All right, this is Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas, and it's been way too long since I've talked to Dr. Gordon Prather.
Welcome back to the show, Gordon.
Glad to be back, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to talk with you again, and for those of you who aren't familiar, I'm sure most of you are, Dr. Prather writes for us every weekend, every Saturday and Sunday.
You can find his articles at antiwar.com, and he's got the extensive background knowledge, not only in all matters, well, virtually all matters nuclear, but also in all the treaties and all the world law, all the international organizations and the specifications of all the additional protocols, to all the safeguards agreements, and all the things that you and I don't understand.
He can explain it all, and so I'm very happy to talk with you again, sir.
Let's go ahead and start with the recent accusations, if it's okay with you.
I'd like to ask you about this stuff, about the implication that somehow the North Koreans and the Syrians are working together on a secret nuclear program.
Do you know what's going on there?
No, not at all, but I do know that Syria is a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty.
The last time I looked, Syria had practically nothing of a nuclear nature, and what they did have was subject to IAEA safeguards, which of course is not quite true of North Korea now, thanks to George Bush abrogating the agreed framework of 1994, which froze the North Korean nuclear programs right where they were.
Now as far as the Syrians, there was that recent blog entry by Joe Cinceroni from the Carnegie Endowment where he talked about Syria's nuclear program and described it as basically an experimental kind of thing like you'd have at the University of Texas here in Austin, something like that.
Is that your understanding?
Well I haven't checked that recently because I think it's a non-story, basically.
I was just looking at an interview at the American Enterprise Institute website, which is where Bonkers Bolton has returned.
He used to run that place when I was in Washington, AEI, and now he's back there again, although I don't think he's really in charge.
But anyway, it's an interview, and I was reading it just a little while ago.
He's the one who I think more than anybody else is alleging that there is this nuclear connection between Syria and North Korea, and he even says, well, he suspects, you know, it might be, or something like that.
So I think that's really a non-entity.
I would kind of like to talk about this interview that you just did with Clemens.
What's his first name?
Steve Clemens from the Washington Note, the New America Foundation.
That is really excellent, and I would urge anybody who listens to this interview to go listen to Clemens' interview if they haven't done it already.
I would defer to him on all of the geopolitical kinds of things, and would like to talk about something I know something about.
I started out as a naval officer, I was an instructor in the tri-service program that instructed mostly Navy people, but also the Air Force and Army people, and the care and feeding of nuclear weapons that were deployed at that time.
And I was a member of an inspection team, operational inspection team, that went out and inspected all of the units that were deployed in the western Pacific that had nuclear weapons.
And as I say, I was involved in operational readiness inspections, where these things were taken out of quasi-stockpile and put on missiles and airplanes and things like that.
Okay.
Then I went to the Lawrence Livermore Lab, where I was a member of the Reaction History Group, and we actually did the measurements, mostly gamma ray and neutron emission from nuclear weapons tests, to see if the emissions that we measured tracked what the theoretical physicists expected to occur.
Then I went to Sandia National Laboratories, where I was involved mostly in vulnerability testing of our nuclear weapons.
I did some work in the lethality.
So I need to talk a little bit about this enormous nuclear weapons program that we've had over these generations, and the results of which are largely irrelevant to today's world.
We spend an enormous amount of money making nuclear warheads that we thought would be able to intercept incoming Soviet warheads in outer space, or near space, and render them inoperable, if not destroy them.
We did a lot of underground tests on our ability to do that.
Those were called lethality tests, spent a lot of money on that.
Then we spent a lot of money on making our ICBM warheads as invulnerable as we could to their nuclear ABM capabilities, what we assumed their capabilities would be.
Well, none of that's relevant when it comes to North Korea or Iran or anybody else.
The only country it's still relevant to, in my opinion, is Russia.
Russia still has a lot of ICBMs, and they're mobile now, most of them, and they've got multiply independent targeted warheads, we may or may not have a system, I don't think we do, that could intercept those and with any degree of certainty knock most of them down.
Okay.
