SIO487: How Close Is Iran Actually To Nuclear Weapons?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 487. I'm your host Thomas Smith. So, I don't know if you remember, I certainly didn't, we had like a brief war with Iran. Did you remember that? Do you remember? What is today's news environment? Yeah, that happened a bit ago. I don' t even exactly remember when Israel was involved. I remember that. Seems like it was a short -lived war, but that was about nukes. If only we had had a deal in place with Iran to limit their nuclear activity. Oh, wait, we did. But then Trump tore it up unilaterally, essentially. But what was that deal? Was it good? Was it take to make nuclear weapons? Can you or I do it? Should we do it, but no, what does it take? To make them? Could Iran make them at any time? Really? If not, why not? Do they really want to make them what would a better nuclear deal look like? Will we ever get another nuclear deal with them? Just tons of questions. Tons of questions about this entire situation and not really just the politics the science involved super fascinating and I've got nuclear engineer Evan McDonnell on to answer those questions for us as well as tell us where the media is getting this wrong really fascinating stuff so glad evan hopped on so why don't we get on over to it we'll take a quick break which you can avoid at patreon.com/seriouspod and you can support the show get that warm fuzzy feeling in your heart it means the world to us it's the only reason this is still going be one of the good good folks supporting the show. Thank you to all those who do and share the show with a friend, listeners, anybody. That's something anyone can do. We really appreciate it. All right. After this break, we'll be on with Evan McDonnell and we'll talk about the nuclear situation in Iran.

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0:02:01 Thomas: Evan McDonnell, welcome back to the show, apparently.

0:02:05 Evan: Yeah, thank you so much.

0:02:06 Thomas: How long has it been? A decade ago? What are we talking?

0:02:08 Evan: This is gonna be at least six or seven years, maybe even eight.

0:02:11 Thomas: Wow, that's crazy. That is crazy that this is still going on, actually, now that I think about it. Someone should put a stop to it. But no, how are you doing today?

0:02:20 Evan: Doing all right. Yeah.

0:02:21 Thomas: Thanks so much for emailing. It's funny because I recognize your name right right away, even though it has been, as you said, seven years. And I was like, oh, this is a fantastic idea. I do remember talking about nuclear back in the day, but you wanted to talk about the Iran nuclear deal. And, I'm sure, Donald Trump's amazing handling of that this time around, right?

0:02:37 Evan: I don't think it's unreasonable to say that he's fundamentally responsible for this war that we just had.

0:02:42 Thomas: We just had a war? Oh, my God. So much is going on. I missed it.

0:02:45 Evan: We had a really quick war Well, Iran and Israel had a war. I guess let's put it that way.

0:02:50 Thomas: And we sometimes count ourselves as Israel for some reason. So, I see the confusion.

0:02:54 Evan: We definitely threw at least How many bunker busters did we drop on them?

0:02:57 Thomas: Oh God, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:02:59 Evan: 20, I think.

0:03:00 Thomas: And the thing is, it's like, was it a war or was it just a news cycle shift for Trump? I Yeah.

0:03:06 Evan: Yeah at this point literally no way to know Well,

0:03:10 Thomas: Nowhere to know. Where do you want to begin with this topic?

0:03:13 Evan: I thought it might be useful to talk a little bit about enrichment as a general topic first and like how we do it and what it means and all those kind of things. And then we can transition into what the IAEA is doing and how we're enforcing what Iran is able to do in terms of their enrichment and the joint comprehensive plan of action that Obama had put into place and what that offered us and what they offered Iran.

0:03:39 Thomas: Yeah. I mean, that's an easy sell for me, but my vague understanding, just as not an expert has been, he campaigned like he does with everything, just talking about how the deal was terrible. It's awful. It's no good. It'S the dumbest deal in the world. They do eventually get rid of it. And then he's like, we should do a nuclear deal. That's exactly what we just got rid of.

0:04:00 Thomas: That's like my layman's understanding. How accurate is that kind of that picture?

0:04:00 Evan: And I would say that's 97 % accurate to the entire... Yeah, that's a good question. No one knows.

0:04:07 Thomas: Well, then what are you doing here? No, I'm just kidding.

0:04:12 Evan: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Obama negotiated with Iran, it was the best thing that we've ever done to be able to control what Iran's nuclear program, what their intentions were, and what we thought was best for nonproliferation overall.

0:04:23 Thomas: Some of this is oh you know I should have do you want to give your credentials you know it's been seven years I think most people won't remember including me oh

0:04:31 Evan: Yeah, actually, I went to school for chemical and nuclear engineering, graduated in 2019, and then I went for work for the federal government as a nuclear engineer in the naval nuclear program. I actually did go through

0:04:40 Thomas: When did you leave that or because did you have to go through this doge stuff or were you gone before then oh no

0:04:49 Evan: All the Doge stuff. I took them up on the leaving the federal government program.

0:04:53 Thomas: Oh wow boy that's a whole different conversation

0:04:56 Evan: So they sent out that mass email to say, hit reply if you want to quit your job. I hit reply.

0:05:01 Thomas: Cash out your chips yeah man it's hard to not talk about that a little bit what was your thinking there how much was it about what's going on the government or was it just like personal life stuff that you don't have to get into?

