06/18/07 – Gordon Prather – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, KAOS959.com, and welcoming back to the show.
I haven't spoken with this gentleman in a little while.
It's my friend, Dr. Gordon Prather.
Welcome back to the show.
Gordon?
Well, thank you, Scott, for having me.
Well, I figured we could talk about the axis of evil and nuclear proliferation and Iran's nuclear program and things like that.
I want to start off, really, with something you address in your last article for AntiWar.com.
That's AntiWar.com/Prather, P-R-A-T-H-E-R.
Well, first, I should tell everybody, you spent your whole career in the military and the Department of Energy building nukes, blowing them up, taking them apart.
You're the chief scientist of the army.
You're an advisor to senators negotiating foreign treaties and, I believe, including the one we're about to discuss, the Nunn-Lugar Act.
Give us a brief background about what the Nunn-Lugar Act is, what its intention was, and how those resources are being used today.
All right, in 1991, the summer of 1991, a number of the Soviet Union still existed, but the Warsaw Pact had disintegrated.
At the time, beginning in 1989 and running on through 1997 or so, I had a close relationship with Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico and, particularly, some of his staffers, including his chief of staff, Charles Gentry.
We had been attempting to do something about the situation in Eastern Europe that had resulted from the Warsaw Pact disintegrating.
The Soviet Union, promptly, they had already built a number of power reactors in Eastern Europe, and a number of others were under construction.
I don't remember the exact number nowadays, but it's like at least a dozen.
And when those countries like Bulgaria and Hungary and Poland and the former East Germany dropped out of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets just pulled back all their technicians, canceled all of the fuel contracts, including the return of the spent fuel to the Soviet Union and all that sort of thing.
So there was a huge mess there, and the only people who seemed to have any idea what the mess was and what the danger was of having all of these either performing or still under construction reactors without any Soviet technical assistance or financial assistance were senators like Domenici, who, of course, in his state is the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Sandia National Laboratory and a number of other entities that are associated with that.
So anyway, we began then to get legislation through Congress that would allow the Department of Energy and the national labs to assist those countries that had these reactors and that had been abandoned by the Soviet Union.
That started in 1989, and there was an act passed called the SEED Act, Support for East European Democracy, I think is what it was called.
And before we could actually get any legislation through that would enable us to do that, at least legally, you know, use appropriated funds and for the national laboratories to actually go into Europe and get anything done.
And the real problem, as far as the national labs were concerned, was the issue of liability.
What happens if anything goes wrong?
In this country we had the, oh, lord, how could I forget it, I can't remember the name of it, Price Anderson.
Anderson was the Senator from New Mexico that preceded Pete Domenici, and there was limited liability for operators of nuclear power plants and things of that nature.
Okay, that's the background.
Well, before we could actually get any legislation through these Soviet legislators from, what do you call it, I've forgotten, is it the Duma?
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, the Duma.
The House of Representatives, basically, yeah.
Yeah.
They came to this country and they pleaded to appeal to certain United States Senators, among them Senators Nunn and Lugar and Domenici.
And they said, look, just as George Bush, our president, had immediately began to transfer back all of the tactical nuclear weapons that we had forward deployed in Europe for the great war that we expected was going to occur at some point between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, Bush unilaterally, Bush the father unilaterally, began bringing all of these nuclear weapons back to the United States from Europe and dismantling them, scheduling for dismantling a lot of, you know, thousands of these nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev, who was the president or whatever the chief weenie is of the Soviet Union was called, he was chairman and he was also president, I think, first time that had happened.
Well, at any rate, he did the same thing with the Soviet nuke.
So here are the, our Russian equivalent, our Soviet Union equivalent at the time, said, look, we want to do what you're doing.
We want to dismantle all these excess nuclear weapons and peacefully dispose of the fissile materials that we get out of them.
And they needed a little help, right?
Technical and monetary.
They didn't have the money.
They had other problems.
The damn country was, was falling apart, disintegrated.
Well, so almost without debate, and I think I sent you the transcript of the debate that occurred on the floor of the Senate.
And it lasted, I don't know how long, a few hours, I guess.
Nunn and Domenici and Lugar, Lugar really got his name on there because they attached the so-called Nunn-Lugar Act, the original one, to the conventional forces in Europe treaty that was before the Senate, you know, at the time.