Then the next thing that happened was in 1991, when it was clear that the Soviet Union was about to collapse, the Warsaw Pact had already collapsed, and so all of the tactical nuclear weapons that we had developed, and those didn't cost very much money, but those were to be delivered by fighter bombers and by cruise missiles and things like that.
We withdrew those, we the United States, unilaterally withdrew from Europe and all over the world all of those kinds of missiles that would have been delivered by short range missiles or aircraft or cruise missiles that were to be used in a huge massed armor battle, you know?
Right.
George Bush Sr. did that.
The kind that's never ever going to occur ever again.
Okay.
You're saying it was George Bush Sr. at the end of the Cold War who did that?
That's right.
In 1991, George Bush did that, and by the way, at the time, Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense.
In 1981, the Israelis, who were, the government was paranoid then, as it appears to be now, had convinced themselves, somehow or another, that the Iraqis, Saddam Hussein was dictator there, who were at that time engaged in a war with Iran that lasted eight or nine years, and had a reactor, built by the French, called OSIRAC, which was basically a research reactor, which used moderately highly enriched uranium as fuel, but they had a nuclear weapons program.
This is 1981.
I was in the Pentagon at the time, and now, since 2003, we've got access to all the records in Iran that, you know, and we now know that that paranoia by the Israelis was unfounded.
At that time, the Iraqis did not have a nuclear weapons program.
Right.
It was the attack on their reactor that drove their program underground.
They decided to start making nukes.
That's right.
It was an IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency, safeguarded reactor, which was being built by the French, completely in the open, and the Israelis attacked it anyway.
You know, paranoid, totally paranoid, and we allowed them to do it, basically.
And now I happen to be looking at the U.N. resolution that resulted from that, Resolution 487 of 1981, and here's the guts of it, strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct, two, calls upon Israel to refrain in the future from any such acts or threats thereof, further considers that the said attackóand this is the important part for meófurther considers that the said attack constitutes a serious threat to the entire safeguards regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the foundation of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Okay.
Well, and they also said, you know, you've got to pay for the damage you did, and don't ever do it again.
Well, they are doing it again.
They are threatening, and they've got nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn't.
Everything in Iran is safeguarded, as everything in 1981 in Iraq was safeguarded, but they went ahead and bombed it anyway.
Okay?
Well, what Saddam Hussein discovered was, gee, maybe we don't need to tell the IAEA about anything untilóand maybe not even thenówe actually introduce NPT, Nonproliferation Treaty proscribed materials into these facilitiesóthat is, highly-induced uranium, for example, or anything like that, you know.
So they set out on this program, this multibillion-dollar program, the Iraqis did, but until about 1990, they never did anything in that program that they would have been required to report to the International Atomic Energy Agency, because the threshold is, if you start screwing around with uranium and things like that, then you're supposed to tell the IAEA about it.
Okay.
As of today, there's no evidence whatsoever that Iran has ever done that.
In other words, they've not violated the Nonproliferation Treaty.
Well, they have centrifuges spinning, right?
And they've announced all that to you.
And they're all safeguarded.
They informed the IAEA, as they were required to do, six months prior to the actual introduction of uranium hexafluoride into those centrifuges.
They declared all of that stuff.
There's no instance that we know ofóthey did a few experiments wherein it involved gram quantities, in some cases microgram quantities of materials, and they said, well, gee, that's just research.
We're not required to report that.
The IAEA's position is, yes, you are.
And most of these things that are unresolved, that El Baradai is talking about, that he wants cleared up by the end of the year, most of those things involve those little experiments with tiny amounts of materials and things of that nature.
But what I wanted to get toóI don't know how much time we've got here.
We've got plenty.
We've got another half an hour.
Okay.
And I'm sitting here on the edge of my seat, riveted.
So I guess, wait a minute, let's back it up a little bit for people tuning in.
I'm talking with Dr. Gordon Prather.
He knows everything there is about nuclear bombs and international treaties along those lines and so forth.
And so far he started out with his experience in nuclear weapons and their usefulness against third world countries and anti-ballistic missile systems versus a theoretical showdown with the Soviet Union, that kind of thing.
Then we got into the Non-Proliferation Treaty, how it applies to Iraq and Iran and how basically in both cases, Iraq back in the early 80s and Iran today, they're doing everything just like they're supposed to do and the Israelis slash Americans are threatening to bomb them anyway.