0:05:11 Evan: Oh no, it was 100 % what's going on in the government. That was entirely my reason for getting out. I just can't support being a part of the executive branch that's now under the control of Donald Trump or God help me, Pete Hexliff.

0:05:26 Thomas: Now, do you know a lot of other people who also did? Hmm.

0:05:29 Evan: Actually, very few from where we were. Within my group.

0:05:33 Thomas: Interesting. I wonder why that was. Cause the conventional wisdom was that some of the best people might take the government up on that. Cause they're the ones who would feel like, oh, I could easily go find a job somewhere else. You know, was that, was dat how it felt?

0:05:46 Evan: I think a lot of people didn't have a good understanding and felt scared of whether the government would be holding up their end of this.

0:05:53 Thomas: Right. That's fair. Jeez.

0:05:53 Evan: There was a lot of trepidation by a lot of other people as I was talking to them about it. We're in a position where you're going to lose your job, you're gonna leave your job and potentially have to struggle to find a new one, especially if the economy is, you know, having struggles or difficulties. And that made people want to stick around I guess uh very few things thankfully low level mostly writing procedures for reactor testing

0:06:14 Thomas: So what were were you in charge of that now is not being done? If you could talk about it. Okay.

0:06:21 Thomas: Oh, okay. Phew. So it's not like you were in charge OF pressing the button that says like, don't nuke the country. And now it's like, okay, good.

0:06:28 Evan: Yeah not even any of that thankfully

0:06:31 Thomas: Okay, so what were the details of the JCPOA as far as we need to know for now? Because some of this feels like a political question, you know, it's it's like with these kinds of other actors, where it's they probably want to always have the threat of developing nukes, because that gives them leverage. But at the same time, there's also been times where it's like, well, once you develop the nukES, then once you have them, then you're treated differently by the whole world. And so there's some thought to that. So I've never known how much they've wanted to actually develop nukEs versus just want to have that threat all the time.

0:07:02 Evan: Yeah it's always difficult to talk about what iran wants and what Iran is thinking about these kind of things my read would be that they mostly want that threat more than they want nukes but at the same time israel is a nuclear power not that israel has ever admitted that. But we all know that Israel has nukes themselves. And that puts Iran in a position as they're sort of the opposition in the region to Israel.

0:07:29 Evan: And I think that that gives them a lot of impetus to try to have some sort of threat or idea of being a nuclear power themselves. I think it has played a lot into what kinds of program that they have been trying to put together over the years.

0:07:29 Thomas: What are the different kinds of program?

0:07:48 Evan: Basically, you have either a civilian nuclear power program or you have a weapons program. You can have other things too. There are research programs and research regimes that you might want to run a reactor and do different things. We do a lot of other things in the U .S. Nuclear medicine, all of the isotopes that we use for nuclear medicine are going to be created in a nuclear reactor.

0:08:04 Thomas: Nuclear medicine. Is that for treating like the the supervillains that we have?

0:08:11 Evan: Yeah.

0:08:11 Thomas: What's nuclear medicine? Huh.

0:08:13 Evan: So a lot OF times for different kinds of medical applications, will give people radioactive isotopes that we can trace through their body. Different isotopes are attracted to different parts of the body. A good example is iodine. And so we can use radioactive iodine and it goes straight to the thyroid.

0:08:29 Thomas: Wow. I don't know why I just thought that was a different thing than nuclear.

0:08:32 Evan: Yeah, nuclear medicine.

0:08:32 Thomas: Wow, okay. And how obvious is it? How different are these things? I know that's often there's, you know, I'll read stuff about like, well, they can tell it's actually for weapons. It's not for civilian power or vice versa. And is that something that is just like easily distinguishable?

0:08:50 Evan: It is very easily distinguishable. That's exactly where enrichment goes into this whole problem. So for a nuclear power program, there's not an application which you need like higher than a 5 % enriched uranium. Uranium that's been enriched enriched to 5 % uranium -235. The rest of it will still be uranium -238. Yeah.

0:09:12 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, I'm trying to of think how, how into the weeds to get, is it easy to answer why you don't need, I would think if you're doing nuclear, you want, I wouldn't want that like a hundred percent. I want that just full, full enrichment, but like, why is it for nuclear power? You don't needs much. And for what's the percentage you need for weapons, I guess.

0:09:25 Evan: So for weapons, that's where you need the highly enriched uranium. That's going to be 90 % or better.

0:09:36 Thomas: Oh, wow. That is okay. I was joking with a hundred, but yeah. Okay. It is approaching something like that.

0:09:41 Evan: You do. You do have to approach something like that. You can never get to 100 % enrichment. It's not enriched at that point. You just have separated these two things. But there's not a way to do that truly. There's always going to be some of the residual uranium -248.

0:09:56 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah.

0:09:57 Evan: It' It's just a problem of how you separate. You can't do it chemically because...

0:10:01 Thomas: I'll take your word on that for the sake of being able to talk about all this. Okay, so are we able able to tell? Because I know a big thing is like inspections and whatever. Is there some crazy way that we can tell or do we use, I don't know, like Spycraft to be able to tell what percentage they're enriching? Or are they able to be like, no, we're just enriching the normal percent, just the totally casual percentage.

