not have access to nuclear weapons, but it is a, it is, it is a very good question to ask what the relationship between the Syrian government's effort to like, Move stuff where the IAEA can't find it is with the ebb and flow of the conflict.
Aaron
32:53
Yeah, look, for wonks in all seriousness, the fact that nobody has any idea where a reactor's load of natural uranium in metal form in their fuel rods is, is interesting. Yeah. It requires us to continue to look around. Yeah.
Jeffrey
33:09
Yeah, but all of this – Go ahead. No, I was going to say for now, proliferation is a state problem.
Aaron
33:18
Right. So I was going to say we don't just have concerns about ISIS and their dildo nuclear weapons, but rather regional proliferation that ISIS, the Iran deal portends a future domino effect or cascade of regional proliferation, both missile and nuclear.
Jeffrey
33:38
There's some interesting stuff going on. I should say, I think that the moment that it is actually unlikely that whether or not Iran builds nuclear weapons, I do believe it is unlikely that other states in the region will follow suit. But having said that, that's only an observation about the mix of incentives and disincentives. It should not be taken as a...
I don't know what you'd call it, a form of denial because, gosh, there's a lot of interesting proliferation activity going on.
Aaron
34:14
You want to keep going?
Jeffrey
34:16
Okay. Well, I mean, so the two, right, that I've been interested in are the UAE. Yeah. And their missile programs and Saudi Arabia and their nuclear program. And so I guess we talk about them. You know, for the UAE – You know, I think it was, it was previously reported, but maybe is not widely appreciated that in 1988 they purchased a consignment of Scud B ballistic missiles from North Korea.
Aaron
34:49
And they are there.
Jeffrey
34:50
Well, so this is one of the interesting things is that the, if you go back and look at press reports, they all sort of say, well, the UAE, they got the missiles and the missiles weren't very good and they didn't like them and they put them in storage.
Jeffrey
35:03
But we noticed that in one declassified U.S. intelligence document, there was a map, and it said that the Scud base was outside of Dubai. And furthermore— There's a larger base outside Dubai. Yeah, and that's the first place I looked. And sure enough, we found the Scud missile base, right? Yeah. And it's active. Yeah.
Aaron
35:33
Yeah, I've had intimated to me Chatham House rules that – Just one rule. That they exist. There's only one Chatham House rule. Yeah, they exist and indirectly referred to in a Chatham House setting.
Jeffrey
35:47
Well, and if you look at the WikiLeaks cables, it turns out that there was a second purchase in 1999 that the Clinton administration kept out of the press. And there are cables that show that the Bush administration sought unsuccessfully, unsuccessfully sought to convince the UAE to give those missiles up. And they didn't, and that there were continuing worries about connections through at least 2008 between North Korea and the UAE.
So that's interesting to me that that base is still operational.
Aaron
36:24
Yeah, it's still there. I don't know how much you want to go into this because I know you have a piece coming out on this.
Jeffrey
36:30
What I would say about the base is this. We've seen that the UAE has been very – Aggressive in – aggressive, maybe it's the wrong word. The UAE conducted that bombing campaign with the Egyptians in Libya.
Aaron
36:46
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Jeffrey
36:48
The UAE takes their military very seriously.
Aaron
36:51
They were involved in giving us close air support in Afghanistan. They forward deployed.
Jeffrey
36:56
Right. And so there's this kind of reaction that like, oh, well, maybe they bought some old lame missiles 20 years ago, but they're probably in storage. And it's like, I don't think you got the right guys.
Aaron
37:10
No, that would be a mistake. Look, the UAE is very serious about their air force. I would say it's the second best air force in the region after the Israelis. They're very committed to it. And underestimating these guys' commitment to their air defense, their forward deployed assets, the frontline fighter aircraft, and long range strikes. So both the cruise missile and the ballistic missiles would be a tragic mistake.
If U.S. policymakers think that these guys aren't committed to it, they're living in fantasy land. They're serious.
Jeffrey
37:40
And I think – but I think they are living in fantasy. Well, then they're smoking something. That's my worry.
Aaron
37:45
Because these guys are very serious about what they're doing and they're not to be taken lightly.
Jeffrey
37:49
Yeah, and I think we do take them lightly and I think that's a mistake. So I would just observe that it's a very large base. It's kept in very, very good repair. There's vehicle traffic, lots of fencing. It's a – Yeah, I wouldn't underestimate the UAE. Nor, by the way, and this gets us to, I think, Fareed Zakaria.
