02/20/15 – Yousaf Butt – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Yosef Butt, Dr. Yosef Butt.
He is a nuclear physicist and senior scientific advisor at the British American Security Information Council, BASIC, based in London.
Welcome back to the show, Yosef.
How are you doing, man?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
Real good.
Good to talk to you again.
So, I opened my email this morning, and there's you saying, I object.
And then I opened up my Twitter, and there's everyone saying, oh, no, look.
David Sanger is making accusations about Iran's nuclear program in the New York Times.
Whatever shall we make of this?
And I thought, oh, we'd better hear from Yosef Butt about this.
Someone more than qualified to put David Sanger and William J. Broad's New York Times writing into perspective.
So, their headline reads, inspectors say Iran is evading questions as nuclear talks enter a crucial stage.
Oh, my God.
Is Barack Obama negotiating with terrorists who are dishonestly hiding a nuclear weapons program right in the middle of negotiating further inspection regime and sanctions relief in order to prevent just that very eventuality, Yosef?
Yeah, well, you know, the timings of these reports are always interesting.
They always seem to come on very crucial times in the talks.
My main objection to the New York Times piece is just that it's one-sided.
So, they basically say, here's all the stuff that the IAEA is saying, but let's just print that, and let's not hear from the many experts who have criticized the IAEA's work on Iran.
So, they're taking this approach that we're just here to report what the IAEA says.
We're not here to actually investigate or educate the public on whether any of this is actually true or might be suspect.
So, there's actually grave concerns about some of these accusations, and that's all they are.
They're accusations.
They're unauthenticated allegations against Iran's nuclear program.
Even former IAEA Director Blix, Hans Blix, said there's as much information as disinformation.
That's a quote from him about these allegations.
And Al-Baradai, who was the head of the IAEA for 12 years or so, said in his latest memoirs that, quote, no one knew if any of this was real.
So, why is the New York Times printing this as if it's something to be concerned about?
Well, at least they have, Broad and Sanger, have dropped the phrase illicit nuclear weapons program from their reporting, where it used to just be taken as a given that everyone knows that Iran has an illicit nuclear weapons program.
Now, they never apologized or said, I guess we have to now refute the last hundred of our articles that we wrote together here.
But at least, you know, they, for the most part, have backed off of that.
But then, I'm trying to find the paragraph here.
I could have swore it was right toward the beginning, where one of the accusations is about some tests that were going on in western Iran, where I know I've read Gareth Porter saying that the Iranians invited the IAEA to go out there and to inspect the site, and they refused to do so.
Yeah, well, it's actually very clear.
It's paragraph 43 of the IAEA's 2011 reports annex, which is the annex where all these possible military dimensions, which were formerly known as the alleged studies file, are.
So, paragraph 43 says, basically, there were large-scale, high-explosive experiments.
There were hemispherical explosives.
There were fiber-optic cables, street cameras, et cetera, very worrying stuff, if it's real, and that this was done in Marivan, a site in western Iran.
And, yeah, so Iran says, why don't you come and check this out, and let's put these allegations behind us.
And then the IAEA's response is, well, you know, we're not really interested.
So, you know, it appears to be just rumor, you know, just rumors that they're not even willing to investigate.
So, what's the point of publishing them?
Yeah, then they turn around and complain that Iran is not cooperating.
We still have all these unanswered questions when they refuse to accept an invitation to come and get their question answered.
And that's ridiculous.
And to be honest, they're serious allegations.
So, you know, if this happened, we need to know.
I mean, you know, I don't know what's real and what's not in the alleged studies document because they're allegations.
Some of them, as Blick says, there's as much information as disinformation.
But some of it could be real.
And this is very serious from a nonproliferation standpoint.
The IAEA needs to go and check this out if what they're saying is real.
So, you know, either withdraw your allegations or go check it out when you're invited to do so.
Like, you know, it's just logically inconsistent.
They just seem to want to perpetuate a rumor and not even investigate it.
Right.
Well, and the whole thing is it smacks of false accusation.
As my friend Gordon Prather, former nuclear weapons scientist, says, and this is something that never is written into the context of any of this stuff, is that, you know, look, for the Iranians, never mind having some weapons-grade uranium or some weapons-grade plutonium ready to go.
For them to make a nuclear bomb out of it would require for them to have a Sandia National Laboratory of their own, basically.
A huge nuclear weapons infrastructure to create it.
And they just don't have anything like that.
