08/17/15 – Yousaf Butt – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place and features classes, discussions, guides, events, publishing, podcasts, and so much more.
And Jeffrey Tucker and I are starting a new monthly show at Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire.
It's just four bucks a month if you use promo code Scott when you sign up.
And hey, once you do, add me as a friend on there at scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
All right, y'all.
Hey, check it out.
I got Yosef Butt on the line.
He is a nuclear physicist and is a senior scientific advisor to the British American Security Information Council in London.
He's got this brand new one at Reuters, Why It's Impossible to Hide Nuclear Work in 24 Days or 24 Years.
Welcome back to the show, Yosef.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
Good to be back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So obviously, what's at issue in this article is the Iran nuclear deal and one of the major objections or perhaps kind of pretended objections to the deal, which is that under the terms of the deal, in the worst case scenario, Iran could drag out a snap inspection of a military site, not any nuclear site that's already safeguarded, but any other site that is a so-called suspicious site.
They could drag out that inspection for up to 24 days and then sneak all their research out the back door.
And by the way, I don't want to set up too easy of a straw man for you, so I'll go ahead and say, and what if it's not necessarily nuclear material they're messing with?
What if they're just working on an implosion system and they're using lead or tungsten as a pretend, you know, fissile material there and then testing the implosion system.
They could sneak that out the back door in 24 days, but not leave any radiological type materials behind.
So what about that too?
Yeah, well, you know, basically people were objecting that there's this delay before inspections can take place.
So, like you said, the actual nuclear facilities that are declared will be in continuous safeguard.
So at any time there can be snap inspections.
And if Iran tries to put that off, the sanctions could snap back on.
So it's not like it's getting a free pass.
Now what this applies to, this 24-day maximum rule, is any place in Iran that's suspicious.
So this is, no country in the world allows, you know, allows you to come in and just walk up to any military site or anything and just like walk in.
Can you imagine UN inspectors trying to walk around Texas like that?
Hey, let us into Fort Hood to look at whatever we want.
Exactly.
So they basically worked out in this deal that, hey, you know, there's going to be two so we can chat and figure out a way to get in.
And then there's, you know, a few more days after that, like 10 more days to work out a methodology to get in.
And basically once you're in, any nuclear material can be picked out very easily, even if they've tried to sneak it out, because this is microscopic dust that, you know, there's instruments right now that the sensitivity allows you to pick up, even trace fingerprint amounts of nuclear material.
So, you know, people who say that you can clean up and stuff are just wrong.
So, you know, you'd take swipes, you'd go in cracks in the room, in bolt holes, at the corners of the room, where the walls meet the floor, et cetera.
And you'd take an ultra clean cotton cloth and pass it along, those would be processed in labs and any microscopic, you know, down to nanogram amounts, one billionth of a gram could be picked up.
So there's no hiding this and it doesn't matter if it's, you know, 10 days, 24 days, 24 years, you'll pick this up.
So, you know, the objections are a bit contrived.
Yeah, sure seems like it.
Okay.
Now, and that really is an important point that's worth going back to about the full inspections at the declared nuclear facilities.
They'd have to somehow divert nuclear material from, you know, somewhere along the chain between the mine, the conversion facility, and the enrichment plant to, you know, have anything to make a bomb with anyway.
And how are they supposed to get away with that when now those inspections are expanded permanently?
And I think, you know, the reason it's really worth going back over this most elementary point here is because they're kind of lying when they talk about this 24 days, Yosef, because the war party side, they never specify that they're not talking about the nuclear sites.
They, you know, they don't necessarily lie about that directly and say, oh no, they can close down Natanz for 24 days or anything like that.
So they just sort of imply that the inspections, you know, have all these obstructions to them without ever addressing the other part.
Like we talked about that every bit of declared nuclear material from womb to tomb in the entire cycle in Iran will be safeguarded 24 hours a day, a hundred percent of the time under the additional protocol, much more than ever before.
This is a very narrow point.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, basically, Iran, the way things are right now or what's been agreed to would have the toughest inspection, you know, inspections rules ever, you know, so why wouldn't you agree to that?
I mean, it doesn't it doesn't get tougher than that in any country.
So, you know, that's the bottom line.
Right.
OK, now.
So what about, though, if they're testing, you know, I don't know, an implosion system, for example, for a bomb, but without nuclear material, because you can do that with lead, right?
Yeah.
Well, there's a couple of points there.