And so now I think we're headed toward the implications of this for the larger nuclear posture of the United States and the world.
Is that right?
Yes.
The theme that I'm heading toward is, and a lot of your listeners may object to this, but it is not in our interest, United States' interest, for the rest of the world to know the limitations of our nuclear capability.
Let's put it that way.
You mean in the sense that the average person thinks of, you know, you say nuclear bomb, they picture the biggest hydrogen bomb in the world and it's unstoppable, and that we want people to picture that rather than understand the limitations of nuclear weapons?
Well, I don't know that we want them to, but it would not be to our advantage for them not to think that.
Well, now here's an example of that, is a big part of the reason that some of the first dispatches from Weller out of Nagasaki after the war were censored is because there are American POWs in Nagasaki who survived the atomic bombings simply by ducking into a trench, and here was the super bomb straight out of the comic books, and they didn't want to have to say that, like, oh, by the way, you could be 300 yards away and survive as long as there's a trench handy.
Yeah, and the fire raids in Tokyo were far more devastating than the nuclear weapon attacks.
The weapons that the North Koreans have apparently built now, and that Iran conceivably could build, and that Iraq conceivably could have built, would have been like the ones we dropped on Nagasaki.
All three of those weapons would have been implosion devices, the North Korean device would have been plutonium-based, and the alleged Iranian device would be uranium-based, presumably, 90%, 235%, as would have been the Iraqi device.
Building an implosion device is not a trivial undertaking, and it usually involves a vast amount of experimental work not involving a nuclear explosion, and there's no indication that any of those three countries have ever done well.
The Iraqis had started a little bit, but they didn't even know about how to build an implosion device until they went to a convention sponsored by the Department of Energy in Oregon in 1989.
We saw the North Koreans fail, basically, at an implosion bomb almost a year ago.
Well, no, it didn't fail.
There was apparently a measurable yield, not design yield, terrible waste of plutonium on their part, but apparently they did get yield.
According to the reports I've seen by our samplers, you know, that there was some leakage that is under...
Well, let me get back to where we are.
So, what I've said is, is that let's suppose that, and again, I encourage people to go listen to Clemens, but let's suppose that there is some kind of accident which starts out with relatively conventional devices being swapped between us and the Iranians.
Something that looks like a pretty strong possibility.
Well, and all of the reports I've seen said, well, if we do launch a shock and awe attack on 2,000 targets in Iran, which we could probably do, the Air Force could do, the Navy perhaps could help.
The planners that I've seen says, and while we're at it, we might as well take out these nuclear facilities, these IAEA safeguarded nuclear facilities that the Israelis want us to take out.
There's no reason to take them out, rational reason to take them out, because they're all IAEA safeguarded, and you're going to get the same kind of condemnation.
Well, no, we'd veto it.
We wouldn't allow another resolution to pass like 487, which says, you know, you just wiped out the damned nuclear non-proliferation regime.
That's what you've done.
Right.
What's the word?
What are you going to do now?
Or allow the Israelis to do it again.
Okay.
Well, anyhow, eventually, in my opinion, even if it started out that way, with just use of conventional weapons, there might well come a time, maybe after we'd had an aircraft carrier or something sunk in the Persian Gulf or something like that, that we would then resort to nuclear weapons.
Let me go ahead and say here that there have been reports, I know I'm not teaching you anything, you know this, but for the audience's benefit, for the past couple of years, there have been reports from Philip Giraldi and the American conservative, from Seymour Hersh and the New Yorker and others, that indicate that the nuclear option is quote-unquote on the table for using against Iran's nuclear facilities, I know at least one of which, the Natanz facility is buried under 85 feet of granite, and the idea has been floated that nuclear weapons would be used for that.
In fact, I think it was the last time that I spoke with Philip Giraldi, Dr. Prather, he said to me that his understanding is that right now, the nuclear option for Iran is on the table in two ways.
