11/20/14 – Yousaf Butt – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is Dr. Yosef Butt.
He is Senior Scientific Advisor to the British American Security Information Council, BASIC, in London.
And he writes oftentimes at Reuters.
You'll find him at The National Interest.
And every so often, guest blogging over at ArmsControlLaw.com, which is Dan Joyner's blog, ArmsControlLaw.com.
And that's the case with this one.
The case of the missing, quote-unquote missing, 19.8 kilograms of Iranian uranium.
Oh, you don't say.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us again on the show today, Yosef.
I'm Dr. Yosef, I should say.
So let me tell you this.
For years on this show, I've said things along the lines of, don't believe anything the warmongers say about this, because the bottom line is the same thing all the time in every report for years on end.
The agency has continued to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose, which means they've proven the negative.
All of the nuclear material is accounted for, therefore it's not anywhere else.
And now I got two articles in a row by you about how actually the IAEA sucks at this, which is really unfortunate because I think the war party has already taken up the mantle and has already started using this as a part of their argument against the quote-unquote bad deal that would allow Iran to enrich uranium at all, that the IAEA cannot be counted on to account for Iran's uranium.
Sorry to use counted on and account next to each other in a sentence like that, but you understand what I'm trying to say.
And so anyway, let's first of all get to the 19.8 kilograms.
Is it true that the Iranians have diverted some uranium and the IAEA let them get away with it?
No, not at all.
In fact, the uranium was just part of this waste, this processed waste that was stored there and was stored under seal.
IAEA has very stringent seals that they put on and you can't really tamper with them.
And they never said it was tampered with.
So they had some drums with waste in it in 2003.
They opened it up in 2011.
And they had two different estimates of the natural uranium.
We're not talking about enriched stuff.
This is natural uranium in 2003.
And they had another estimate seven years later or eight years later.
And those two estimates were different.
So nothing was actually missing.
There was a seal on the drums of the waste.
No material got anywhere.
But the story got spun out of control because it was placed next to this possible military dimensions annex in one of the IAEA reports.
And then the U.S. diplomats started fanning the flames.
And the press got into it and just spun out of control.
Yeah, so that's sort of what happened there.
It's amazing that people don't stop and go back and check.
I mean, I know that George John at the AP doesn't want to go back and check.
But it seems like 15 times bitten, twice shy a little bit here from some of these Iran news reporters that, well, what is the story here?
As you say, well, look, the entire thing is debunked on the face of it.
If the barrels are all still sealed, if I don't know if they're barrels, whatever containers are still sealed, then they're still sealed.
Unless you're telling me that one of the containers is missing, then there is no scandal here.
You're saying it's the people who are making, who are basically guessing, are guessing different for whatever reason.
Do you know what reason they're guessing different?
Well, it's a complicated measurement because you're trying to find out, you know, there's all sorts of crap in the waste.
And you're trying to find a radiation signature and trying to estimate from that.
And, you know, so basically there's large error bars on it.
I don't know what the precise error bars on this one would be, but it could be something like, let's say it's 19 kilograms plus or minus, you know, 15 or plus or minus 20 kilograms, which means like you don't really know.
You know, it's consistent with zero, basically.
So that's one part of the issue.
But the other part of the issue that, you know, nuclear matters just seem scary is, you know, you have to look at what 20 kilograms of natural uranium corresponds to.
And, you know, we talk of that in terms of a significant quantity, which is more or less, you know, kind of what you'd need to get to make a bomb.
And you need 10 tons of natural uranium.
You need to refine that up.
And that's, you know, that would be what's needed as a raw material for a bomb.
So this would be 0.2 percent.
When you say natural, you mean it's not even yellow cake, refined ore yet.
It's basically just what you pulled up out of the ground at this point.
Is that correct?
No, not really.
It's basically natural uranium metal, let's say.
It's not enriched is what I mean.
It's not enhanced in any isotope.
It's the same as uranium in as far as enrichment as in the ore.
But it's not, you know, it's not ore.
So in other words, this is the stuff that you would transform into hexafluoride gas to then introduce into the centrifuges.
Right.
But the point being that this would be 0.2 percent of what would, you know, what would be needed to, you know, if it was further refined to make a bomb.
And it's not even a significant, you know, nowhere near a significant quantity of uranium.
And, you know, besides that, it's never missing.
It was just discrepancy in estimates.
So, yeah, that's the bottom line.