Number one, you know, you do these kind of tests with hypothesis for conventional military.
So that is actually technically legit.
I mean, if it doesn't involve nuclear materials, then, you know, you can't really make a huge a difference.
I mean, they could be doing it to test regular chemical bombs, you know, not chemical weapons, but conventional explosives, conventional explosives.
So, you know, you cannot just tell them to stop all their military activity.
So part of this can go on now.
Yeah.
Heavy elements.
These swipe samples can pick up other things, too.
It's not just that, you know, they'll pick up only fissile stuff.
So if you're particularly concerned about lead, you know, there'll be signatures for that.
You know, you can do mass spectroscopy.
You can, you know, you can, there's various ways to pick up the elements of interest.
But you know, the point being that you can't object very loudly to them doing non-nuclear stuff.
I mean, that's not something that, as far as I know, that's been agreed to.
I mean, it would be against the spirit of the agreement, but they probably wouldn't be breaking the letter of it, even if they did that.
All right.
Now, and all of this is really, well, I don't know all of it, but much of this is actually about Parchin, the military facility and the accusations that they were, they had a bomb chamber where they were testing explosives there.
Now, my friend Gordon Prather, who used to make H-bombs and stuff at Sandia National Laboratory, was the chief scientist of the Army.
He's explained to me that that's not how you do it.
You test them outside, not in an explosive chamber like this.
And I think Robert Kelly, the former chief of the Iraq inspections regime for the IAEA back in the early 90s, he's written a pretty compelling piece for Loblaw called the Parchin Puzzle, where he seems to cast doubt on this explosive chamber's even existence at all, I think.
And especially as Gareth Porter has also debunked the cooperation of this supposed former Soviet nuclear physicist, a bomb maker, but in fact, he wasn't a nuclear physicist at all, this guy Dan Ilenko.
And anyway, I just wondered if you could give us your summation of what you think about the Parchin accusations, whether the thing is just all wet or how that plays into this 24 days.
And really, what do the Iranians care?
Why don't they just let them come back to Parchin three more times or whatever and just get this story debunked?
Because it's obviously bogus in the first place.
Yeah, there's a few points to make about Parchin.
And then the, you know, why don't they let them back in?
I think they're willing to do that as long as there's a plan to resolve it.
I think what's not desired from their side is that they'll now go in, they'll find nothing here.
There's another building of interest after two weeks, and they don't want this wild goose chase to go on because the IAEA already came twice in 2005 and looked at different parts of Parchin.
I think five buildings each time they found nothing at all, nothing suspicious, nothing deal used, no nuclear material.
So now they have a new building of interest.
And I think, I don't know what the detailed negotiations are, but I think what's going on is they just want a work plan to resolve it.
They don't want, hey, you'll come in here, you'll find nothing, and then there'll be another building of interest.
In other words, you're saying work plan, you're saying they'll agree to it, but they want to have in writing what's going to happen.
They want a flowchart of like how this will get resolved, not that you'll keep asking to come back in each time you find nothing, because this is a sensitive military site from their perspective.
So now, Parchin, the main point I'd like to make about that is that whatever is happening, the place that you want to take samples from, these samples that I talked about earlier, is from inside the building.
So now all this propaganda that's been put out by the ISIS folks run by David Bright is wrong.
They're talking continuously about stuff that's happening outside.
What you want to do is go inside the building, take swipes.
If there is a chamber, Iran has done a great favor to the IAEA because they can go into the chamber and they can take swipes and they can pick up any nuclear material that was there, used ever, even if there's been sanitization, even if Iran's been trying to clean it, because you cannot dilute it down to the amount that you won't pick up these nanogram amounts of nuclear material.
So if Iran did have a chamber in there, that's great for the IAEA, because that concentrates the nuclear material, if there was any nuclear material.
So all this talk about paving outside and bulldozers and cars and suspicious activity is all wrong.
I mean, what's happening of interest is inside the building.
Now if they demolish the building and they pave it over, yeah, that's suspicious.
But as long as that building is standing, people can go in, even if it's been properly cleaned up, you can still pick up nanogram amounts of material and you can pick that up.
So, you know, just watch out for the propaganda people.
Yeah, it's amazing that people still take Albright seriously when his whole case before was, you know, hey, look, a pink tarp.
More and more.
There's a blog over at Arms Control Law that I just reviewed everything for Parchin on.
