All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
So check out this website, whytosleepinamerica.com.
I like that, Why to Sleep.
And I also like the title of this, The Phantom Menace, Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fearmongering About Iran's Nuclear Program.
And I like that because of the Star Wars reference, even though that's the worst of the six.
And also, Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fearmongering About Iran's Nuclear Program is my speciality, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say.
So the keeper of this here website is Nima Shirazi.
And again, it's whytosleepinamerica.com.
And you're the author of this great piece, huh?
I am.
Thank you so much.
Well, this is wonderful.
And I think what I want to do is just shut off my mic and have you take us through this, I think, exhaustive, completely comprehensive list of every time the Israeli government ever said the Iranians were about to have nuclear weapons.
It's beautiful.
It's like some kind of art, the way that you outline this, their bogus argument here.
Well, again, thanks.
Yeah, basically what I was able to do is look at essentially the past almost 30 years of these lies and complete fabrications regarding a supposed Iranian nuclear weapons threat.
And what I found is that ever since the Iranian revolution, and notably I guess since maybe 1984, both the United States and Israeli intelligence and politicians and even media have completely fallen in line with this idea that an Iranian nuclear bomb, which obviously is the worst thing that could ever possibly happen in this peace-loving world of ours, let alone the fact that Israel has 400 nuclear weapons that no one likes to talk about, and they're not even a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, even though Iran is.
Nevertheless, obviously this horrible, horrible fear of an Iranian bomb has been prevalent and present in the discourse for at least 1984.
And what winds up happening is that year after year, even month after month, week after week, we have clear indications, proof, evidence of people saying in the press Iran is two months away from this crazy breakout capability.
They're three to five years away from having a testable nuclear bomb, or even in the more long-term view of, let's say, people that are supposedly more pragmatic, that Iran is seven to 15 years away from having a bomb.
What's never part of the discourse, of course, is that Iran, by all accounts, does not have a nuclear weapons program.
This doesn't come from simply the Iranian government, which has stated this unequivocally for years and years and years, saying both on religious grounds, or humanitarian grounds, or strategic military grounds, that Iran refuses to even pursue nuclear weapons.
They're the worst thing that could ever possibly happen to mankind.
Not only that, but obviously nuclear weapons have not prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union.
They haven't made the United States safer in our own country.
It hasn't prevented Israel from being in constant conflict with its neighbors and the other countries whose land it steals.
Iran has repeatedly stated that they have no interest in a nuclear weapon, but of course this never reaches our ears here.
All we hear is, well, obviously Iran is led by a bunch of lying liars, and all they want is a bomb, and all they want is to destroy the rest of the world because they're evil and they're crazy.
We just hear repeatedly that they are just around the corner from having a nuclear bomb.
Obviously this is unsupported by all evidence found by 16 intelligence agencies here in the U.S., by the IAEA, which fully monitors and supervises the Iranian nuclear program, and has repeatedly and consistently found that absolutely no nuclear material has been diverted in Iran to weaponization programs or purposes of any kind.
And yet the concept that Iran is inevitably going to have a nuclear bomb, which will then threaten the rest of the world and make them the scariest place on earth, that still is the only thing we hear.
We hear from the top down and bottom up, and it's completely unsupported by facts.
What I was able to do in my article, I'm sure it's not nearly as exhaustive as it could be, because I'm sure I missed a whole lot of bogus claims.
But it basically goes, as much as I could find, step by step in hearing all of these absurd claims.
And what you find is that it's almost like a stand-up comedy routine, where every single next sentence is a different prediction that never came true.
Right, yeah, it's like the guys who put out the Nostradamus videos, where they're like, the world is going to end in 1988.
And then in the next version they're like, and the year he predicted all this would go down, 1994.
And then they just keep updating it for the new year.
Exactly.
And actually, what I've seen recently, even in the past week, with the predictions from Meir Dagan, who's the outgoing Mossad chief, and then reiterated actually yesterday by the lovely Hillary Clinton in Abu Dhabi, where she's currently on her tour, is that with these new predictions, the newest one from Israel, from Mossad, is that Iran won't have even one single bomb operational until at least 2015.