One would be possibly to use against facilities like Natanz, and then secondly, I think the way he said it was to keep them in our back pocket in case they try to fight back, for example, against our guys in Iraq, and that kind of thing, that we can basically say listen, you're going to stand there and take it while we bomb you, and if you do really fight back against us, then we'll use nuclear weapons on you.
So I'm not predicting this necessarily or saying everyone alert, alert, America is about to nuke Iran necessarily.
I believe Philip Giraldi, when he says that his understanding is that they are seriously contemplating using nuclear weapons against this country, Iran, that has never attacked us.
Okay, now, not to bring in the following seems almost extraneous detail.
During the 80s, the Reagan years, I was chief scientist for the Army, and as a consequence of that, I was a VIP observer, participant, whatever you want to call it, to reforgeur 82, that was the NATO exercises, full up NATO exercises we conducted in 1982, mostly in Germany.
And we had a helicopter, there were three of us in the little VIP contingency, and Lieutenant Colonel Shep hurting us.
And we flew all around, you know, spent several days flying over the reforgeur 82 activities, including the Germans and the Americans and all that sort of thing.
And this was the thing that amazed me about it, the thing that really came back to me.
Here you fly, you fly, and you fly, and you fly, or you helicopter, or you helicopter, and you don't see a damn thing.
You know that there's something, you know, hundreds of thousands of troops out there conducting maneuvers.
And all you see is farm life or maybe a car driving along the Autobahn or something like that.
And then somebody says, there's something, and so you look over here and here's a regiment or something like that, an armored regiment or something like that.
And so they occupy somebody's farm, okay?
And they're all sitting there and most of them not moving.
And then you fly, and you fly, and you fly, and you don't see anything.
And then somebody says, okay, well there's the so-and-so unit, and there they are.
And you know, they occupy somebody's farm.
And what you're used to seeing in these war pictures and things like that, these maps where everything is colored in red or something like that, and you assume that, I guess you assume, that it's like World War I, where they were armed shoulder to shoulder all the way from Switzerland to the sea, you know?
There literally was a line of troops, okay?
But that isn't the way modern battlefields are.
And it's not clear that the nuclear weapons that we developed for use in tactical situations on a battlefield situation would be of any value in a modern battlefield, because you don't see large concentrations of forces like that.
They're all over the damn place, because they're mobile, you know, they don't have to be all in the same place.
Right.
I mean, what you're saying basically is these nukes were designed for keeping the Soviets from rolling into Western Europe.
Yeah, like World War II, with these massive armored divisions of thousands of tanks in the battles of Kursk in the summer of 1943.
Literally thousands of tanks fought against each other, and there were infantry following along with them.
And we've already discovered in Iraq how useless a tank is when people have got hand grenades that attack from the top, you know?
Right.
If a guy can run up and throw a little hand grenade, and it'll knock out a, I don't know what an Abrams tank costs these days, but, you know, 30 million dollars, something like that?
Forty million?
I think, Dr. Prather, the point that you're getting at here, I think, is the point that many people make in a lot of different circumstances, whether they're talking about the dollar or, you know, various degrees or circumstances about our military posture.
So the common theme here, I think, is that the Bush-Cheney regime is killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Not just for, you know, us regular people who would like to, you know, go about our business and make our money and be okay, but they're even killing the empire.
They're taking the global dominant posture that we already had, and they're overdoing it so much that they're destroying their own credibility as an imperial force.
Well, I'm not going to defend the empire, but I think what you're saying is right.
What I am saying, on the basis of what I know, is that most of our nuclear arsenal would be of no value whatsoever when it came to doing anything to Iran, okay?
And if we do use them, we'll prove it to the world.
Well, no, what we'll wind up having to do, we won't be able to use them at all.
The ones we'll wind up using are the people killers.
And that's the only thing, you know, we won't, there won't be any military strategic targets that are worthy of using nuclear weapons, but what we'll wind up doing is killing all the people in Tehran.
That's the logical way in which this thing will go.
And that's what scares me.
Just to back up a little bit from the mass holocaust and everything, you're saying that it wouldn't even do any good to drop tactical nukes, say, on the Natanz facility, it wouldn't destroy it?
Well, in the first place, again, it's an IAEA safeguarded facility.