0:10:24 Evan: Yeah, the good news is there's actually really easy ways for us to tell how they're enriching their uranium. There's two different ways primarily to look at it.

0:10:28 Thomas: Interesting. First, you taste it. You can check how thick it is. Yeah, swish it around.

0:10:35 Evan: You smell it, you run your fingers through it and get a good sense of who it is as a person. The first thing you do is you can look at their centrifuges, right? Primary method that we use for enriching uranium at this point. We put them in a big centrifuge, spin it around really fast, and the heavier particles will go further out and the lighter particles will collect further in and that we can start to separate them that way. So it's just by mass. But the only way that centrifuges can work is in a cascade. You have to start here and you enrich it just a little bit and you send it to the next one and you enrich it a little more and sends on to the next one. You enrich it just a little bit more on top of that.

0:11:20 Evan: And so the way these cascades are set up will tell us what their ability to enrich is. That we can look at the physical configuration and we can get an idea of what their capabilities are.

0:11:14 Thomas: Well that's interesting hmm oh interesting they can't just do that underground where we can't

0:11:36 Evan: Well, that's what the JCPOA gives us is unfettered access to the places that they are actually doing the enrichment.

0:11:43 Thomas: See allegedly are they you don't think they're able to just kind of hide

0:11:48 Evan: Surprisingly, based on the terms, it'd be really difficult for them to get away with that. That we are able to look into where they're putting things. We do use a lot of spycraft for those kind of things. Just satellite imagery, mostly, that kind of stuff. See the kinds of stuff they're building, see the kind of sites they have, where they'RE moving big trucks to.

0:12:05 Evan: And we can say, we want to go look at this. And they'd have no way to tell us not to.

0:11:59 Thomas: It interesting satellites yeah yeah so

0:12:13 Evan: I think so.

0:12:13 Thomas: That's surprising it's more effective than I might think okay

0:12:14 Evan: I think it's more effective than a lot people might have considered. It seems like a hard problem, but it's not as hard as it comes off.

0:12:21 Thomas: Sure interesting so what years was this in effect I don't remember precisely how long did was this the deal that worked.

0:12:28 Evan: So the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was in 2015. 2015, and from then until 2018, when Donald Trump pulled us out, it was not.

0:12:35 Thomas: Oh, oh, is that early? Gosh. So it really wasn't in effect all that long. Oh wow. Now, was there any actual thinking to this or was it just the Trump bullshit of whatever happened before? Cause Obama equals bad and I'm going to do it. Was there, I mean, I could at least hypothetically, I would imagine if I were a conservative, I think, well, I don't want to have to give up anything. If you do anything wrong, we'll just bomb you. So no, do you know, But now that I think about it, what did we give them, really? I know we freed up a bunch of cash that they yelled about or something.

0:13:10 Thomas: What else did we have to give them? Anything else?

0:13:09 Evan: We did a couple of things. We didn't take away their nuclear program overall. We let them hang on to that. They can keep their civilian nuclear power, and they can keep enriching to that 3 .5 % to 5%, and they can keep stockpiles of that kind of uranium, that level of enrichment. And on top of that, like you said, we gave them back access to a lot of the money that they had, and we've removed a lot of sanctions. And Europe removed a lot of their sanctions as well. The EU, as they were a party to this with us and Iran, they also removed a Lot of their Sanctions they had been putting in place.

0:13:41 Thomas: That doesn't sound like much of a real cost to us, other than just, like, morale. Just conservative feeling like we shouldn't let up on that, you know? Because it doesn't seem like we gave them a whole lot. So I was going to set up maybe a steel man argument of, like... Well, we shouldn'T have to GIVE UP anything. We should just be able to do the iron fist. Like, don'T make nukes. But it just sounds like that doesn't even really make sense right

0:14:07 Evan: I don't think that it really does. I don t think there's a lot of justification that makes sense for pulling out. I think that the biggest justification that Donald Trump had was Obama is bad, and so anything he did is bad.

0:14:17 Thomas: Sure well that's not great justification

0:14:21 Evan: To be fair, that's his justification for most things.

0:14:36 Thomas: So then did anything happen once the deal was gone gosh you know it's been a while but I do feel like I remember a few news cycles or we did we love to do the thing during trump where the couple of like centrist ostensibly lefty people are like well actually it's working out great if you look at these things I do feeling like there was a couple news cycles of that of like no actually it's good they're still not making a nuke and it turned out is because they're full of shit the whole time and they don't want to actually make nukes but that's just my very vague memory what actually happened did anything do they start making anything what happened when the deal was killed by

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0:15:10 Evan: So I don't think anything happened immediately. Although at that point, not being beholden to any of the restrictions that we had actually put them under, Iran did start violating the JCPOA almost immediately, but not in ways that were inherently working for a weapon, which that's the biggest thing that we're worried about. That's the biggest things that JCPoA is trying to protect us from. It really wasn't until about 2020 when When one of their leading scientists, a guy named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was murdered. And that was the thing that really pushed Iran to start developing their weapon. So this was one of Their top nuclear scientists. He was assassinated by Israel.

0:15:28 Thomas: Trump by who do we know who or no okay

0:15:56 Evan: I don't think that anyone has ever officially said anything. But he was assassined with a remotely detonated car bomb. So almost certainly Israel's action there. And that was the point at which they started enriching up to 60%.