And so this was kind of germane.
And so they just attached it and they, I think they passed it by voice vote.
I don't even think, I can't recall now, but it sailed right through is the point, though.
Yeah, it went through faster than anything I've ever heard of.
And I used to work for a senator for years and I, you know, it was just amazing.
Well, at any rate, what it said was of money that had already been appropriated for that next fiscal year, that would, well, the existing fiscal year, really, it was fiscal 92.
And this was just on Christmas Eve, practically.
They said, you're authorized to, the Secretary of Defense is authorized to expend up to $400 million, and essentially to provide this money to the, by then it was Russians, you know.
This was Christmas Eve of 91, and by the time Nunn-Lugar actually passed, the Soviet Union no longer existed.
It was strictly Russia.
Right.
It was actually, wasn't it Christmas Eve 91 that Gorbachev resigned?
My recollection was it was the 21st of December or something like that, but it was very close to Christmas.
Uh-huh.
Right then, yeah.
And it just went right on through, just like that.
Okay.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on.
The most remarkable thing imaginable, practically, because if you read that debate, they say, look, we've been over there.
Nunn went over and I think Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico went over, and Pete Domenici, some of them, couldn't make it for that trip.
But they went over and they were appalled at what they saw.
Not about the nuclear weapons, but about all of the fissile material that the Soviet Union had been producing, and the plutonium, and all that other kind of stuff that was not all that well-secured.
Hang on, let me stop you right there for a second, Gordon, just to recap for the audience, for people tuning in and so forth.
What we're talking about is the disillusion of the Soviet Union, the setting free basically of all the Warsaw Pact states, and now there was basically a problem, not so much with the nuclear weapons being deployed everywhere, because the Russians pretty much took those back and had pretty good control of that and brought them all back inside Russia, as you said, mirroring what George Bush Sr. did in removing our tactical nuclear weapons, offensive weapons from Europe.
So basically, these three senators, one or two of whom you're very familiar with personally, Lugar, Nunn, and Domenici, they got together and they passed this legislation that gave appropriated money basically to, I don't know, the Department of Energy, I guess, to go over to Russia.
No, unfortunately, they said, of the funds appropriated already for this fiscal year that we're now in to the Department of Defense, $400 million, you're authorized to essentially provide that to the Soviet Union or the Russians.
So that was the problem, was the DoD had the money.
Yeah, right.
Okay, so basically, so tell us what happened.
They passed this law, it sailed through the Senate, and basically its point was for this money that the DoD had to be used to secure fissile material in the former Soviet states.
That's basically where we're at now, right?
That's basically it, because you see, like, I don't remember the exact number, but there were thousands of nuclear weapons that were going to be dismantled.
And that meant that all of the fissile materials in there, the things that make them go off, you know, were going to be, you know, it's relatively easy to know whether or not you've got all your nuclear weapons or not, if you can count, okay, but how do you determine whether or not you've still got all of your fissile material or not once you've taken it out?
Right.
You have to be keeping very close track.
It's funny, too, you know, with hindsight and what have you, I can see why this bill would sail through the Senate, and I'm only surprised that it was only $400 million.
It seems like the obvious policy at the fall of the Soviet Union would be for George Bush Sr. to say, hey, we'll buy every nuke you have.
Let's end this nuclear standoff once and for all.
You're not the Soviet Union anymore.
Let us buy all your nukes, and then we'll dismantle almost all of ours, you know, something like that.
And almost exactly that, he did begin the, what he said was, we'll buy the fissile material and we'll make reactor fuel out of it, or we'll set up an agency or something like that that's administered or overseen or scrutinized by the International Atomic Energy Agency that will sit there and watch what you do in the former Soviet Union, now Russia, to make sure that there's a material accounting procedure set up so that we can verify that you are converting, you're taking this fissile material out of these nuclear weapons and you're converting it into fuel for nuclear reactors.
Okay, now this all sounds like great ideas.
So what happens?
It tells me that this didn't all get carried out the way it was supposed to.
Yeah, well, part of it I didn't know about at the time because they, the Bush White House, first President Bush, they called me one day and said they had a job they were interested in me getting.
I'd been in government under Reagan.
I was a Reagan political appointee in the Pentagon.
And out of the blue, they called me and said, we got a job we'd like to talk to you about.