It is a violation of the charter, of UN charter, and it is also a violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Not that these people in charge give a damn about any of that.
Not that any of the Likudniks in Israel care about any international law, or Bolton cares anything about international law, although he's an international lawyer, you know.
I'm not.
He is.
And he's the one that goes around attempting to destroy all of this stuff.
But my view is, is that there's no reason, really, to suppose that we could do that.
We have a whole class of nuclear weapons, ICBM launched, that are designed to destroy a missile silo, or even a small field of a missile silo, and it would do it by blast, by just fracturing the rock, causing a little earthquake where those things are.
Well, but there's a hole in the ground, you know, where the missile comes out, and there's a blast door, a heavy concrete blast door, that covers that silo.
That's for the silo.
Of course, the Russian missiles, ICBM now, are all mobile, or most of them are mobile.
They aren't, you know, you don't even know where they are, so you don't have to go around fracturing rock to knock them out.
The big problem is finding out where they are.
But back to what we're talking about here.
I keep saying, in that article by Clemens, he says, he quotes some high-level Bush person, they're saying, well, one of the reasons why we don't want to attack Iran is because our intelligence is sketchy.
We don't know where all these nuclear facilities are.
That's the wrong way to put it.
We know where all their nuclear facilities are.
We just don't know where these are that are alleged to be there that probably aren't there, you know?
They don't know.
They've got them all buried somewhere, and we don't know where they are.
Well, and they say, well, we can't attack them because we don't know where they are.
But there's another reason why we can't attack them.
They don't exist.
Well, I guess as long as they're using it as a reason to not bomb them, that's kind of take it halfway.
Well, yeah, I agree.
But like I say, the big problem is that Cheney and his cabal have already decided that the way to go about this is to inch into it, you know?
Let me ask you something, Dr. Gordon Prather.
You know the Cheney cabal, don't you?
Let's put it this way.
My then wife worked for Dick Cheney when he was chief of staff in the Ford White House, and that's where I met him.
And you've met a lot of these other neoconservatives, too.
That's right.
And can you confirm for me that Ronald Reagan called them the crazies and that they were to be kept in the basement?
No, I think that's, well, I don't think so.
I think that's Colin Powell, isn't it?
I hadn't heard that Reagan had said that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Yeah.
Well, I heard that attributed to Bush and Scowcroft, and then recently I heard that attributed to Reagan as well.
I wanted to see if you could confirm it.
Well, that might have been, although one of the somewhat disturbing things to me was there were people who disagreed violently with Reagan's policy of trying to win the Cold War the way he did it, that is, without firing a shot.
And among them were Richard Perle and a few others that I won't name right now.
When it became clear at Reykjavik or whatever it is in Iceland that Reagan was going to be somewhere, then they jumped on the bandwagon.
And Perle, somehow or another, managed to get himself, made the NATO chief weenie, which should have been a State Department, well, I don't know about that, but in any case, he jumped on the bandwagon and became the biggest champion, practically, of Reagan's program.
Now, they all claimed at the time that they all knew that it would never work.
He would go up to Congress and tell them, now, we're not serious about this, but we don't want the Russians to know it, so we have to know about it.
But Reagan was serious about it.
You know, these people were disloyal, in my opinion, to Ronald Reagan, and the fact that Gorbachev and Reagan got along so well, and that's what caused the end of the Cold War with us, quote-unquote, winning it, you know.
It was a combination of the pressures from Afghanistan and from the pope and from the Polish shipyard workers.
To have the Cold War won in our favor made all of the Cheney cabal and the Richard Perle and the neo-crazies very unhappy, because they wanted to, you know, march in a parade down the streets of Moscow or something at a victory parade, and they were, and they're still trying to do that.
It would not make them unhappy at all, in my opinion, if they were to somehow or another trigger an all-out war between the United States and Russia.
That's how crazy they are.
Yeah, well, it does seem like they're trying to pick a fight one way or another with Russia.
I always thought that at the end of the Cold War, not that I approved of this, but I always thought the game plan would be to, even if we had to make serious concessions, bring Russia into NATO, and that it would be the North then taking over the South, you know, in a new alliance.