0:16:05 Thomas: Gotcha oh okay it's almost like when trump's saying that well just got 10 feet higher they're doing like Like, all right, well, we're going, we'll go on a 50. We're going to 60 where it's like still approaching. And like, honestly, that does also kind of still sound like wanting to have a threat and not really following through on it. But I guess it's still significant. I mean, they're closer than ever, but is that really artificial? Like, is that entirely them just being like, fine, take it to 60. Could they go to 190 or whatever at any time? They're just not. Or is it so difficult that they're still like, they actually are struggling with it. And this is how far they've gotten.

0:16:45 Evan: So what's most interesting about enrichment is it actually gets easier the more enriched your uranium is, right? So as we go on, the higher enriched that your uranium ist, the easier it is to enrich higher faster. So the stockpile of 60 % uranium that Iran had, likely still has at this point, could have been converted in a matter of two to three weeks to five to seven nuclear weapons. Bomb material.

0:17:15 Thomas: Oh wow okay how long does that stuff keep in the fridge if you put tinfoil over it how do you or you know

0:17:21 Evan: You know, something in the billions of years.

0:17:24 Thomas: Oh okay so it's stable it doesn't you can just like all right now we've got our 60 %

0:17:28 Evan: I mean, it's radioactive and it is constantly decaying, but the half-life of uranium is four billion years. Yeah.

0:17:35 Thomas: So doing fine so I just didn't know like if it's hard to store if it's you know so but they can be like allright we've got our Tupperware full of 60 % and that's what it is there's no okay that'll keep

0:17:44 Evan: Yeah, that can sit. You can store it safely, put it in a nice container, but exactly.

0:17:48 Thomas: You and the kids can feast on that for a week Okay. Okay. So that, I mean, a couple of the things you just said there really do feel like they advantage Iran in terms of just what they're trying to do, where it's like, it's easier as you get higher. And also you can just sit on it. It doesn't sound like there's any, you know, it doesn't expire anytime soon. Okay, so that does make it sort of easy for them to escalate to the amount they want to sort of maybe get their way on certain things. But I guess just to ask the question this way one more time, forget everything else. If Iran was just like, there's no restriction, there'S no politics, there' s no anything. If they were just like we would like to develop nuclear weapons tomorrow or whatever, you know, ASAP, they could just do it, right?

0:18:04 Evan: I think that they could more or less do that, but I think the biggest thing actually standing in their way was a delivery system. What Iran had not really developed was intercontinental ballistic missile, something that could really deliver a nuclear warhead.

0:18:39 Thomas: Amazon. Okay. So it's more about that. Was that part of the JCPOA at all or was it just the nuke stuff?

0:18:50 Evan: The JCPOA was primarily looking at enrichment. You can have a delivery systems, but if you don't have the uranium to detonate, you don' t ever have a nuclear weapon. You can't have a nucleare weapon without a delivery sytem.

0:19:06 Thomas: Can't have a nuclear weapon. Yeah, sure, sure.

0:19:08 Evan: If I have a critical mass and I can put it somewhere, I can still detonate that, even without like a missile or anything like that right there are difficulties you know I think we've all seen oppenheimer at this point talking about the different methods that they were trying to come up with to actually cause the critical mass I don't know if that's something that you want to get

0:19:28 Thomas: Well, I think for the purposes of what we're talking about, point is they could make nukes anytime, probably, but they don't necessarily have a delivery system. But the deal was more about just the nuclear material itself, not so much about a delivery system. Okay.

0:19:39 Evan: Into yeah controlling the nuclear material is the better way of preventing somebody from having a nuclear weapon having 90 enriched uranium is a significant deficit for non -proliferation

0:19:55 Thomas: Okay. Got it. Now, they start doing that. Do you want to take us through any more of that timeline of post -deal, or do you want to get to today?

0:20:03 Evan: We could talk a little bit about the post -deal. That's the point at which we think, right, 2020 is the point at which they started really ramping up their enrichment. They had developed the photo site, and that was where they were putting a lot of centrifuges that we had prevented them from using. Another part of the JCPOA was they could only have their oldest, their worst centrifuges in their enrichment sites, And that was a great way to stop them from enriching quickly. And it was after 2020, they started moving their better centrifuges into the different sites and actually setting them up, starting them to enrich. Rich.

0:20:46 Evan: It's not until this May that the International Atomic Energy Agency, that's the UN's atomic energy people, that they released their report that really gave us all this information about what Iran had been doing this whole time. So that was this past May. And that, I think, is what really precipitated Israel's reaction. Yeah.

0:21:10 Thomas: Interesting. Okay Okay, I wasn't sure how much of their justifications would just be BS. Because frankly, with all that's gone on, I don't really trust a lot of what Israel is doing or saying. Are there reasons for doing stuff? So are you telling us the official story that they're telling us? Or are you giving us your opinion as to what's really motivating stuff with them?

0:21:22 Evan: This is more speculation than anything else. I mean, certainly Netanyahu has been rattling sabers for decades about their program and how quickly he thought that they could ramp up to a nuclear weapon. And he's been wrong that whole time. But this new UN information, right, this is actually coming from the

0:21:47 Thomas: Oh, okay. It's a little more trustworthy then.

