All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, you guys, I got Jason Ditz on the line.
He is the News Editor of antiwar.com.
And thank you very much for joining us, Jason.
Appreciate it.
No, thank you.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Yeah, man.
So I'm not going to take up too much of your time today, dude.
It's Friday afternoon here and I know you got a bunch of work to do and everything.
But I just wanted to find out a little bit about the Iranian reaction to all the, you know, the recent escalations, you know, obviously surrounding post Soleimani, we ain't got to talk about all that.
What's going on over there and particularly regarding their, I guess, now a new abrogation of some of the restrictions in the nuclear deal, which I believe is allowed in the nuclear deal.
So that's that.
But then also there was a statement of their possible withdrawal from not just the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Obama nuclear deal, but even the nonproliferation treaty, too.
And I was just wondering if that's really right and did they really mean it?
And can you fill us in, please, sir?
Well, that is that is what the foreign minister, Zarif, said was that withdrawing from the NPT was a possibility.
That seems like that would be a very extreme reaction.
What's been happening is for months now, Iran's been trying to get the rest of the parties to the joint plan to sit down and discuss sanctions relief, because the P5 plus one deal, as it was originally stated, was supposed to give Iran all the sanctions relief in return for all these restrictions on their civilian nuclear program.
Iran was for the first couple of years fully compliant with every limit, I mean, bar none.
But the sanctions relief never really came, because once the U.S. withdrew from the deal, they also started threatening all these banking sanctions on Iran, which have kept at least the three European Union members of the deal from doing any meaningful trading with Iran.
So for them, it's like they got no sanctions relief at all, except for some increased trade with Russia and China, which they probably could have gotten a lot easier in other ways.
Which this is why over the past several months, Iran's been steadily violating the terms of the deal.
They go above these limits, which they're technically allowed to do in certain cases, and this would be one of those cases.
But Iran's been very clear about why they're doing it.
They're doing these in visible but easily reversible ways.
If they had gotten the talks they wanted and the sanctions relief they wanted, they could get back into compliance in probably a couple of weeks' time.
So it's not like they're just going all out towards increasing the size of their nuclear program.
They're just doing enough to try to provoke talks that they want.
The problem is the European Union.
They've been promising to do something about sanctions relief for a long time and never really came through.
And then all of a sudden, this month, they announced that they're triggering the dispute mechanism because of Iran's violations.
They're allowed to do that, to trigger the dispute mechanism, but that's not a good way to resolve the dispute because it's not what Iran wanted.
Iran just wanted talks.
Yeah, it was America that broke the deal unprovoked.
Right.
And so Europeans are sort of just pretending that's not the background to Iran's actions on their side, right?
Right.
And France, which was kind of one of the three European powers that was taking the lead and talking to Iran, had been presenting it as like, oh yeah, we're going to have some talks at some point, but we need to work this out and we need to work this out.
And then just all of a sudden, one day, dispute mechanism gets activated, which starts a lot of really onerous technical meetings.
It's not necessarily catastrophic, but it certainly complicates matters and is going to make it a lot harder to resolve the dispute.
And a day after that was done, we come to find out, unsurprisingly, that the whole reason that the three European nations triggered the dispute mechanism was President Trump demanded that they do so.
Right.
And threatened them with new tariffs, right?
Right.
Trump said, you must put the dispute mechanism on in the nuclear deal that we are no longer a party to, or else we're going to punish you with 25% auto tariffs, which would be harmful, especially for Germany, among those three nations, France too, to some extent.
And they just gave right into that, huh?
Right.
They knuckled under pretty much immediately and gave Trump what he wanted.
And apparently they haven't been paying attention to what happens when you give Trump what he wants, because unsurprisingly to anyone who is following his other negotiations, within a week and a half, Trump started threatening the exact same 25% auto tariffs for other stuff that he wanted from the European Union.
Now he's saying, well, if you don't sign this very generous trade deal, you're going to get the 25% auto tariffs.
If you don't do this, you're going to get the 25% auto tariffs.
Sooner or later, he's going to keep increasing demands until he gets to something they can accept, and they're going to get the tariffs anyway.
So there's really no point in giving him what he wants on the first issue, because it's never going to be enough.
Once he's sure he's got a threat to hold over you that's going to work, he's just going to keep milking it for everything it's worth.
Oh, and especially when the consequences of this are lending so much credence to the narrative of the nuclear danger that Iran represents here, when, as you have covered at antiwar.com for all these years, and we all have about how superfluous the deal really was, that we didn't really need it, but we did need it to take the fake issue of Iran's non-nuclear threat off the table, because it really could have come to war, even over just the pretension that somehow their civilian program was a weapons program.
But this deal really did cancel that narrative, and made it impossible to pretend that we think they might actually be making nukes and stuff.
But now, if the thing falls apart, we could get right back in that situation.
I guess it's even possible that they could put the Iranians in the position to go ahead and try to create a new secret parallel program somewhere, and make a bomb or two, if it's the only way to keep us out.
If we're going to keep pretending to believe that's what they're doing, in order to use that as an excuse to attack them, or at least sanction them, and try to do a coup there, and this kind of thing.
From their point of view, it's only logical.
You look at Saddam and Gaddafi dead in a ditch, and Kim Jong-un sitting on the throne.
It's pretty easy to do the math there.
Right.
The North Korea talks haven't gone well either, largely because of this same problem, where if you agree to President Trump's demands, then suddenly you're going to find yourself with more demands on top of that, until you can't possibly meet them.
But he hasn't been attacked, at the very least.
That does seem to be the lesson to take from North Korea, is that if you get one of these clandestine nuclear programs to the point where you have a few deployable nuclear weapons, it really is good enough to stop you from getting invaded over it.