Right. While I don't think Saudi Arabia is likely to build a nuclear weapon... I think we take the Saudis a little lightly too.
Aaron
38:20
Do you smell that? The whiff of sort of dumb Arab, dumb Muslims that pervade strategic thinking in the United States?
Jeffrey
38:29
Yeah, I believe that's called racism, Aaron.
Aaron
38:30
Racism. I never know what to call it because the Arabs are – are they a race? I don't know. I actually – I don't know.
Jeffrey
38:38
You could call it prejudice. Prejudice.
Aaron
38:40
Prejudice to the extreme as if these guys are dumb and can't make their own strategic decisions even if their militaries may not be as advanced as ours. Yeah. These guys aren't stupid. No. They have legitimate security concerns.
Jeffrey
38:54
Yeah. So for listeners, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece basically saying that the Saudis cannot build nuclear weapons. Which is a joke. Yeah. I mean what really struck me is the – Well, there were three things, right? One is the arguments were terrible. You know, one argument was, well, they don't have a domestic auto industry, so they can't build a nuclear weapon.
And it turns out lots of people have built nuclear weapons with either no domestic auto industry or a crappy domestic auto industry.
Aaron
39:20
I've always wanted the Volga.
Jeffrey
39:24
And by the way, just as a side note, right, Saudi's investing in a domestic auto industry. So whatever. Yeah. But the second thing is he argued that their science and math education rankings are so low that they couldn't do it. And he was so – well, actually, he's not lazy. His research assistant was lazy. That person didn't bother to just look up the science and education rankings of all the countries that have built nuclear weapons.
And it turns out the Saudis' ranking is perfectly respectable, that it's higher than – it's very close to countries with nuclear weapons like India and China. And my guess is when India and China actually built their nuclear weapons, their rankings would have been quite a bit lower. But, you know, Saudi had a higher ranking than Israel and a higher ranking than Pakistan.
And, you know, North Korea didn't even rank. And so, you know, like I think it's kind of a specious argument. I don't actually think you could use that data set to demonstrate whether a country could or could not build nuclear weapons. But the way that you can see that is by actually looking at the numerical rankings of all of the countries that built nuclear weapons.
And you realize that Saudi Arabia is not particularly high. It's not particularly low. It's kind of in the middle. I said three things, but we'll cut it off and let you talk.
Aaron
40:49
No, I mean the presumption that I always make about proliferation – and I actually think that this goes back to the Pakistani model from the 1970s and the Chinese model in the – you'd be more familiar with the late 1950s – is that if a country, even if it's not well-developed – and the Saudis are farther along than they were at the time – makes the strategic political decision to dedicate enough state resources to build a bomb, they will succeed in building a bomb.
Jeffrey
41:13
Yeah, and that's kind of where my piece ended up. We'll talk about the state of the Saudi nuclear program in a minute, but I think people who don't follow nonproliferation full-time believe that building a nuclear weapon must be really, really hard, and that's why many states haven't done it. And I just think that's wrong.
Aaron
41:39
No, it's – yeah.
Jeffrey
41:40
Yeah, I mean the reality is that – Most, well, I shouldn't say most states, but most countries with you know some level of wealth or, or development, you know, and, and, and, and that's a pretty big group of countries, right? It's everybody from kind of North Korea up. Most of those countries can build nuclear weapons. It's that they choose not to do so.
Right. It's a political choice. And that's because we have created – we've created incentives, right? The US provides security guarantees. We have a treaty regime. We provide for peaceful use of atomic energy. There are all of these – Practices and regimes and institutions that we've built up that have generally worked very well in that most, you know, most countries that you'd ever be interested in have the choice to build nuclear weapons and they choose not to.
And so that's what drove me crazy about the piece, right, is it kind of pats the Saudis on the head and says, you know, we don't have to care about your security concerns and we don't have to care about your Interest in economic development. We just don't have to care about you at all because you can't.
Aaron
42:57
You're a dumb Arab. That's what I got out of that article.
Jeffrey
43:01
I want to be clear. I don't think Zakaria himself was right when we talk about The racism embedded in these arguments, it's not saying that he is a racist or that – it's more that there is this kind of assumption which seems to underpin a lot of our discourse. And we're picking on that more than – You know, suggesting a particular person was motivated by a particular animus.