Now, again, this assumes that that's even going to happen.
But either way, with this new prediction, which kind of sets forward the fear factor a few years into the future, even though just this past year people like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic were really fear-mongering and ramping up this idea that we're just a year away, or less, to prevent Iran from getting a weapon that they're not even trying to get.
But what we've seen this past week is that with these new predictions, what winds up happening is that still the idea of whether Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon or not is not discussed.
That's just a given in our current discourse.
What we find is that people like Hillary Clinton say, oh, well, what that means with a longer view, with a longer prediction now, a less immediate threat, what that means is that sanctions have been working, it's that the Iranian government is in disarray and it's unstable and it's primed for regime change, and that Israeli efforts to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, whether they have anything to do with the nuclear program or not, and computer viruses and this and that, and sabotage on nuclear facilities, all that has essentially been pushing back this scary due date, basically.
And that all of this is to essentially reaffirm that the absurd U.S. and Israeli foreign policy regarding Iran has been effective, rather than actually having an honest talk about why these predictions keep getting pushed further and further back.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I think the entire thing, well, first of all, all of that was very well said, but it seems like the entire debate is really the core of why it's all wrong, is because it's all oversimplified, and nuclear technology is nuclear technology, and if the government says it's scary nuclear technology, then it's scary nuclear technology, and they don't ever have to get very much more specific than that, and it seems like the same thing is true with the so-called breakout capability.
The ability to make one bomb, if they kicked all the inspectors out and started to make one, still, you know, they never define what that means or why that should itself be some kind of danger, and I'm sorry we've got to leave it right there for the break, but we'll be right back, everybody, with Nima Shirazi, wide asleep in America.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Nima Shirazi.
His website is Wide Asleep in America, established 2008.
Oh, man, I missed a bunch of great stuff, apparently.
We're talking about this article from December the 29th, The Phantom Menace, Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fear-Mongering about Iran's Nuclear Program.
Now, Nima, if you wanted to comment on my rambling about the kind of vague definition of the breakout capability, so-called, and so what about it, feel free.
Otherwise, please continue, because I'm having a good time.
Oh, well, yeah, actually what I was going to say right before we went to break is that you make a really great point about what this breakout capability is.
There are, I guess, multiple strains of fear-mongering regarding Iran.
They kind of get lumped into one big mess without much differentiation in the press or even the political sphere, but sometimes warmongers, fear-mongers, whoever they may be on the left or right, because Iran seems to be the only topic that everyone agrees on here in this country, which is that obviously it needs to be stopped at all costs and can't be listened to and is irrational and the biggest threat to us all.
And yet, some of these people say that Iran is just around the corner from having a breakout capability, from reaching the quote-unquote point of no return, which is having the ability to essentially, if it wants to, turn around rather quickly and make a nuclear bomb.
The other part of the fear-mongering is simply saying, oh, they're 18 months away from having a working nuclear weapon.
These kind of get lumped together because they're kind of one and the same because they're all based on absolutely nothing.
But regarding this breakout capability, what is never pointed out is that this option, which is sometimes referred to as the Japan option, this kind of breakout ability, is that were Iran even to decide that it wants to have this capability, which there's no evidence of anyway.
I mean, you can speculate, you can say, well, they would be crazy not to when they're surrounded by U.S. troops, when they're threatened on a daily basis by Israel.
But regardless, even though they apparently have not made this decision, even if they were to, they would then join an essentially nuclear club of about 140 other countries that, according to both the IAEA, which monitors all this stuff, and even organizations like Greenpeace, all agree that about 140 countries currently have the basic technical capacity to produce nuclear weapons.
And even of that 140, at least 40 of them already have the materials and know how to build nuclear weapons quickly, which is a capacity referred to as rapid breakout.
So Iran is the only country we ever hear about that's a crazy nuclear threat that could possibly turn around and then annihilate everyone else.