Yeah.
Now listen, you had this piece the other day about all the hype about nuclear weapons.
I saw Daniel Larrison had a piece highlighting Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, saying, oh no, Iran has restarted their nuclear weapons program.
You had a thing about a lot of hype going around about the breakout capability, and the Iranians producing enough low-enriched uranium that if they made a magic wish, they could turn it into an atom bomb in a certain amount of time, and this kind of thing.
Can you take us through that a little bit?
Right.
Iran has been enriching uranium at, what is it, 3.67 percent?
Very, very low enrichment levels used for their nuclear power plant at Bushehr, the Russian-built power plant.
It sounds like a large stockpile when you're talking kilograms of very low-enriched uranium.
But every time you increase the enrichment, you decrease the size of how much uranium it is.
Even the most rudimentary atomic weapon designs depend on 90 percent enrichment, or higher.
If Iran went from the uranium stockpile they have right now, turned it all into weapons-grade uranium, 90 percent or over, it would take a huge amount of uranium.
For their entire stockpile to be transformed into that 90 percent uranium, you're going to end up with a very small amount.
If Iran somehow had the expertise to take their centrifuges, crank them all up to 90-some percent, throw all the uranium they have in there, and transform it into this higher enriched uranium, it probably still isn't enough for one weapon.
But because their stockpile has been growing a little bit because of this deliberate violation trying to get the sanctions relief negotiations going, at some point, they're going to get to the point where their stockpile is big enough that it's technically one weapon's worth, again, with a whole bunch of other processing needed to be done to it to get it anywhere near that and processing that Iran's never attempted and probably wouldn't have a very easy time pulling off.
Israeli intelligence likes to emphasize this as their breakout level, the point at which Iran hits enough low enriched uranium that they could hypothetically turn it into one weapon.
Which is kind of a silly metric, because assuming everything went right on the Iranian side, and they were able to produce one bomb out of all this years and years of nuclear program, they would have to detonate it to prove that it worked.
Otherwise, I mean, they could say they have a bomb at any time, and you don't really believe them until they've detonated one and everyone goes, Oh, wow, they actually have one.
But if you detonate it, then you don't have it anymore.
So being able to make one bomb isn't worth anything, they'd have to be able to make several bombs.
And the first one's probably not going to work great.
I mean, we've seen in the North Korean example, which isn't a perfect example, because they're using plutonium, not uranium.
But it took several detonations before anyone was saying, Oh, yeah, they've got a credible ability to conduct atomic explosions now.
Right.
Although even still, the question is, whether they can deliver it or not.
And they have missiles, but apparently they don't have the ability to miniaturize it.
So if we're talking about the Iranians having the ability to make a nuclear warhead and deliver it with a ballistic missile, I mean, that's an entirely different set of ballgames.
Not just one new one.
Right.
I mean, that's, that's a whole other thing on top of enriching the uranium to levels they've never attempted, turning that into a workable bomb, which they've never intended, or never intended or attempted.
Then miniaturizing it enough to make it deliverable is another level of complication.
And yeah, I mean, these are all huge obstacles, which if Iran set itself to, Oh, we absolutely positively have to get a nuclear weapon to stop the US and or Israel from attacking, they probably could at some point, it probably would take years to pull off.
But to say that they're on a breakout track because they have a stockpile of civilian enriched uranium is just ridiculous because it's the IAEA is all over that place that Iran's got an amount of safeguards agreements with the IAEA that is more than anyone else has ever been asked to do.
And they simply can't go above their 3.67%, 4.5%, things like that.
They can't go greatly above that without making it plainly obvious to everybody that's watching why they would be doing that.
So it's not like this could all be done under the cover of dark with nobody expecting it.
Yeah, it seems like the consensus really, I mean, among people who aren't the scaremongers about this, is that the only real scenario where they would do this would be after a war, which has failed to change the regime, but has really made it mad, and has driven them out of the nonproliferation treaty and so forth, that then they might, as a Hail Mary thing, go ahead and try to make a new lab under a mountain somewhere and see if they can get the project done before a full invasion force is mounted.
Some kind of total worst case scenario like that.
But you know, even Obama said, and I think this is totally credible, that this is the same one, where he said the reason he was supporting al-Qaeda in Syria was to spite Iran.
It's called As President, I Don't Bluff, his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.
And he's essentially saying, listen, Jeffrey Goldberg, do me a favor.
Tell the Israelis and the Israel lobby, who you are a front man for, that really, I mean it, I swear to God, I will nuke Tehran before I let Tehran get a nuke.
It will not happen.
We will start a war before they get anywhere near it.
And the Iranians know that.
A latent deterrent has suited them so far.
It seems like only attacking them over this fake pretext could turn it into a real one in the future in a self-fulfilling way.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, the Iranian religious leadership, which is also in practice their civilian leadership, have said nuclear weapons are religiously forbidden under their Shiite Islam, that they're not allowed to seek nuclear weapons.
And looking at Iran's history over the last 50 years, you can see where that might be the case.
Because Iran has been targeted with weapons of mass destruction before, the chemical weapons during the Iraq war that killed a large number of people.
So the idea of weapons that are deliberately designed to be used on civilian targets probably do seem pretty horrific to a country that's been targeted by weapons like that in the past.
It's not that dissimilar from imagining Japan and their stance on developing nuclear weapons.
All right.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I know you got a ton of work to do and I've taken up enough of your time already, but I'm so glad that you're here and covering this stuff and, I guess, every violent conflict on the planet there at news.antiwar.com.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
Thank you for having me.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