0:21:47 Evan: UN inspectors going into the sites in Iran and actually finally seeing the fruits of Iran's labors for the past four years.

0:21:55 Thomas: Okay. Okay. So what exactly, sorry, what exactly did they tell us or tell the world?

0:22:00 Evan: So the biggest things they got was how much uranium that they actually had on site. We got to May of this year and we found that they had increased their enriched uranium stock by almost a thousand kilograms over like four years. And that was just enriched overall. They now had like 400 kilograms of 60 % enriched uranium. So this is an increase, like a massive increase in what they had had.

0:22:33 Thomas: Is that an increase that matters or would they have already had enough to do whatever? Like, how much does that amount in real terms? I know it's signifying, oh, they're making this stuff, they'RE enriching. But like, is it like, well, they already would have had what they needed if they wanted to make a nuke once again? Or does that amount really matter.

0:22:50 Evan: The amount matters a pretty big deal. Iran's ability to enrich depends on having stock and the more stock they have of any amount gives them a better flow up until that highly enriched bomb material so they're increasing the base of this pyramid that they've built of their enriched uranium and so the base is getting bigger and then they can use that to flow all the way up and we're not at the peak yet they're only at a 60 percent. But that increased stock really gives a big difference into how many bombs they would be able to actually make. Right.

0:23:25 Thomas: Gotcha. I guess I was thinking from the perspective of like the talking point is always oh we can't let them have a nuclear weapon. It's like how many matter? If they just get one is that the game or not?

0:23:39 Evan: Arguably, getting one is losing the game, if we want to think about it that way. We're trying to prevent there being more nuclear weapons in the world, if that's sort of our baseline, right? Not even just Iran. Like, Iran is who we're talking about now. But anybody, from a non -proliferation standpoint, we don't want nuclear weapons out there. We'd all be better off honestly if all the people who have them now got rid of them right I think that's I think that's pretty safe to say right

0:24:06 Thomas: But it's almost like it's some sort of an arms race. So

0:24:09 Evan: Almost as if everyone is trying to beat everybody else we're talking about an increase of iran being able to produce like one bomb in maybe a month or two to being able for two seven to eight bombs in two weeks that's the work they did since about 2020 I would say pretty bad

0:24:28 Thomas: Not good. Not great. All right. And then what happened?

0:24:32 Evan: At that I mean that point you know we get to exactly where we are right right?

0:24:36 Thomas: Remind us where we we are because I'm not even joking. Everything in the news cycle took over so fast that I don't even, I barely remembered that there was a conflict.

0:24:45 Evan: Yeah, exactly. So Israel went on a campaign bombing different sites that they believe that Iran was using for their nuclear program. And on top of that, killed 12 of their top nuclear scientists, mostly via bombs. And On top of That, they were reaching out to other nuclear scientists via social media, like direct messaging, that kind of stuff, and letting them know, if you continue working on this program, you're next.

0:25:11 Thomas: They're sending them LinkedIn messages like, Hey, it's such, it'S so believable. And yeah, right. It's, I mean, it' s so crazy that that's the world we live in, but it really is. Hey, just got a DM. Don't make a nuke or else false sad face emoji oh really like asking him to defect

0:25:15 Evan: It's on Facebook, probably, right? But that is that's exactly the kind of program that israel is putting out and actually asking their nuclear scientists to turn over and start working for israel I think they wanted them to stay and just start passing information

0:25:38 Thomas: Oh oh oh gotcha yeah gotcha gotcha that makes more

0:25:41 Evan: And so this led to the u .s joining in so we have some different places that iran is making their bomb material the primary one is their photo site and the problem with that one is that it's buried deep underground in a way that isreal couldn't reach. And that was why they asked us if we would bring our bunker busters.

0:26:02 Evan: And that was our work, is to destroy that actual Fordo fuel enrichment plant.

0:25:57 Thomas: Sense oh right now the bunker buster stuff I don't know how much we need to get into that but the so the idea is there's stuff that's far enough underground that only us psychopaths who have these crazy weapons can get to it and eventually I don'T know how Much you want to talk about this again it's the border between like kind of political talk and like actual nuke talk but But Netanyahu really did just completely play Trump.

0:26:28 Thomas: And it's really fascinating to see because Trump didn't think this was a good idea, didn't think it was popular. But once Netanyihu made it look like a win kind of thing, then Trump's like, oh, this is great. We had everything to do with it. And it is depressing that it really feels like it is kind of that simple. But am I wrong? Do you think there is more to it than just the optics that Trump loves so much?

0:26:49 Evan: I mean, I think it's optics for Trump, for sure. Like, this gives him a big win from his perspective, right? If he can go out and say, we've stopped Iran's ability to create a nuclear weapon. If that's true, that's a really big win for his administration. It's a different way of getting the same wind that Obama fundamentally got with the JCPOA, but gets you to the same end result to some extent. But the question would be, how well did we do at destroying Iran's nuclear program? And I think that the answer is probably not as well as anyone is reporting that we did.

0:27:24 Evan: We know that Iran got their highly enriched uranium out of the site before we bombed it. And we know that they have still been developing new centrifuges. They've been building new centrifuge technology. They have have been working on this for 10 years, 20 years at this point. And I think that they still have all this capability.