I just think, you know, I just think his research assistant did a bad job.
Aaron
43:31
Yeah, no, look, and to the point where like PhD research is actually moving away from, at least my PhD was not like why states proliferate, but why states don't proliferate.
Jeffrey
43:41
Yeah, all starting with Jim Walsh, right? Who wrote Bombs Unbuilt.
Aaron
43:45
Yeah, cited in my dissertation.
Jeffrey
43:46
So if you listen, Jim, thank you.
Aaron
43:49
A dependent variable problem.
Jeffrey
43:51
It's really interesting because I think many people don't realize – so the way I illustrated this in the piece is President Kennedy made that famous remark about how 15, 20, 25 states could build nuclear weapons. We have on a declassified basis the underlying report, right? And the 15-20-25 wasn't like countries that want nuclear weapons. It was countries that could.
Right. It was a tactical basis. And that was their underlying judgment, like is if you could, you would. And the international community has been really successful in switching that presumption. So that's now no longer about whether you can or not. It's about whether you want to. And actually, I think especially – You know, Edel Solingen and – it's funny.
I've met him, but is it Jacques? Jacques Hyman. I've never met him. Or does he say Jack? I actually met him in Tokyo, and of course I can't remember. Anyway, Jacques Hyman's – their work is different, but really focused on this question of what causes leaders to want nuclear weapons. Yeah, so I do think academic work is moving away from – From that way.
I didn't know. Oh, that's right. You just told us.
Aaron
45:08
I compared incentives for why once they proliferated to why they didn't. I tried to take both models and try and cross-compare it to what triggered the Iranian nuclear decision to proliferate, whereas Turkey Was a big supporter of nuclear weapons, but then moved away from it beginning in the 1980s. As Iran was proliferating, Turkey was devaluing nuclear weapons for its security posture, and why? But anyways, we've gone off attention here, but that that thinking pervades sort of, it brings back into the Iranian Nuclear Agreement, and like the concern about Saudi Arabia and Jordan, for example.
That civil nuclear cooperation with them, so our concluding of a 1-2-3 nuclear agreement with them, will necessarily lead to proliferation because we're giving them the tools to do so. And that they now have the right to do so because we're giving Iran the same stuff.
Jeffrey
46:03
Yeah, this argument makes me crazy. Me too. Because it's like a willful misreading. So let me just try to explain the difference. We have these things in the U.S. called 1-2-3 agreements named after Section 1-2-3 of the Atomic Energy Act. And those are agreements that the U.S. negotiates with countries. To provide them with peaceful nuclear assistance or to engage in peaceful nuclear cooperation.
And that's like selling you a reactor and fuel and a variety of forms of assistance that are really high end. And that's a very special thing to get. And what's being negotiated with Iran is not peaceful US nuclear cooperation because that is – like they are not getting a one-two-three agreement. What's being negotiated with Iran is a removal of sanctions so that they will be treated like any other – Yeah, any other non-nuclear weapon state.
That's right.
Aaron
47:10
Yeah, an NPT signatory non-nuclear weapon.
Jeffrey
47:13
Except the condition for the removal of the sanctions is that they are subject to far more scrutiny, right? Yeah. And so they have to forego reprocessing. Yeah. They don't have to forego enrichment, but there are for a period of time limitations on their activities. And there are a whole set of additional intrusive IAEA inspection measures that go above and beyond what you would say a normal state has to endure.
And so it's interesting to me when people are like – you're giving them a better deal than you're giving – Saudi Arabia or Jordan or the UAE. And to me, that's crazy. They're not getting the level of cooperation that those countries, well, that the UAE is entitled to and that Jordan and Saudi Arabia are negotiating for, because it's a totally different kind of agreement.
Iran is just trying to be treated like a normal non-nuclear weapons state that doesn't have a one, two, three agreement. And they don't even get there. So I just...
Aaron
48:19
The argument is nonsense.
Jeffrey
48:20
Yeah. Well, so what muddies the water is that in order to get this 1-2-3 agreement, the UAE agreed that it would not pursue either enrichment or reprocessing.
Aaron
48:31
Right. So as a condition for peaceful nuclear cooperation with the US and export of certain things, they have to agree to forever forego enrichment and reprocessing.
Jeffrey
48:38
Right, and we can talk about the balance of that, but that's basically what's holding up negotiations with Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which is the UAE agreement basically says they get – it also has a kind of most favored nations clause. And so if Jordan or Saudi Arabia get a less – A less stringent arrangement than the UAE gets the less stringent arrangement too.