And if you go in, more and more technical people and even kids and James Acton at the Carnegie Institution are casting doubt on ISIS properly, finally.
Right.
In fact, yeah, I saw the guy from Carnegie fighting with him on Twitter, the parking lot of death.
Everybody be afraid because there's a couple of sedans parked at the west end of this parking lot here.
Yeah.
I mean, their basis just seems to be just to keep the word Parchin in the news.
They actually managed to do that by putting out stupid press releases.
Right.
All right.
Now, I accidentally took you into this break here.
Hold on just a sec.
I don't want the live audience to miss too much of this, Joseph, but we'll be right back in just a sec.
OK.
OK.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that once you keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation, if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Joseph, but he's a nuclear physicist and we're debunking some of the anti-Iran nuclear deal propaganda that's been floating around here.
And of course, David Albright from not that ISIS, the other ISIS, constantly putting out leaks and being the basis for pretended news stories by the likes of George John and David Sanger, you know, claiming alarmist things about the nature of Iran's nuclear program and what's going on there.
And we were joking about, you know, oh, look, a garden hose.
And a pink tarp.
You know, that's corning insulation, dude.
That's not a tarp.
And even if it was a tarp, what the hell does that mean?
You think they're washing away uranium with a hose?
What is this?
But it doesn't matter.
As Joseph was saying, I'm sorry we went into the break there where you couldn't hear it, but he was saying, you know, it's just about keeping the name parchment in the news.
You know, just, oh, look, they're lying.
Oh, look, they're cheating.
Oh, here we are in the middle of trying to get this deal done.
And here they are, according to the satellites, meaning according to what David Albright claims the satellites show.
Something to be worried about.
And you know what?
You got to hand it to him, Joseph.
It worked, right?
A week ago, the headlines were dominated by this story that here the Iranians are sticking their middle finger at us right when Congress is debating whether to allow this thing to go through or not.
Yeah, it'd be a shame to hang this up because, you know, some NGO doesn't have the scientific skills to analyze imagery.
I mean, this guy gets in front of Congress and talks about all kinds of imagery.
Somebody in Congress should ask if there's any scientists at the Institute of Science and International Security or what imagery experts they have and what their training is, because I don't see it from their public side.
I don't see any scientists at that institute.
Yeah, I mean, the Robert Kelly piece that, let's see, I have here somewhere.
I did have it.
He says, you know, look, we're talking about sedans, we're talking about cars.
The bottom line on Parchin, the bottom line on Parchin is if he's telling you about things outside that are happening, it's not that interesting, because what the IAEA should be interested in doing is going inside the building and if there's a chamber going inside the chamber and taking samples there.
And that's very simple.
That's what needs to be done.
That's the most important thing.
So it doesn't matter if there's bulldozers at the side or if there's, you know, asphalting, whatever, that you don't need to pay attention to that right now.
Well, I mean, and maybe they would if there was a previous accusation that right there where they're pouring new asphalt is where we think they were doing outside tests, because again, at least as Gordon Prather puts it, the accusations of what supposedly was going on at Maravon made more sense because that's how you have to do these tests for the implosion systems is outside.
But no one ever said they were doing tests outside at Parchin.
They said there was this test chamber and tests going on inside.
Now they're saying, oh God, look, a bulldozer and a parking lot and a Mercedes Benz sitting there.
So what else does that mean other than, you know, paint tarp, garden hose, and again, just keep the name Parchin out there, but no specific accusation.
But meanwhile, the Iranians invited the IAEA to come out to Maravon to check out what was going on out there.
And the IAEA refused to come out and look, apparently because they already figured they weren't going to find anything.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, when ElBaradei was the head of the IAEA, this possible military dimensions PMD file, which includes Parchin and a bunch of other stuff, including Maravon, you know, it was called the alleged studies because they were only allegations.
And he said there was major questions about the authenticity of it.
So he didn't take it very seriously.
And if you look at what happened in 2005 with Parchin, where, you know, they had open access.
Iran divided it up into four bits and said, you know, pick any anyone you want, go in, inspect away.
And they didn't.
They went in once.
They didn't find anything.
They went another time.
Didn't find anything.
And then, you know, the relationship between the IAEA and Iran got sour and sour.
And then they haven't allowed the IAEA back in.
And I think it's because there's no flowchart of how this is going to get resolved.
So hopefully that's been worked out in these agreements between the IAEA and a large deal that's been negotiated between the IAEA and Iran.