0:27:42 Thomas: Mm -hum. Wow.

0:27:43 Evan: There's a lot of ability still to mobilize uranium at this moment. There is going to be rebuilding. There are going to places that they need to think about what their next steps are going be. But broadly, I don't think that we have destroyed their nuclear program in any way.

0:27:58 Thomas: So what is the story there? Is it the bunker busters didn't bust as many bunkers as they're supposed to bust? Or what's the main cause of not being as effective as we thought we'd be?

0:28:10 Evan: I think a lot is unknown unknowns to get into Bush era. We don't know exactly exactly what technologies they have been developing in labs that aren't part of their nuclear program. If we don't know to look there, we don't know what exactly they're developing. Right.

0:28:28 Thomas: Well, we don't have the deal in place to be able to check that kind of stuff, right?

0:28:33 Evan: The IAEA is still going in and they're still looking at things. But the biggest things we don' t have is any enforcement. Our exiting the deal completely hamstrung the ability to enforce any of the terms that Europe was still abiding by at that point.

0:28:52 Thomas: So the state of play then is that we don'T. What do we know about their situation right now?

0:28:57 Evan: The best things that we know about the situation right now is that that Fordow fuel enrichment plant is probably fully destroyed. But what we don't know is what they were able to salvage before we bombed it. Israel is bombing it and they're just bombing the surface level. And so at this point, Iran certainly knows that they need to start getting things out. And we don'T know to what extent they managed to do that. We think they got all their uranium out. We DON'T know if there are other sites they could be doing any kind of enrichment at and we don't know what kinds of centrifuges that they still have ones that we haven't seen before

0:29:36 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like none of this worked. What is what Israel is doing works is what we did worked. How do you define working? What do you think?

0:29:47 Evan: Yeah we've probably slowed them down on having a weapon by a year maybe

0:29:54 Thomas: OK. It seemed like the timeline was so quick before. Yeah.

0:29:56 Evan: It's not an insignificant setback for them you know they've lost a lot of people that were working on this and a lot of that knowledge goes away and we've destroyed some of their primary sites, right? We've destroyed where they were doing their enrichment to 60 % pretty thoroughly. But I think that there could still be capacity for enrichment that we're unaware of, and that's something that we really need to wrestle with. And that the JCPOA was what let us actually look in and find those places.

0:29:59 Thomas: Yeah, mm hmm. No, that's fair. Yeah mm hmm mm hmm OK. Now, what about any sort of deal making that Trump has tried to do? Has he tried to any of that? We didn't really talk about the couple times I think he tried to like renegotiate a thing that was exactly the same as the JCPOA. I think you did that in the first term, I want to say, at the end of the first term. I don't remember much talk about that in a time before this very conflict. What's the status of any of those talks? Yeah.

0:30:50 Evan: I think the status of these talks is going to be that Iran's not going to particularly interested at this point, because their best bet is to make a bomb.

0:30:55 Thomas: What is their incentive? Yeah, right.

0:30:58 Evan: Like, what else can Iran do in this position? Israel has bombs, we have bombs, they have nothing, and they're going to need to be pushing.

0:31:00 Thomas: Yeah. It makes sense to me. We didn't give them a whole lot of reason to deal with us.

0:31:11 Evan: Yeah. I mean, bombing people is not actually the best way to get them to come to the negotiating table. Yeah, weirdly. People hate being blown up.

0:31:21 Thomas: So says you, you so-called expert,

0:31:23 Evan: You should maybe trust Benjamin Netanyahu, who says that blowing things up is the best way to get people to do whatever he wants them to do.

0:31:31 Thomas: Right? I really love that there's all those clips of him saying they're five minutes from a nuclear weapon for like the past 20 something years. Um, yeah, I mean, it just seems like, and I, you know, I guess on some level from what you're saying, I'm on some level, that's kind of always true. It seems like they've been at least until maybe now you're saying there might be a year away or something. I don't know, but it seems like it's been pretty close a lot of times and they could have done it maybe and just aren't, but

0:31:39 Evan: Yeah you can go all the way back into the 90s probably it's really only in the last like five years

0:31:59 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Since the since he killed the deal I guess you're saying okay yeah yeah

0:32:02 Evan: Yes I mean broadly yeah that in israel assassinating their top scientists that's really pushed them down this road

0:32:12 Thomas: I mean again this is more politics too I mean as much as I've come a long way since the early islamophobia of the new atheist movement and then and like I do feel like there's some legitimacy to the idea that like I don't think this is a great government to have nuclear weapons

0:32:28 Evan: You know I don't think there's a lot of question about that right iran is not somebody that we want having a nuke in the same way we didn't want north korea to have a nupe like that's not safe for any of us it's not the world that we wants to be creating but it is the world we are creating right we're We're pushing a lot of these people towards building bombs by our foreign policy.

0:32:35 Thomas: Yeah yeah ja ja ja do they have like just civilian nuclear power like was that just the excuse forever or were they actually pumping out power plants

0:32:54 Evan: They have actual power plants. Yeah, they're producing energy. It's a good question, actually.

0:32:57 Thomas: More than us I know we're not great with nuclear yeah yeah

0:33:02 Evan: I'm not sure what their capacity is. I'd have to look into that one.