There is major news here.
And the major news is the news that they really went wild with this thing more than I realized, actually, when I go back through your article here and the links to all this, where you even have the aforementioned George John scaremonger at the Associated Press implying that, I mean, he just kind of as George W.
Bush would say, he sort of shorthands it that you could actually nuke somebody's city with this natural uranium without even having to do another thing to it to get it ready.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
Yeah, I have to go see if that was George John.
We might have been another reporter.
Oh, I checked.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
The one at Reuters is Frederick Dole.
But he was the one, you know, releasing most of the reports.
And actually, I think the people most at fault at this one are the people at the U.S. mission, because they should have known not to inflame this issue.
And it really wasn't a big deal.
And they should have technical advisors that can advise them on that.
So I'm not sure why they decided to start inflaming the issue.
And, you know, when you talk to reporters, they say, well, you know, our job is just to report whatever other people say and not to analyze.
But, you know, that's a little coy, I think.
I think they could get some decent technical help and say, you know, what's really going on here, instead of just regurgitating whatever the IAEA or Western diplomats tell them.
And many of these Western diplomats are not technically informed.
In fact, even if the news is what they say, then still double check, because if they're saying something wrong, that's a news story itself.
They said something, but it wasn't right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's incredible, especially on this issue, after this amount of time of miss and disinformation where there never was a big drum roll and an announcement, but they sort of just gave up on the lie that there was a secret parallel nuclear weapons program in Iran after that lie was told in American media a hundred million different times.
And everybody knows they've got a secret illicit nuclear weapons program over there.
And they just kind of dropped that lie without even saying sorry for a minute.
Well, what's interesting is if you go back to David Albright was in Congress yesterday, and they asked him, you know, is, you know, did the IAEA say Iran's nuclear program is still going on?
And he said, yes, that it, you know, the IAEA says that it's still that there might be still weapon that there is weaponization work still going on.
So, you know, somebody needs to hold him to account too, because that's not a great lie to Congress.
Well, it's going to have to be you.
And I look forward to that piece as well.
Yeah, no, it's all very important.
And these so-called experts like David Albright sure have a lot of sway when it comes to, you know, just being cited.
If anybody's got to double check anything, they only double check it with him a lot of the time, unfortunately.
But I want to go through some of these so-called possible military dimensions.
We're four days.
I'm sorry, I didn't introduce this issue well enough at the top of this interview.
We're three, four days away from the deadline on a final nuclear deal with the Iranians here on this trumped up issue.
And so more about it on the other side of this break with Dr.
Yosef Butt, a real nuclear scientist, not like David Albright, the pretend one.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
And look, I'm no nuclear scientist, but I know Dr.
Gordon Prather, and he's the former chief scientist of the army and used to design and build hydrogen bombs for Uncle Sam at Sandia.
And he says David Albright is a fraud and has always been a fraud.
That's why he had to stop identifying himself as a nuclear physicist because he got called on it because he was not a nuclear physicist.
And that's why he had to stop identifying himself as a former UN weapons inspector because he is not a former UN weapons inspector.
He's just an agent of influence for, gee, I don't know, somebody constantly rumor mongering about Iran.
And there's that great clip that was put up at Atomic Scientists the other day of him on CNN explaining how to detonate an implosion nuke where he obviously had no idea what he was talking about, this clown.
But anyway, I can say that because I'm just citing the great Gordon Prather, and he absolutely has the expertise to be able to shout down at David Albright.
I don't mean to put words in your mouth, Yosef, or anything like that.
But it's really important as this guy is constantly scare mongering and rumor mongering about Iran when we're on the eve of a de facto peace agreement with them to put this gigantic, I would say, fake issue to bed.
It's the biggest outstanding issue between our two countries, America and Iran, and it's overblown.
But this is the chance to finally put it away.
And we got these people trying to screw it up, these people who have no earned credibility anyway.
They may get it in the media anyway.
Yeah, I think the modus operandi is just to drop things, ominous-sounding things into the news stream from time to time, even if anything nuclear-related sounds scary.
But when you actually dig up, like we did for the AP graphs, incidentally, he still disagrees about the Associated Press graphs that were a joke, really.
He still seems to think that those are a real source of concern, and the ring magnets that were never actually ordered.
Somebody in Iran allegedly was on the web maybe doing a Google search on something.
But it's ridiculous how this kind of thing just gets hyped up.
And it doesn't need to be real.