And yet, no, we're still kicking them while they're down, or I guess they're getting up anyway, despite our kicks at this point.
The thing that's puzzling to a lot of people, and I'm not a person who has privy to that kind of stuff, is at least what they say in public, what the Russians and the Chinese say in public about this whole thing.
I think what Clement has suggested is probably correct, and that is, they see the United States in a death spiral, and it's not to their advantage, well, it's not to the Russians' advantage, to stop it.
The Chinese are a little concerned, because they're our biggest supplier of- Yeah, they're our banker.
Yeah, and consumer products.
So they'd kind of hate to see us go away for a while.
I don't know why I'm laughing, but the point is, I'm sure that both the Russians and the Chinese view with certain degrees of alarm, what they can see is not just shooting ourselves in the foot, but- Shooting a bunch of people to death, too, taking them all with us.
Well, again, to sum up again, at the moment, we're considered to be a superpower for a lot of reasons, economically and all that sort of thing.
But the dollar's in trouble, and there are a few other things that indicate that we're going down, eventually.
And then also because of this tremendous nuclear weapons capability that we've got, which, in my view, is basically unusable.
And even that part of it that we could use in Iran, in the first place, it's not clear that a bunker-buster nuke would do any more to that facility at Matanz than precision-guided cruise missiles.
I don't know.
I guess it would.
But the basic thing, when you talk about a 10- to 20-kiloton nuclear weapon, the effects, when detonated on the ground, which is what would happen when you tried to knock out those nuclear facilities, the effect of a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon is essentially almost exactly the effect of having 10,000 tons of high explosives detonated there.
That is, almost all of the energy, almost all the effects are due to shock and blast waves.
A relatively small amount goes into radiation, and that radiation falls off rapidly with distance.
There is a problem with fallout, but basically the problems with fallout are, you know, you need to take a bath regularly or something like that, and don't eat something that's got radioactive contamination on it.
You know, the people that have gotten us all so scared of nuclear explosions have not studied carefully what the results of the Chernobyl accident was.
You know, that was a terrible thing in terms of fallout.
I don't remember right offhand, I read all the reports and actually participated in some efforts to try to ameliorate the consequences of that accident, but not at the time, of course, because at the time it was the Soviet Union, but after the Soviet Union split up and it was in Ukraine, which became an independent country in 1992, we went over there, a number of us did, from Los Alamos and Sandia and places like that, and looked mostly at the damage to the site and the efforts that were still ongoing to contain the radiation that, you know, that...
Well, anyway, you're not singing the praises of nukes, you're just saying, we may very well demonstrate how useless they are if we do use them on Iran, and that's going to compromise our collapsing empire even further.
That's right.
I'm essentially saying that it'll be like the shock and awe campaign that was supposed to scare the Iraqis into throwing violets at us or something like that, or roses.
I'm saying that, you know, most of the nuclear weapons in our stockpile were not designed for effecting regime change in Iran.
Yeah.
I can just see Cheney now, you know, ready in the nukes, and this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you.
Okay.
Now, real quick, and we only have like three minutes, so see if you can say this kind of fast as you can, and we can go over a little bit of time if we want, because it's Chaos Radio, but please help me very briefly understand what ElBaradei is doing with the IAEA.If I understood Gareth Porter right, he was saying that ElBaradei's basically figured out a way to get the Iranians to come clean with every single little thing, even the stuff they haven't even been required to come clean about before and all that, and that in doing so, this will somehow trigger the issue to automatically somehow go back to the IAEA and out of the Security Council or something.
Is he right, and or do I understand him right?
Well, I wrote a column, which you edit, a couple of weeks ago, wherein I took a different line than what Clemens did.
Well, I was talking about Porter there.
Did you read Porter's article?
Oh, I read Porter.
Okay.
But Clemens said something.
He said that he thought ElBaradei had set a trap for the Iranians.
I think that gives too much credit to ElBaradei, but what he has done, according to my column of a couple of weeks ago, he's essentially set a trap for Condi Rice or John Bolton.
How's that work?
Well, because of the way the resolution, the IAEA resolutions read, and the U.N.
Security Council resolution essentially says, you've got to comply with these IAEA resolutions.