0:33:05 Thomas: Okay so they are they are doing

0:33:07 Evan: You know, our next steps are trying to figure out what else we can do to help prevent Iran from moving towards nuclear weapons. We don't have anything right now that will stop them from doing this, except the threat of more bombs. It hasn't been so far.

0:33:11 Thomas: That yeah yeah but again that doesn't seem super effective yeah

0:33:23 Evan: You know, nothing that we've done so far has really, what have we just dropped? 400 bunker busters.

0:33:26 Thomas: Maybe we just need to bust their bunkers even more yeah

0:33:33 Evan: You never know. Could work this time. That's our biggest question going forward is, is there a way to turn this around and get Iran back on board? You know working with the EU, working with IAEA and trying to curtail their weapons program.

0:34:00 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:34:00 Thomas: Are you seeing a lot of the coverage of this be just wildly off like what are the biggest what are your biggest complaints I always love getting getting the real picture instead of what are incredibly terrible, decrepit media is showing us. Where are people getting this the most wrong? What are the worst takes you're seeing on this?

0:34:14 Evan: I feel like the worst takes that I've seen anywhere so far are the ones that are saying that it's true that we've really destroyed their ability to ever have a nuclear weapon. A lot of people are talking, oh, it'll be 10 years before they can do anything. Mainstream reports, and they seem to just be buying into what Israel is saying and what the U .S. is saying about what we accomplished. Accomplished, and I think fairly uncritically. You know, they're assuming that Iran doesn't have any other capabilities for enrichment than the ones that we've just destroyed. And I think that that's one of the biggest things that I've seen go wrong, is a misunderstanding of what Iran has been working for, and what Iran ha s the capability to do, and wat capabilities we've stopped.

0:35:01 Thomas: How significant is this?

0:35:04 Evan: I

0:35:04 Thomas: I mean, do you think a lot of people are thinking that, or is that just the, is that the MAGA talking point to try to just overstate Trump's accomplishment here?

0:35:10 Evan: Mean, it certainly is the MAGA talking point. Like, it's definitely coming from there. But it It feels like the news media in general, right, just everybody, is sort of uncritically reporting that Iran is done for in terms of their nuclear ability.

0:35:25 Thomas: I mean is, yeah. And how untrue do you Think that is? I Mean, even if we took out all of their stuff. I mean, the knowledge is there, right? It's not like a knowledge problem, right? I mean I guess hypothetically if people have assassinated enough of their scientists, maybe it would be, but if that feels hard to do, right, yeah. I memorized it. Should we write that down? No, it's all up here. It's all in the noodle.

0:35:32 Evan: Mm -hmm. No. Yeah, that was actually one that, that wasn't a specific one. I remember reading an article saying that, you know, they've killed all these top scientists. And, of course, they were just holding all this information in their head. And so this is, right? This is going to completely destroy everything. How would we know anything?

0:35:58 Evan: Why would we put that down? No one's writing anything on computers. No one's doing hand calculations or anything.

0:36:03 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah destroy all the paper. No, I don't know. Yeah. No, that doesn't seem great. I mean at the same time there's got to be some amount of learning, technical know -how that theoretically would be, would slow them down to lose.

0:36:04 Evan: It just seems wild to think that Iran's not writing down their nuclear program. Yeah.

0:36:22 Thomas: But I don't know, like how much of this, how much of this is like, you need only Dr. House can do it versus like, well, they, you know, if you have the institutional knowledge, you can, you can train up people to do whatever this is they're doing.

0:36:33 Evan: It feels to me like it sort of falls into a, why are we assuming that Iran doesn't have nuclear scientists that are as capable as nuclear scientists in any other country, right? Why are we assuming that, you know, the brand new PhD, he doesn't really know anything, right. It's only the guys at the top who know how to do anything with their nuclear program. They have universities that are turning out nuclear engineers and nuclear scientists every day or every year. And I think that the knowledge is still there. One of my favorite quotes is that when it comes to proliferation, the biggest secret is already out there. And that's that we can do this, right?

0:37:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:37:16 Evan: A bomb can be made. And once you know that, how to make it isn't the big problem.

0:37:21 Thomas: Right. That really is so true in just human endeavor. It's like, once you, it's crazy that it makes that much of a difference, but it's like once you know something can be done, it's like, it's so much easier for some reason as humans to be like, how did they do this versus, well, could something like dreaming up, like what is a possible thing that could be done?

0:37:38 Evan: Right. Yeah.

0:37:38 Thomas: You know, like it's just easier for some reason, that confidence of like, there is a way to do this. So let's find it. It's kind of weird.

0:37:44 Evan: Once we have that as humans, you know, we can drill down on this solving a problem like that.

0:37:49 Thomas: Yeah. It's like how the, like the sub four minute mile or whatever. It's once it happens, somehow a bunch of people can do it. I don't get it.

0:37:52 Evan: Now everyone can do it, you Know.

0:37:58 Thomas: I could do it the other day. Yeah.

0:37:59 Evan: Oh yeah. I do it all the time. Actually running a four minute mile right now.

0:38:02 Thomas: Sub 30 minute mile. That's what we were talking about, right?

0:38:04 Evan: Yeah, be lucky.