It just needs to make it to the news cycle.
Well, and he also participated in the run-up to the Iraq war in the same way, giving credibility to all the assertions of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq back in 2002 and 2003.
And it's just that very same thing, as you say, a never-ending deluge of accusations that virtually no one is equipped to bat down.
Certainly, no one wants to look like they're on the side of the Ayatollah, no American, right?
It takes like a Jude Winnisky or a Gordon Prather or somebody very brave, like yourself, to be willing to just come right out and say, these assertions are not factual.
Back down, kind of thing.
We don't get much of that.
Well, I think that's the power of technical analysis, because it's sort of unambiguous.
It's not a political call.
It's one plus one is two, and there's not much to debate there.
But it's not just him.
What's the problem now is even at the IAEA, the head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, is known to be biased in his views.
He should be impartial, but he's not.
And he also gets in on just dropping these things from the past.
For instance, this Polonium-210, that was very scary sounding again, and he said that could be used for neutron initiators.
But that issue was resolved by the IAEA itself back in 2008, and they said it's a closed issue.
But he just decided to drop it in a press conference.
And what was the issue there, exactly?
What was the excuse?
Well, I mean, I think they were just doing some experiment.
There's lots of uses for Polonium-210.
You can use them in fire detection and things like that.
That has some industrial uses.
So they might have been, I don't know what exactly they were doing, but it does have research uses.
And they got the scientists to admit to it.
And the IAEA said, yeah, that's fine.
That makes sense.
The issue was closed.
That was in 2008.
And he just dropped this sentence in a press conference a couple of years ago.
It just said, oh, and then there's this Polonium-210 that the Iranians haven't told us about.
But they had, and the IAEA had closed the issue.
So that became the scaremongering du jour for that week.
So that's how it goes.
Now, let me ask you.
Did you read Gareth Porter's book, Manufactured Crisis?
Yeah, actually.
Yeah, I read at least large sections from it.
Because I'm interested in your review there, because what he does is he goes through every single accusation of every possible military dimension, the technical term and also just in English, everything that could have possibly been an indication of what they were doing with nuclear technology for nefarious purposes.
And it seems like he pretty much debunks every last little bit of it.
And I wonder whether you thought that you found any error in there, you thought that he was right on with accounting for this or that.
Yeah, no, I think it's a great book.
I recommend it to people to read.
There was a lot of details that I didn't know about.
I learned a lot from it.
So yeah, it's great.
It's great investigative reporting.
More people should be doing it.
I think there's Cy Hirsch at The New Yorker who does some good investigative reporting on this issue.
And then Gareth Porter and, unfortunately, the other reporters are just sort of reading tea leaves at these gatherings and trying to get into the corridors of power and not really doing any kind of critical analysis or any kind of investigative background checks on what these accusations are.
They're just saying what other people say and not really informing us if it's actually true.
All right.
So, I mean, that puts us at a disadvantage in a way when a bunch of falsehoods about the danger carry the narrative.
On the other hand, the president and the secretary of state sure seem to be pursuing this thing.
I guess I don't know how hard or what the scuttlebutt is and the chatter and blah, blah, blah from those people, those same journalists that you cite from the conference in Vienna.
But are you in any way optimistic for this deal working out?
I'm not really optimistic for this particular deadline, let's say the November 24th, although I think what's going to happen is, you know, I think there's going to be an agreement to just keep this going in extension, let's say.
So, you know, it'll just keep things rolling along.
And what's odd is if you really think Iran is weaponizing, if you really think they're on the verge of doing this, there should be some urgency.
You should be willing to do a lot to get them to stop that.
But it just seems like everybody's on cruise control and they're like, okay, you know, it didn't work out this time.
We'll just get another extension.
You know, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would happen if Iran was really weaponizing, you know.
So even just the pace of negotiations shows you that there's no desperation to get a deal, which is just odd.
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
Stephen Walt pointed out, it's those of us who aren't concerned about Iran's nuclear program are the ones who want the deal because we just want to put the dang issue to bed after years on end of scaremongering about this.
While those who claim to be concerned, they apparently would rather have a war than a deal.
Yeah, and right now we go to ISIS, you know.
Iran could help us out fighting ISIS, a jihadi group in Iraq and Syria.
That's a whole other interview there.
Hey, thanks so much for coming back on the show, Yosef.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
It's Dr. Yosef Butt.
Check him out at armscontrollaw.com.
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