That's the way it says it.
You know, we're going to apply sanctions until you comply with the resolution.
The IAEA resolution, okay.
But the IAEA resolution basically says, in order to ensure confidence that – and confidence in who?
Well, ElBaradei, because he's the director general of the IAEA secretariat.
So it says, in order to ensure confidence that the program is completely peaceful in Iran, we deem it necessary – that's the exact language – that you suspend uranium enrichment, that you sign the additional protocol to your safeguards agreement, that you do a couple of other things.
And then the kicker is, to satisfy the director general, ElBaradei, on the additional questions that he has remaining, that's the main thing in that resolution, is you've got to satisfy ElBaradei.
It says specifically that his concerns go beyond the protocol, go beyond the additional protocol.
It says right there that ElBaradei has got no business asking these questions.
But we deem it necessary that you do that in order for us to be satisfied that your program is perfectly peaceful.
Well, he's close to doing that.
He expects that by the end of this year, he'll be able to go back to the IAEA board and tell them, well, they've been cooperating wonderfully, and I am now satisfied.
They didn't – he won't say this, but this is – I'm going to pray they're saying.
They were not required under their safeguards agreement to satisfy me.
You the board of directors had no business requiring them to satisfy me.
But they did it anyway.
I'm satisfied.
So that really – The program is perfectly peaceful.
So that's it.
So that will take the wind out of Condi's sail, is what you're saying.
Oh, gee, yeah.
And of course, as far as Condi Rice and the rest of them are concerned, unacceptable, you know.
Well, of course, yeah, they need an excuse.
So is that right then that somehow it triggers the current state of affairs, whatever, one piece of paper or another, from the Security Council back to the IAEA's jurisdiction or some kind of thing like that?
I don't think – I don't see it that way.
I see what happens is, is that when Elbaradei makes these reports, he makes it not only to the IAEA board, but they go on to the General Assembly, UN General Assembly, and to the Security Council.
So what he will be reporting in his report is, I'm satisfied.
You've said that they need to do this and they need to do that, but I'm satisfied.
And that's the critical thing, you know.
He's the guy.
So you don't know necessarily about, you know, it'll trigger this or that technicality, exactly, just – I don't think that's the right word.
What I think will happen is, is that Russia and China will come in and say, okay, not only is Iran in compliance with its safeguards agreement, but if it was, subject to an additional protocol, it would be in compliance with it.
And not only that, but there are all these other weird things that Elbaradei wants to know about, like what happened back in 1981, that's none of his damn business, you know.
He's now satisfied.
So how can you conceivably go and say that – require anything of Iran?
They've gone a mile and then, you know, much, much, much further.
Okay, now, Doc, let me go ahead, and we're already over time, but I just want to discuss this real quick and give you a chance to comment as well.
I want to go ahead and defend you from an attack, which I don't know if you've ever even suffered or not, but I can imagine that someone might think, well, this Dr. Gordon Pray the Guy is simply a partisan of the Ayatollah or some kind of silly thing like that.
And you know, I'm worried kind of that people might think that about me.
I do nothing but basically, for intensive purposes, defend Iran on this show every day.
And so, you know, I just want to say for myself, I'm no fan of any theocracy anywhere, not particularly the Persian one either.
My only problem is that my government seems to be much more dangerous to me and to them, and you know, and they use basically nothing but lies to justify the aggression that they're trying to get away with.
So it's not that I like the Iranians, it's just that I don't like my own government either.
And so I wanted to give you an opportunity to comment along those lines, sir.
My columns almost entirely are about what I know about.
They have nothing to do with any geopolitics.
And what I say is that this administration, the Bush administration, is following in the footsteps of the Clinton administration and before it.
And it is increasing the probability by destroying, intentionally destroying the International Atomic Energy Agency and the non-proliferation regime is increasing the likelihood that nuclear weapons will someday be used against Americans here at home.
That's my guiding mantra, I guess, something like that.
It's irrelevant whether it's Iraq, to me, whether it's Syria or Iraq or Iran or India, even we could talk for a long time about what Condi Rice and the rest of them are doing in India, how that undermines the non-proliferation regime and how that makes nuclear weapons being used against us in this country.