And I said, well, I'm working on all this stuff.
There's really only one job that I would be interested in, and that is the job, it used to be called System to the Secretary of Defense for Atomic, let's see, System to the Secretary of Defense for Atomic, what, I can't recall anyway.
Anyway, it was the guy who was the sat-a-stride, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense Council that did exactly that, that decided on weapons, the requirements that were going to be presented by the Department of Defense to the Department of Energy, and would be the guy who was going to be more or less in charge of these activities under the Non-Lugar Act.
And I went in, I got interviewed by everybody, Dick Cheney, who I knew was Secretary of Defense, and so they said, okay, we're going to have a big problem this summer, this is the summer of 92, because the Democrats are probably going to try to get President Bush to sign on to the Conference of Test Ban Treaty, and we don't want an opportunity for that to occur, you know, we don't want to turn your confirmation hearings, this is a confirmable position.
So they said, okay, you're our guy, but we're going to have to wait until after Congress goes home in 92, and then as soon as that happens, and then Bush will be re-elected, and then you'll be our guy, this is the Secretary of Energy for, it isn't called that anymore, but anyway, that's what the title was, and I can't recall now what it was, okay, well of course, Bush didn't win, he wasn't re-elected, but I, you know, and so the whole program got turned over to the Clintons.
I wonder if Cheney would have gone along with this, I don't know, but we'll never know, but when in came Clinton, and Hazel O'Leary and the Department of Energy, and the Congressman who died in office was Secretary of Defense, I can't recall his name right off the end, well, it doesn't matter, Aspen, well, at any rate, they immediately looked upon this non-Lugar program as a carrot they could use to force the Russians to disarm.
Well, now, this was never the intent of non-Lugar divinity, to disarm the Russians.
All they were concerned about was all of this fissile material that might get loose in the world, and that it was in our, United States, our national interest to help the Russians secure all that stuff, and make sure it was all accounted for, and all that sort of thing.
But that's not, that wasn't the Clinton, Gore, O'Leary, Aspen take on things.
And so they proceeded to use the monies that were appropriated every year, which was like half a million, I mean, half a billion, 500 million dollars a year, for like, you know, up until now.
And they bought, and they used it for everything under the sun, except helping the Russians.
You know, I'm laughing, but it was just unbelievable.
I mean, some years, the people who were actually doing this, securing all of this fissile material, trying to keep it out of the hands of terrorists and other people, we'd only get like 50 million dollars out of that.
You know, 500 million appropriated, and only 50 million actually coming to the, to be used for the purposes of...
Now, Gordon, in the larger sense, there's really, of countries that have the capability to deliver nuclear warheads on missiles that, you know, even conceivably would ever launch them at us, it's basically just Russia and China, right?
There's nobody else except the French and the British, basically.
I'm not even sure that the Chinese would fall in that category.
There's really just the Russians.
So really...
And why...
It started with Clinton, maybe it would have even happened if Bush, a senior, had been re-elected.
I can't tell you about that.
But certainly in 92, there were people in the Pentagon, Cheney and Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby and people like that.
I knew Cheney, but I didn't know Wolfowitz, and I didn't meet Cheney, I didn't meet Scooter Libby until much later.
But there may have been people who would have proceeded to attempt to use non-Lugar funds to disarm the Russians.
And of course, the Russians never came over here and said, we want to disarm.
What they said was, we've got tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that were built for this war that in Europe, Central Europe, tactical nuclear weapons, things of that nature, and we want to get rid of them, you know?
And so really, assuming that George Bush doesn't just sucker punch Vladimir Putin and start some craziness between our state and their state at this point, really the only danger of a nuclear bomb being brought to America one way or another and being set off is loose nukes or old nuclear warheads recycled and used by stateless terrorist groups, black market type stuff.
There's no other nuclear threat to America except perhaps this loose Russian material, and yet you're telling me that everything our government could have done to help allay that threat has been sabotaged, and as you said, the money was spent on everything but this.
Yeah, the worst example I can think of, and I'm, I had all the specifics about this at one time, and I'm talking off the top of my head now, so I have to be a little careful about it, but at one point, as a part of this defense conversion program, which is what the Pentagon was spending most of the money for, that was appropriated to help the Russians secure their missile material, the Pentagon issued a request for proposal, which is the way they do business, to American contractors saying, tell us what, how we should convert this Russian missile guidance factory into something peaceful, you know, beat your swords in the plowshares kind of thing, you know, a noble and all that sort of thing.