And so there's a, I think the Jordan and Saudi one, two, three agreements are done, but they're kind of held up over this, this issue of what language are they going to use to govern enrichment and reprocessing? Because we would like them to, To say that they won't engage in those two fuel cycle activities that are of most relevance to building a bomb.
Aaron
49:22
So one thing that bothers me even about the UAE deal is that it's often held up as the gold standard. That's what it's called, the gold standard.
Jeffrey
49:30
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aaron
49:31
And so when the details of these agreements – like say with Vietnam, right? Like we just – you know – Journalists go crazy like Obama didn't live up to the gold standard. The UAE deal is the exception to the rule.
Jeffrey
49:47
Yes, it is, although I like the gold standard.
Aaron
49:51
Me too. We all do, but is it feasible to be replicated again and is perfect the enemy of good enough?
Jeffrey
50:00
Yeah, I think people don't understand. I mean people have this idea that the Bush administration rode into town and laid down the law and told the UAE how it was going to be and then the UAE caved. It's just not how it happened. Yeah, it's not how it happened. I mean it's always hard to know exactly what the process for anything is because there's negotiations and then there are all the conversations that happen on the sideline and sometimes people at State and Energy are, shall we say, entrepreneurial.
But to a first approximation, the UAE had been really burned by the Dubai ports world fiasco. Yeah, that was a joke. Yeah. Maybe a little racism there.
Jeffrey
50:44
The odor. And so my understanding is that the UAE, not wanting to endure such a fiasco again – Decided that a very strong ENR renunciation would – it's the gold standard. It would gold plate them so that the deal would fly through the approval process with very little opposition. But of course it includes that clause that says if you turn around and give the Saudis or the Jordanians a better deal, then we get that same deal.
So it's actually not that – Not that discriminatory towards them, right? Because they sort of can get away with renouncing everything, but at the same time, they're not left unprotected if they're the only country to renounce.
Aaron
51:34
Yeah, and it actually demonstrates their strategic thinking as a country beyond the congressional issue. It really stuck it to the Iranians at the time, too, because it held them up as the model for the region, whereas the Iranians were further cast as an outcast, increasing pressure on them through their own diplomatic actions, hence proving that they do have a strategic thinking in their foreign policy and they aren't a bunch of dummies running around the desert.
Jeffrey
52:01
Although now that raises this question of the Saudi and the Jordanian 1-2-3 agreements, which at the moment, as I say, I think it's hard to get DOE to tell anybody or state, but it seems like they're done. But hung up on this issue of whether they'll renounce enrichment and reprocessing. I should say the Jordanians have said it's done, but they're hung up on this issue.
That was a couple of months ago. And there's a hint of this in the WikiLeaks, not the WikiLeaks of U.S. cables. The Saudi cables. But the Saudi cables, I guess it's the Iranians, right? They say it's the Yemen cyber army, but do we really believe it's the Yemen cyber army? No. No. No, it's the Iranians, right? Probably.
Aaron
52:48
I would assume so.
Jeffrey
52:51
So probably the Iranians hacked the Saudis, and that cable suggests that it was spring 2013 that they negotiated the agreement, but I'm guessing it must also be held up for the same reason.
Aaron
53:05
Yeah, I mean... Am I wrong? I mean when I see – so maybe we'll start to wrap up here. I mean when I see the Saudis concluding cooperation agreements with like say the Russians or the South Koreans and on the cusp with us as well, I'm encouraged that this is further indication that they aren't trying to proliferate.
Jeffrey
53:26
Yeah, I think that they're smart. I mean they know that they want to have a certain level of technological – And they want to build that and they want to invest in that. And that was the third thing I was going to complain about.
Aaron
53:43
Yeah, my follow-up was like, what is the level of the open source?
Jeffrey
53:48
And so they want to have a certain level, but they also, you know, they're not, it's not like a, it's not an isolated, they also want to remain engaged in the international community, right? And so they're doing it the right way. And, you know, if they found themselves in a situation where they had all of these capabilities, right?
And the Iranians had built nuclear weapons and they were threatening them all the time and the United States was not a reliable partner. They would be in a position to make a different decision. But I just – I think that – They're kind of, they're going about it the right way, and you know the reasons that they would want to restrain themselves, I think, are very strong, and they know that. And so, you know, it's perfectly reasonable for them to build up a technological capability that gives them an option down the road, and maybe, maybe reminds the Iranians that two could play at that game, while at the same time being totally in compliance with all of their obligations and and being you know.