And yet, Iran would be one of about 140 countries that would even have this option if it even wanted to, and it hasn't even been determined if they want to.
They repeatedly state that they have no interest.
And the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate, which was written in 2007, and then basically corroborated and affirmed again, I believe, in September of 2009, and still hasn't been changed.
The reason it hasn't been changed is because there's no new information.
And what it determined is that Iran certainly does not have a nuclear weapons program.
They have a nuclear energy program, but they don't have a weapons program.
And this is the United States government saying this.
They don't have a nuclear program, and they quite possibly have not even decided whether to start one.
So, I mean, that's what we're left with.
We're left with absolutely no evidence of anything, and that even by stark estimates and kind of fabricated ideas, even so, Iran would be one of 140 countries that possibly had this capability and still wouldn't do anything with it.
Yeah, well, and even if we accepted the premise that they would have to be stopped, we'd still have plenty of time, because they'd have to withdraw from the treaty, the NPT, and kick the inspectors out and basically announce to the world, yeah, now we're going to make one single gun-type uranium nuke and hope it works.
And how the hell are they going to deliver it?
Because it would have to be really big and heavy.
They don't have the ability – they don't have any weapons-grade plutonium being produced there.
All they've got is uranium, and they don't have the ability to make the implosion system there.
There's no evidence that they've done the 10 million tests required to get an implosion system to work, right?
All they'd be able to make is a single gun-type Hiroshima nuke, and then what are they going to do with it?
Get themselves annihilated?
Right, exactly.
And, I mean, no one ever talks about what Iran would possibly do even if it had nuclear weapons, which, you know, obviously the unspoken threat is not that Iran would actually use these weapons, but that Iran having these weapons would completely change the power dynamic in the Middle East, if not the whole world.
Right, well, you know, in that Goldberg article that you mentioned, Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, he actually – my understanding of it was he quotes Netanyahu and Barack both conceding that they're not afraid of a nuclear first strike by the Iranians.
Netanyahu says he's afraid that Hezbollah in Lebanon would be emboldened, and Barack says he's afraid there would be a possible brain drain of young, talented Israelis who would go to America for their graduate degrees, and then they'd stay there instead of coming back home again.
Precisely.
And that's the existential threat, that we're all supposed to be willing to destroy the world on behalf of this foreign state with its priorities obviously very screwed up.
Exactly, exactly.
And I mean, part of this, if not all of it, really relies on the public perception, which keeps getting kind of bludgeoned into us by every press report and every political speech, of Iran being a completely irrational actor in the world, and that unlike countries in the West where white people are in control, Iran, which obviously is in control of insane, crazy religious zealots who have no consideration for any political calculation and clearly don't care about their own civilian populations, obviously these people cannot be reasoned with.
Obviously these people, if they get their hands on this scary weapon, they would use it and they would destroy the world because all they want is for the Imam to return and blah blah blah.
So that needs to be the narrative.
Once that is kind of chipped away at it because it doesn't make sense, even the idea of an Iranian threat becomes all the more bogus.
I mean, if you look at actual historical record, the Iranian government, whether you like it or not or whatever, is not an irrational actor.
It's always been very calculated, always determining what's best for its own interest, and its own interest obviously relies on its survival and its success.
I mean, during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was attacking Iranian troops and Iranian civilians with both chemical and biological weapons, which they got obviously from the United States, including anthrax and mustard gas and lethal nerve gas.
And 60,000 Iranians died from these lethal attacks by Iraq.
Iran never retaliated in kind.
I'm sorry, we're out of time, but thanks very much for your time.
Everybody, that's Nima Shirazi.
Nima is wide asleep in America, and this is some really good work here, The Phantom Menace, Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fear-mongering about Iran's nuclear program from 1984 to today, all the different predictions about their imminent obtaining of nuclear weapons.
So I look forward to really digging through this website, too, and look forward to talking to you again.
I'm always very excited to find one more person who's actually good on Iran, so cool.
All right, so nice to meet you, and talk to you again soon, Nima.
Thank you so much, Scott.
It's been a pleasure.