But once, the Russians weren't interested in converting their missile guidance plant into something else, this was just something that somebody in the Pentagon decided would be a good thing, and so contractors submitted their proposals, and then the Pentagon had another contractor, which is the way they do things, review those proposals and make a suggestion as to the winner.
And the winner was, and I don't know how far along this actually got towards implementing this winning bidder, but it was to convert that missile guidance factory into a factory that made soda pop bottling plants, you know, double cola is the name I remember of it, I think it's based in Alabama someplace, I think.
But in any case, nobody asked the Russians, and of course, they weren't interested in converting their missile guidance factory, and of course, none of this had anything to do with nuclear threat reduction in the sense that Nunn, Lugar, and Domenici originally envisioned it.
Now, let's see, there was one other thing.
The Clinton administration also dragged its feet on proceeding with the agreements that Bush elder had with Yeltsin on the establishment of this entity that was going to take this fissile material, plutonium and uranium, uranium-235, plutonium-239, and blend them down into fuel.
The elders signed the agreement, but President Clinton never asked for any funds to implement it.
So, eventually, Pete Domenici did it himself.
At the time, he was the chairman of the budget committee, and he busted his own budget to provide funding to implement this agreement that Bush elder had originally agreed to, and that Clinton had followed up on.
Well, I'm certain that the New York Times and the Washington Post will bring all this up during Hillary Clinton's run for the White House.
Oh, well, I don't know how much of it.
Bill Clinton, you can blame on Hillary.
Oh, plenty.
Come on.
Well, you know, if she really did, as lots of people say, decide to marry this no good on the grounds that she could get him into the White House, which apparently is the case, you know?
I mean, she apparently recognized right off the bat that somehow with a good woman behind him or something like that, he might get into the White House, and it worked.
Now, the next question is, of course, whether or not she can do it herself or not, and I don't know the answer to that.
Well, let me ask you this, because I'm just getting absolutely appalled, except for Congressman Ron Paul.
Every one of these people are going to pursue almost the same policy.
It's a continuation of the Clinton policy and the Bush Jr. policy, which apparently is to antagonize as much as possible everybody in the Middle East, whatever tribe or whatever, and also to throw down challenge after challenge to the Russians, hoping to provoke them into some damn thing, so we can kill all the Russians that are left over there.
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
Again, noting, as you said, they're the only ones who can actually fight back against us at this point.
But let me ask you, my understanding- They can wipe us out.
You mentioned- I mean, wipe us out in the sense that they could kill, I don't know what percentage it would be, but at least a quarter of our population, the Russians can do that tomorrow if they want to.
Yeah, they could destroy our entire civilization in one afternoon, no doubt about that.
But let me ask you about this.
You apparently do have doubts about China's ability to deliver warheads across the Pacific Ocean.
My understanding was that they had a pretty well-operating three-stage missiles.
Is that not right?
What I essentially said was, they have- Let's see.
One of the things that brought down the Soviet Union, I suppose, was maintaining all of these ballistic missile submarines on constant duty, having all of these missiles and silos and even the mobile missiles, that the cost of all that essentially was one of the contributing factors that broke up the Soviet Union, that drove them broke.
Now, the Russians are not doing that.
They're keeping- I think they've got a new set of ballistic missiles that are, I believe, mostly all of them are mobile.
We don't know where the hell they are, you know?
I mean, you talk about a first strike, how are you going to do a first strike when you don't even know where their missiles are?
I don't think they're spending much money, if at all, on their ballistic submarines, submarines that have ballistic missiles mounted in them.
And I think a lot of the missile fields, the hardened missile silos and things like that, were in Ukraine or Kazakhstan or places like that.
Okay.
So, the Russians, from what I can see, have done basically what Gorbachev started to do, and of course Yeltsin was kind of a loser, but the thing that's changed everything was that when people started driving up the price of oil and gas, natural gas, which occurred after 1998, which is when Putin came in as president, is the Russians no longer are broke, you know?
They got lots of money.
And so a lot of the considerations that prevailed in the early days of the Russian Federation went out the window.