Transparent. Yeah. And yeah. So yeah, I think it's quite reasonable what they're doing. And I wouldn't oppose a one, two, three agreement. I'd like to see them find a formula to renounce enrichment and reprocessing because I think – and the Vietnam solution might be good here. There's no real reason for them to do those things. There's not a market-based reason.
It's really an issue of – Somewhere between national pride and fear of getting cut off from fuel, which I don't really think is a realistic concern for Saudi Arabia. And then maybe a little bit of, you know, nobody likes to be discriminated against. So I'd like to see them renounce enrichment and reprocessing and rely on the international market for fuel cycle services.
Aaron
55:43
Yeah, but I think the underpinning piece of Zakaria's piece was – I think you talked about your foreign policy pieces. They have invested in developing their nuclear infrastructure, at least capabilities, scientific-wise.
Jeffrey
55:56
Well, yeah, it's crazy. So he says that they can't do this, right? And the example he gives is they don't have an auto industry and they have this allegedly miserable science education ranking, both of which are sort of – Poor measures of what we're talking about, but also kind of not true. But then the thing he overlooks is there was this thing called the King Abdullah Center for Atomic and Renewable Energy, right?
The Saudis had this incredibly grandiose plan to build a giant city dedicated in part to atomic energy. And that plan has been scaled back But not because they started it and found that they couldn't do it, but because King Abdullah died, and there was, I think, I'm led to understand there was some kind of bureaucratic fighting, right, because the King Abdullah city wanted to be incredibly bureaucratically powerful and control everything.
And it's been sort of reduced so that it still exists, the entity that's responsible for it, but that a lot of the functions have been given out to other ministries, which actually makes more sense, right? Like it's a retrenchment, but a retrenchment to like pragmatism.
Aaron
57:15
Yeah, and I wouldn't discount how much money they're actually spending now. I mean, we have this conception of Saudi Arabia that money is infinite, but they're running deficits. They're financing a war in Yemen, a war in Syria, and oil prices are down around 50 bucks a barrel.
Jeffrey
57:29
Yeah, and I took the various architectural plans for this city. And there's actually one of the plans is in the leaked documents. Oh, I got to give credit. Allah, Al-Rababa, who worked with me on that amazing Saudi piece. And I don't say it's amazing because I think I did amazing stuff, but because he did amazing stuff. He also has been going through the cables.
And he found a kind of a plan for the King Abdullah City for atomic and renewable energy. And it was really grandiose. I mean it was – like we – I ended up finding the location in Google Earth, which by the way was correctly marked in Google Earth. Maybe Wikimapia or Google Maps. So all I did was confirm that that was in fact the location.
But it was like a city. I mean it was like a straight up city. It was going to cost some obscene fortune. I think it's probably good that they – Scaled it back. Maybe they'll focus more on the auto industry. Yeah, that's right, right, which as we all know is the first step to a bomb. I just – God, I should mock that more, right?
Aaron
58:33
Yeah. But I just think the region is in flux. Proliferation obviously comes into this, but I think what we should actually be watching for in the coming – Months and weeks, for me at least, is on the sub-strategic level, of course. But the missile stuff is just something to watch out for because missiles, I think, will become more prevalent in the region and probably not nuclear.
But again, that's just because the incentive-disincentive structure is still leaning towards disincentives.
Jeffrey
59:04
Right, right. I mean it's – I don't know. It's like everything we end up saying, which is that there is this very interesting stuff that's occurring. Right. But when you really dig down into the details, it's not as easy as saying that there's a regional arms race or that everybody's going to build the bomb. It's more nuanced than that.
Aaron
59:23
And I guess that's why you need a wonk. You need a wonk and you need to differentiate between Arabic and dildos.
Jeffrey
59:31
You need a wonk who can tell the difference between a letter and a dildo.
Aaron
59:36
That's true. Anyways, I think with that, we've covered it all, haven't we? I think we're done. So thanks, everybody, for listening. I hope everybody liked my grand return. And if you did, rate the show on iTunes. It helps us out. Yeah, but please compare us favorably to the dildos. Yeah, exactly.
Jeffrey
59:55
So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks, Jeffrey.