And so, OK, yeah, you know, testing some implosion systems out at Maryvon in the desert, it sounds sort of plausible if you accept the given that somewhere they have a giant Sandia National Laboratory hidden underground somewhere, and this is part of that.
But otherwise, it doesn't make any sense for them to be testing these implosion systems out there in the desert when it doesn't correlate with any other true fact that anybody knows.
Yeah, well, in any case, most of these allegations are from more than a decade ago.
So, you know, even if true, it's not clear that any of it is of current concern.
The other thing that, you know, instead of worrying about Maryvon, where they make very serious accusations, they seem to be much more interested in the Parchin Military Complex, where the IAEA has already visited twice and found nothing.
And, you know, Robert Kelly was a former IAEA inspection director and a weapons scientist in the U.S. Weapons Complex has criticized the Parchin obsession also because, you know, he says there's supposed to be some large chamber that they're supposed to have done explosions in over there.
And it doesn't make any sense because, you know, you could still pick up residues of any radioactivity, any tests that were done with uranium in there.
And so and the timing is off.
The site is located very close to a fence, 200 meters from the boundary, whereas it's a huge Parchin is huge.
If they wanted to do something very hidden, they could do it deep inside Parchin.
Why make it 200 meters from a fence?
So the whole thing, you know, it just doesn't ring true.
They also say that the Parchin chamber was supposed to be being designed in 2000.
And then they say that it was being tested in 2000.
So the timeline doesn't also hang together.
There's just a lot of questions about this and where they make the serious accusations.
And Marivan, they don't seem to want to go where they've already been twice and found nothing.
They seem to want to go again.
So it's just, you know, who knows what the IAEA is doing?
My own problem with them is they don't really know about nuclear weapons.
They are people who do nuclear materials accountancy.
You know how much went in, how much came out.
They're very good with that.
And picking up trace amounts of radioactivity, they're good in those tasks.
But they don't know about nuclear weapons and they're getting confused.
And they need outside help.
Yeah, and here they are with a mandate from the U.N. to try to pester the Iranians into letting them inspect their missile facilities and their centrifuge manufacturing facilities and all these other things outside their purview.
Now, I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with Yosef Butt, nuclear physicist and senior scientific advisor at BASIC in London.
We're talking about Broad and Sanger in The Times today.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Dr. Yosef Butt, nuclear physicist and senior scientific advisor at the British American Security Information Council, BASIC, based in London.
And we're talking about Broad and Sanger in The New York Times, waxing scary about the possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program, the alleged studies.
I was just thinking during the break there, Yosef, that whoever forged the alleged studies, the so-called smoking laptop, they must have won one heavy gold medal from the Israeli Mossad that almost definitely contracted them to do so, because this has just been the most useful piece of, albeit completely debunked, disinformation on this subject has done more to throw a wrench in, I don't know exactly the role it's played in the negotiations, but certainly in getting an honest narrative across to the American people about what actually is even being negotiated here.
There's so much smoke.
There must be some fire.
People are led to believe, and this so-called smoking laptop, these alleged studies, they cover six or ten different points that can be brought up over and over and over again separately from each other.
You can rename them possible military dimensions.
So now it's a whole new group of the same debunked accusations again and again.
Here, Broad and Sanger are bringing up missile payloads.
Well, even David Albright debunked Broad and Sanger in The New York Times about the missile payloads part of the alleged studies documents back, jeez, I don't know, seven years ago or something, where, as Gareth Porter has elaborated, it's the wrong rocket in the forgery.
They were already developing a newer, better rocket than the one that the forgery claims that they were developing a warhead for, or a delivery vehicle for, and yet here they are in February 2015 pretending that this is a possible military dimension, when they've already had to concede this point in the past.
Yeah, well, you know, my concern with it is, you know, I'd like to stick to the specifics.
So, you know, the issue is that this is not something that the IAEA is outfitted to investigate.
They don't know about ballistic missiles and payloads.
And yeah, they can call in people, but what you really need is similar to what was in Iraq, an action team with outside experts who know about this stuff, who can go in and say, well, you know, this seems real, this is not real.
Not just people who are not really skilled in this matter, don't know about missiles, trying to evaluate missiles and then getting things wrong.
You know, you mentioned the possible military dimensions.
You know, I don't know what all is in there.
There well could be some things that are correct, but there certainly seem to be things that are wrong.
For instance, in Sanger and Broad's piece today or yesterday, they mentioned the neutron transport studies.
This relates to paragraph 52 in the annex report from 2011.