And almost everything that Bush Jr. has done since he's been in office has to strengthen the Russian position, that is, they've got more money and their countries around the world are looking to Russia to stop Bush from any really wild things, you know?
But now I think China had never built up this enormous infrastructure.
They didn't have all these ballistic submarines, and they didn't have all these other kinds of things.
I think, I believe, I'm not sure about this, but they're essentially doing what the Russians are doing.
They're taking several hundred mobile ICBMs, and they've got warheads to put atop them, and they're sophisticated, apparently.
And so basically what they're saying is, look, you don't want to mess with us.
We've got 1.3 billion or 1.6 billion, I don't know what it is, but an enormous number of people.
And we can survive a first strike, you know?
That's been the Chinese position since Mao.
You don't frighten us, you know?
You want to kill a few hundred million Chinese?
Fine.
We'll kill a few hundred million Americans in retaliation, and then after the retaliation, where will we be?
Right, okay, yeah, I just wanted to make sure I understood you about that, about the state of their missile technology, but again, as compared to the US or the Soviet Union, they have not even a hundred missiles, they have, what, you're saying below 50 at this point?
Well, I don't know.
Hundreds?
I don't know.
Yeah.
And I'm not sure that we know.
You know, if they're mobile, how would you know?
Well, that's a good point.
And intelligence agencies, you know, I guess half the time they get it wrong and the other half they're lying, so you can't really take what they say as word for it.
But now, you also brought up the Middle East and America's policy of aggression over there, and this is something that I know that you've been concerned about for a long time, particularly the expansion of the war from Iraq into Iran, and it seems like, I guess, if you have to weigh them, the most convincing excuse to have a war against Iran is that they're on the verge of having the ability to produce a nuclear weapon, is what they keep saying.
And so, you say that's ridiculous.
Explain to me and explain to my audience why it is, Dr. Prairie, they're a nuclear physicist, that it's ridiculous that Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons.
Okay.
Let's look at a country that has produced nuclear weapons and tested them, Pakistan.
Pakistan was able to do that because they never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Okay.
Now, they...
And just so you know, just so you know, Dr. Prairie, we got 10 minutes.
Oh, well, okay.
So we're going to do our 10-minute version of Iran Can't Make Nukes here.
Well, let's say what you should worry about if you want to worry about something.
All right.
We're stirring up all of this inter-religious, inter-sect, inter-tribal strife in the Middle East, and it includes Turkey and Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and apparently there are some people in our country that would be just happy as we could be if they all were in there killing each other.
Now, the problem that I see is, Iran's not a problem as far as nuclear weapons is concerned, and I can't tell you all that in 10 minutes, and we now know that Iraq wasn't.
Okay?
And certainly, Afghanistan isn't, in spite of the fact that some people say Al-Qaeda wants nuclear weapons, but Pakistan has got nuclear weapons.
I don't know how many they've got, but we know that because they tested them, and there are even some people who think that maybe we've got some kind of deal with Iran where, I'm sorry, with Pakistan, wherein we've provided them certain, I don't know, security features like we have on our stockpiles, so that we sort of have an idea as to where their nuclear weapons are actually stored.
But that's beside the point.
Pakistan, the situation in Pakistan is getting worse by the day.
Almost everybody who faces and understands that worries about what happens then if they all get to fighting against each other in Pakistan.
Who winds up with those nuclear weapons?
Well, Musharraf himself, in a couple of columns I've quoted that, when they did an award ceremony for A.Q.
Khan, the guy that's so vilified around the world these days, and they gave him a special award, and in that award ceremony, Musharraf, over and over again, talked about what heroes they were because they had developed the Islamic bomb.
Those are his words.
Now, I don't know which sect of Islam is going to win out in various countries and things of that nature, but if anybody wants to worry about nuclear weapons in this country being set off in this country by terrorists, you better worry about what in the world we're doing over there to stir up trouble that's going to affect those Pakistani nuclear weapons.
And you know, it's been brought up on this show before by other experts, the possibility at least.
Well, I don't want to say who I think it was because I might be wrong, but somebody with credibility on this show said that that was one way that Iran might be able to fight back against the United States, would be to engineer a coup or at least widespread chaos in Pakistan and destabilize the Musharraf regime would be one way that they could fight back against us, asymmetrical warfare.