And hopefully they can work it out and people should just wait and let them get on with their, you know, scientific work instead of trying to talk about bulldozers and parking lots.
Well, now, so my understanding was that the IAEA had never really confronted the Iranians with the actual documents to say, how do you explain these?
But now this Reuters story from Saturday says that the Iranians have just given them a whole new stack of documents, I guess, regarding past research.
But I guess they're not necessarily, you know, real refutations of the PMD because they still haven't been shown the documents to refute, right?
Yeah, that's my understanding.
You know, I don't know what's been...
They're basically doing like Saddam in 95 and just saying, here's everything.
And we don't know what else to tell you.
Yeah, I mean, and I don't think all of it is the IAEA's problem, because I think some of the countries, you know, haven't shared it with the IAEA even.
So, you know, I just don't know where the ball's been dropped on that.
But, you know, and some of the PMD things may actually have happened, but are not necessarily nefarious.
For instance, some of these floating bridge wire detonators, you know, those can be used in nuclear weapons, but they can be used in, you know, oil exploration and explosive use for normal oil wells.
So maybe Iran, maybe that's part of the information that Iran gave over, you know, that, you know, whatever actually did happen, whatever part of the PMD file is true, you know, certainly they can they can respond to that.
And the IAEA may have shared more information for them to respond to.
I don't know.
Well, and they've had a track record for years now of successfully explaining away any number of accusations about what they're doing from and many of which, again, can can be traced back to ISIS and David Albright.
Look, everybody at these magnets.
Oh, my God, the magnets.
But then, yeah, there they are at this, you know, centrifuge machine at this university that has nothing to do with nuclear or anything.
I mean, there it is in use.
And there's all kinds of things like that where the IAEA has officially said we're satisfied.
That seemed to be false.
For instance, those graphs that the AP Associated Press leaked a couple of years ago saying, oh, this is you know, this is the curve for the explosion energy of a device.
And if you look at it from a technical viewpoint, all the timescale doesn't make sense.
It's like mathematical errors in it.
Somebody just done a botched job of, you know, what it looks certainly like somebody's trying to plant a fake thing because it just doesn't make sense.
You know, that's not something that research scientists working at a national level, the kind of mistakes that they would make.
So certainly I can see where Al Baradai was coming from when he said that there's major major questions of the authenticity of some of the documents.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, you know, anybody who's really trying to look honestly at all this information, I think would agree that they never really did have a nuclear weapons program.
They always wanted to settle for just a capability as a half a nuclear deterrent as good enough, whether for religious reasons, really, or just strategic reasons like they know they could never build a nuclear arsenal in time to head off the U.S. and Israel and, you know, that kind of thing.
And so they just decided a decade ago, more than a decade ago, that they would just stick their hands up and open their books up and say, see, we're not making nukes.
Don't shoot.
We're just trying to do a better job of, you know, pleading not guilty than Saddam ever did, you know, and in order to avoid regime change.
That's been their policy this whole time.
Yeah.
I mean, the bottom line, like, it'd be a shame because the deal that's been negotiated is very tough on Iran, is very intrusive inspections.
You know, it's a good deal.
It makes sense for everybody.
Everyone's agreed to it.
And if these people, you know, shouting from the sidelines, these non-scientists at ISIS managed to sabotage it because of their propaganda, that'd be a real shame.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks for doing your part to help put back against it with real scientific credentials here at Reuters.
It's why it's impossible to hide nuclear work in 24 days or 24 years by Yosef Butt at Reuters.com.
Thanks very much.
Come back on the show.
Appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
Hey, Al Scott here.
Ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time?
Well, a friend of mine, libertarian activist Arlo Pignotti, has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all, QR silver commodity disks.
The first ever QR code, one ounce silver pieces.
Just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price.
They're perfect for saving or spending at the market.
And anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate gets one.
That's scotthorton.org slash donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at commodity disks.com or check them out on Facebook at slash commodity disks.
And thanks.
Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more wars in the Middle East or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C., but those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at counsel for the national interest dot org.
That's counsel for the national interest dot org.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF dot org slash subscribe.
Jacob Hornberg, a tireless champion of liberty and president of the FFF, brings you the best libertarian writers every month on the topics that need our treatment the most.
Read Jacob, Jim Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, Joe Stromberg and more every month in the Future of Freedom.
It's just $25 a year for the pocket-sized print edition, $15 to read it online.
The Future of Freedom, FFF dot org slash subscribe.