And once again, that is the terrorist dream weapon, a nuclear weapon, a small one, like the, you know, not a small in size, but a primitive first-generation nuclear weapon delivered in a U-Haul truck or a, I don't want to give a, you know, a rental truck.
But that's, you know, when Al-Qaeda first tried to bring down the World Trade Center, they did it with a bomb, which we now know was built according to a manual supplied by the CIA to the Afghan insurgency back in the 80s.
That's how they learned how to make this bomb, fertilizer and fuel oil and things like that, the same kind of bomb that, what's his name, no, the guy that used it in Oklahoma City, got his name already, same kind of bomb, probably built from the same manual.
But anyway, Al-Qaeda drove that truck into the garage under one of the World Trade Center and they apparently had some calculations that if it went off there, it would not only bring down that building, but it might bring down the other one, too.
Well, it didn't bring down either one of them.
And I've seen studies on why it might have, but not where they put, where they parked the truck.
And the way they caught these guys, you remember how they caught them?
Yeah, well, one of them, well, the real guy, Rems Yusef, got away, but the one guy went and turned, went to get his money back for the truck.
Yeah, and how did they know that was the truck?
Because there was a serial number on an axle, which wasn't destroyed by high explosives.
Well, and the FBI knew who all those guys were before the bombing anyway, there's that too.
The point is, is that the real concern that we ought to have in this country, as opposed to the Israelis, okay, is somehow or another Al-Qaeda getting ahold of a nuclear weapon and smuggling it into this country, which wouldn't be all that difficult, and setting it off, you know, and it would most likely be a Hiroshima-type bomb, a gun weapon, because they are so simple.
And now what you're saying, basically, is this is your bottom line, this is the reason you write what you write for Antiwar.com, is because your concern is that American policy is making that more and more likely, rather than less.
Right.
I read in the articles that I, columns that I wrote in the summer of 2002, summer of 2002, that the policies that the Bush administration was already instituting were gonna make that more likely.
Now, it still hasn't happened, so I've been, you know, holding my breath, been five years now, and they haven't managed to get their hands on one, I don't think.
But...
Well, let's hope not.
And the point is, as I say, is that it's, and like Scott Ritter says, the people that Dick Cheney-Kabal really don't believe this, they do not believe that the North Koreans had a secret nuclear weapons program, or that the Iranians have a secret nuclear program, or that the Iraqis had a nuclear secret program in 2003, you know?
They knew that's not true, and yet they went ahead anyway, because they knew they could get everybody on board.
Wolfowitz said that himself, he said, well, the only right reason that we could all agree on, you know, and we're still at it.
And the consequences, as Clemens says, I don't even want to think about it.
And the worst possible case, these crazies will get us in a war with Russia, and then that really is serious.
That would be serious.
Yeah, well, as the young kid who got tasered the other day said to John Kerry, hey, if you're so concerned about it, remove him from power.
And seems like, you know, that would be perfectly within the control of the Congress to, well, we know how to keep the nukes out of the hands of the neocons, and that is remove George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Well, yeah.
Simple enough.
And don't vote for this U.S.
-India deal either, you know, that's another whole can of worms.
Yeah, maybe we should talk about that on the show coming up next week or sometime.
Yeah, I don't know as much about that as I do about most things.
You know, I don't know for sure that India or Pakistan have deliverable nuclear weapons that would perform as designed.
You know, how would you know?
Yeah, I don't know.
And I don't have time to ask you about it anymore either, so.
But I really appreciate your time.
Again, I'll go listen to Porter's piece, and then I encourage other people to go listen to Clements.
He makes a couple of errors in there.
He says plutonium when he means uranium, but that's okay.
A slight thing, depending on whether it's an accusation or whether it's one debunking an accusation.
All right.
And so, yeah, thank you very much, everybody.
Dr. Gordon Prather writes for AntiWar.com every Saturday and Sunday.
You can read what he writes at AntiWar.com/Prather.
And I really appreciate your time today.
You all shed a lot of light on these things for us, Gordon.
Okay.
Thank you.
And we'll see you next time.