And even though we only do have a few minutes here, I would like to at least try to sum up the case against Iran's nuclear weapons program, against its existence, from what I understand from you and from other sources as best I can, and then maybe I can get you to answer me kind of yes, no questions as to whether I'm on the right path.
I believe what you were starting to say there was that the reason the Pakistanis have nukes and the Iranians don't is because the Iranians are members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
They have a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has been all around and had what amounts to carte blanche to inspect all of Iran's programs, all the big deal about they have secret this and secret that.
Those things that were secret were things that were not required to be declared by their signature to the treaty and the IAEA Safeguards Agreements and so forth.
But as soon as all those things were required, they fessed up to every bit of it, and that to this day there are cameras and sensors and IAEA inspectors in, out, and standing around in Iran monitoring their nuclear program, and that there's no evidence that they've been able to enrich uranium to anywhere near a percentage of purity of uranium-235 that would be required to make a warhead.
Is that basically right, Dr. Prather?
It's all more than basically correct, and the only thing I would say is they were doing all of this cooperating voluntarily with the IAEA, allowing them to go virtually anywhere they wanted to go, unannounced and all that sort of thing, until John Bolton and some of the other people put the squeeze on them, got the UN Security Council to illegally impose sanctions on them to keep them from doing what the IAEA Safeguards Agreement and the Non-Proliferation Treaty gave them the inalienable right to do, namely, to develop a nuclear or direct the peaceful nuclear fuel cycle.
So, about a year ago, under all this pressure, the Iranian parliament, whatever it's called, Duma or something like that, told the Iranian Nuclear Atomic Energy Agency, stop voluntarily complying with these jokers, even directed them to stop doing it, and so the Iranian Nuclear Agency said, okay, we've been voluntarily complying far beyond what our safeguards agreement requires of us.
From now on, we're just going to do what our safeguards agreement requires us to do.
And that is the thing that has resulted in the so-called debate in the White House being, can we force the Iranians to give up their inalienable rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium diplomatically, or are we going to have to bomb them?
They're both immoral and illegal positions.
Right, and in fact, to be very clear, Saturday's New York Times front page, that is exactly the debate in the administration, is based on the premise that not one centrifuge spins in Iran.
And so, help me understand, and help my audience understand then, Dr. Brother, if the Iranians, Iranians can master the technology required to enrich uranium to 3.5% for their electricity cycle, does that mean that they can just flip a light switch and make a nuclear bomb the next day, or what?
No, it doesn't mean that at all, because it's not a simple thing to get the 90% pure U-235 or less, but you can't do it at all while the IAEA is sitting there looking over your shoulder.
You know, they'll know immediately when you start modifying your cascades and you try to start making 90% or better weapons-grade plutonium.
And now you've said, you've said before, uranium, you mean, right?
Yeah, I'm sorry, uranium.
Okay, and now you said before, I believe in your article, you believe the policy really is to try to provoke the Iranians from withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
That way they don't have the unalienable right anymore, and we have the excuse.
It isn't just me that said that.
John Bolton said that after he was no longer our ambassador to the United Nations.
You can see it.
You know, it's on a video conference call with, was it AIPAC?
I've forgotten now.
Do you remember?
No, I'm not certain.
Yeah, well, I referenced it in one of my columns, and...
I'll see if I can find the YouTube of that for us.
And now you're saying that John Bolton says in this statement that, yes, our policy is deliberately to try to get them to withdraw from the treaty as our excuse to have another aggressive war.
No, he said that that is what he hoped would happen.
I see.
There is a difference there.
That's good clarification.
That's right.
Because as a private citizen, I can now say that that's what I hoped would happen, or will still happen.
All right.
We're all out of time.
I thank you very much for your time today, Dr. Gordon Prather.
Well, sure.
It's good to talk to you again, Scott.
I hope we're still around here.
I don't know.
It's just terrible to be in a position of essentially, you know, defending the International Atomic Energy Agency against all these assaults, you know.
It's our agency.
We set it up, the United States, and now it's in the way of some of the people in Washington.
They want to get rid of it, and I think that's a bad idea.
Well, you're putting up a hell of a good fight, and everybody can read everything you write along these lines at antiwar.com/prather.
Thanks again, Gordon.
Okay.
We'll see you next time.