And basically, we link this to the leaked associated press graphs, which were incorrect and very shoddy.
Basically, having the wrong timescale did not correspond to any realistic nuclear explosions and wrong energy power correspondence also in those graphs.
So there's a lot of about, you know, you can say neutron studies and scare people, but it seems to correspond to things that are very suspect that have been leaked to the press.
And it's not just my opinion.
There was another nuclear physicist at the Monterey Institute, for instance, and we both studied this and other people have also weighed in and corroborated that.
So this, you know, and even let's say even if this was true, computer studies like that, actually, as long as they don't involve physical nuclear material are actually allowed under the NPT.
Now you can criticize the NPT, but they actually do allow it.
And so does the IAEA regulations that Iran has signed on to.
So, you know, there's a lot of smoke here and it's hard to, you know, get to see any fire there.
All right.
Now, let me ask you about one more of those details there.
There's part of the alleged studies is that one of the accusations is that they at least had plans for some bench level experiments with lasers, with laser enrichment to create uranium tetrafluoride, so-called green salt.
And my understanding was that even though the accusation is only bench level experiments anyway, that that actually made no sense whatsoever because they already had the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, where they can convert uranium to uranium hexafluoride gas, which is what they need for the centrifuges.
And that they there is no other need for the green salt.
So it seemed like the kind of thing that was made to look them look like they were guilty of something that that they were hiding something.
But really, it made no sense once the truth came out that they already knew how to make hexafluoride gas.
Yeah.
You know, I don't I don't know.
Obviously, it might have been a pilot project.
It might have been a research level project.
I don't know.
But the point is, as long as they're not actually diverting their nuclear material to a military program, it's none of the business.
Now you can.
Well, I guess I'm sorry.
I guess my my my very poorly phrased question was about whether green salt is good for anything or anything.
Does it make any sense that they would be that they would look to me?
To me, it personally does not make sense, but it may make sense for people to do research.
There's research level projects and all sorts of things.
But I think the overall point, again, is that as long as material is not diverted to military uses, it's not it's not officially a problem.
So even centrifuges, unless they're unless somebody knows that they are using this for a military purpose, centrifuges are perfectly allowed.
As many as Iran wants is technically allowed.
Now, you can you can argue with how lax those regulations are, but that's you know, that's the bottom line.
So there may there may have been various research projects that perhaps made sense or didn't make sense.
I don't know.
But, you know, speaking to the things that were mentioned in the New York Times report, none of those things make much sense.
And none of those things is worth holding up a nuclear agreement with Iran that could tamp down future threats.
I mean, instead of obsessing over stuff that's 10 years old and probably incorrect and probably not even a violation of the safeguards agreement.
Why not?
Why not make a deal with Iran that improves the future?
All right.
And now back to your thesis about we really need a different kind of organization to do this.
That's because these what the Iranians are accused of obstructing are not investigations mandated by the safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
They're separate investigations mandated by the U.N. Security Council and given to the IAEA.
But they might as well have given the task to the local sheriff's department or somebody else.
It's it's really outside of the purview of the IAEA's actual role under the NPT.
Correct.
Yeah, that's pretty much correct.
So, yeah, they might be a little bit more competent than the local sheriff's department, but probably not much.
So but they're not creating for this task anymore.
The local sheriff's department is exactly.
So, you know, they don't know.
They do have some stuff that knows about nuclear weapons.
But also there's an issue that member states can actually ban nationalities of various inspectors.
So they as far as I know from information from the inside, that they have banned various inspectors.
And Robert Kelly and Tara Karal had a piece in Arms Control Today where they mentioned, you know, pretty much all the Western inspectors from all the Western states are banned from working on Iran's file.
And those those would be some of the few people who would have nuclear weapons knowledge.
So, you know, and and the structure and the organization and the bureaucracy there is just not designed to to look into nuclear weapons accusation.
So what what's really needed is an action team with outside experts who come from who have this knowledge, who can evaluate the evidence and say what's real and what's not, instead of just perpetuating these rumors and New York Times picking it up and making it sound like it's a big deal.
And it's not right.
Well, yeah.
And especially these two, they're expert at that.
And in fact, whenever there's a big piece in The New York Times going the other way, it's always by James Risen or somebody else.
Like when they are reporting that the CIA still says that they haven't decided to even begin trying to make nuclear weapons.
You'll never see a Sanger byline on that one.
So very important to keep in mind who's who over there.
Thanks very much for your time and your great work on this subject, Joseph.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
All right.
We'll be right back.
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