0:38:06 Thomas: I mean, like so many things in the Trump era, it's like, yes, I, I'm glad I learned more information about this, but we're kind of stuck for now. It's not like you or I can go get a grassroots foreign policy going. It's like foreign policy is one of those areas where we have to have the person who does the foreign policy in office. Like we can't really replace that.

0:38:28 Thomas: A lot of other stuff we can, we need to take some initiative, you know, maybe, and try to make up for some of the mutual aid or whatever. But this feels like you need someone who isn't insane in the White House. If you had some hand in, I guess, the next administration strategy here, what would you think? What would you tell them? What Would you recommend?

0:38:45 Evan: I think that the best things that we could do would be to offer our support for their civilian nuclear program. I think this is a really important thing to sort of generally write the US should be supporting civilian nuclear power power programs everywhere. Like, that's just a positive worldwide.

0:39:00 Thomas: Why don't we? Well, I Guess we don't even support our own civilian nuclear programs.

0:39:06 Evan: So why would we support anyone else's?

0:39:07 Thomas: Yeah, I answered my own question, I gues. But is there also a sense of like, well, if we help them with that, they'll fashion it into a nuclear weapon.

0:39:12 Evan: That is what it always comes down to. I think that that's always the talking point that I hear is, you know, you can't build nuclear reactors there because then theoretically they can get bomb material.

0:39:23 Thomas: And I mean there's got to be like youtube videos telling you how to build a nuke by now like there's right yeah oh that doesn't sound great

0:39:29 Evan: I mean, there are people who are doing this stuff in their backyards before. As the nuclear Boy Scout, I don't know if you've ever heard this story. So a young man who was trying to build a nuclear reactor in his parents' backyard in a shed.

0:39:36 Thomas: No so what is this oh wow oof

0:39:46 Evan: And he got a lot closer than we want to believe that he'd be able to. And this is mostly by taking apart smoke detectors.

0:39:47 Thomas: Then you would

0:39:54 Evan: Smoke detectors actually have a lot of different kinds of radioactive material in them. There'll be some tritium and often something called americium. And he was getting his hands on that by pulling apart smoke detectors.

0:39:54 Thomas: Hope smoke detectors jeez

0:40:08 Evan: So he had to turn his house into an EPA Superfund site. Yeah.

0:40:06 Thomas: That's crazy yeah how much how much and how much trouble do you get for doing something like

0:40:15 Evan: You go to jail for, I think he's still in jail. I'm not, I can't remember for sure.

0:40:17 Thomas: That oh wow jeez so don't do this at home could you just say no I was just building building a civilian nuclear plant. He can't go with that excuse.

0:40:24 Evan: I mean, he was. He was genuinely just working on a, yeah.

0:40:28 Thomas: He was just doing that. Yeah, we're not. Okay. We're also not fans of people just doing that.

0:40:32 Evan: No, this is something that we want only the government to be allowed to be in charge of. Yeah.

0:40:37 Thomas: Sure. And it does sound like it maybe isn't even at this point, a question of expertise or foreign policy. We've lost credibility. I mean, so much of that, again, is not really a question for your expertise, I don't think, but just giving opinion. It feels to me like Trump really, I mean maybe if we can get a different president in 2029, which I'm not positive on, maybe the thinking might be, well, there's no more Trump at that point. Like if the rest of the world can think there's no more trump, maybe then we're able to negotiate in ways where people take us seriously. But I don't know why anyone would take our word on anything now when deals can just be delete ripped up at any time for not good reasons. And it feels like it's more about that maybe than any sort of technocratic expertise. Like I don' t know how we just regain our reputation.

0:41:23 Evan: I totally agree with that. I think that's exactly right. Right?

0:41:26 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:41:27 Evan: I think our credibility on this is shot, right? Like we don't, why would anyone assume that we're good faith negotiators at this point, you know, on this kind of a thing, especially when we make a deal. Some five years later, we're out of the deal. And another six years after that, we're dropping bombs on them, trying to destroy what we told them they could have to some extent in the first place.

0:41:48 Thomas: A couple of years later. Hey, you guys want to talk? Talk it out?

0:41:51 Evan: You guys want to have a conversation about going back to enriching semi-uranium or how do you guys feel? So I don't know that we have, you know, in just four years, again assuming there's some possibility of actually having a new president I don't know exactly how we get people to come back to the table for this

0:42:08 Thomas: Well, I think that's kind of the bummer of a note to leave out on, but I'm glad we got some of the more correct information on nuclear. I really appreciate it.

0:42:16 Evan: It's my pleasure thank you

0:42:17 Thomas: Yeah. Evan McDonald, thanks for joining. Is there anywhere you want to send listeners or anything?

0:42:21 Evan: Oh boy I don't believe in social media so there's nowhere to find me

0:42:24 Thomas: Sure. Okay. Tell everyone go outside. How dare you? I will not.

0:42:28 Evan: Yeah just go outside and you know get a little bit of sun and you're trying to think about not letting donald trump ruin everything anymore

0:42:37 Thomas: Yeah, that might be a good idea. Might be good. All right. Well, Evan, great to have you. See you in another seven years. We'll do this again.

0:42:38 Evan: Give it a shot yeah exactly.