All right, my first welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and welcoming to the show Joe Cirincione.
He's a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he's also the director of nuclear policy.
He's the author of the book, Bomb Scare, the History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, and is the former director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Welcome to the show, Joe.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
Ah, well, it's very good to have you on, and in fact, there's been a few times over the last couple of years that I've considered bringing on to discuss one issue or another and never got around to it, but I'm glad I finally did.
Great, well, it's a pleasure to be here.
So it was the sixth of this month, correct, that Syria bombed something or other in, pardon me, Israel bombed something or other in Syria, and the leak was that perhaps it was tied somehow to their nuclear program.
What can you tell us about that?
Well, this is a story that's just piled hyperbole upon assumption, upon speculation.
I've got on record saying I think this story is just nonsense.
There's almost nothing we actually know about what happened with this bombing attack beyond the fact that the Israeli plane hit something in Syria almost two weeks ago, but it hasn't stopped former UN Ambassador John Bolton or the editorial page of the Washington Post or some of the leading neoconservatives in the country from alleging that what was hit was a Syrian-North Korean nuclear project in Syria and that this was the beginning of a Syrian nuclear weapon program.
Now, that kind of speculation is the kind of thing we heard in the run-up to the war in Iraq about what Saddam Hussein was up to, and we're seeing a replay here with Syria.
It concerns me because we seem to have our media falling into the same pattern of almost hysterical reporting about issues with very little fact to back them up.
Now, the factual basis is this.
Syria has had a nuclear research program for about 40 years, has been aided by about a dozen different countries in that program, including the United States, who at one point trained a Syrian nuclear scientist.
It's been a well-monitored program.
It's the kind of research program that many universities have.
They have a very small 27-kilowatt actual reactor that basically produces radioisotopes, things for medical use and research, but it's nowhere near the kind of program you would need for a nuclear weapons program.
Syria doesn't have the financial, technical, or industrial basis for such a program, so there's a huge leap to go from this basic, rudimentary program they have to a nuclear weapons threat.
It's disturbing that some of the leading newspapers in the country, including the Washington Post, have made that leap with almost no factual basis.
And now the reactor that they do have, does it not produce plutonium at all as a waste product?
Well, every reactor produces some plutonium.
That is, the uranium in the fuel rods is, over time, converted into plutonium.
But in order to have a reactor that would produce plutonium for a bomb, it has to be fairly large.
For example, the North Korean-sized reactor.
And then you have to have a reprocessing facility that can break those fuel rods down and extract the plutonium.
The reactor in Syria is way too small for any kind of extraction, nor do they have the extraction facility to actually reprocess the plutonium, so it falls short on two counts.
Now do the Syrians, are they a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and are they a member in good standing with the International Atomic Energy Agency?
Yes, they are, on both counts, and that's how they got the nuclear aid in the first place.
So they're a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In fact, I was in Vienna, Austria just last week at the General Conference of the IAEA, and I spoke to, I would say, two dozen officials while I was there from a number of countries, including the United States, and the IAEA experts on Syria, and nobody put much credence behind these stories.
Nobody thought that there was any kind of serious weapons threat coming out of Syria.
They couldn't understand where these stories were coming from.
Hello, Scott, this is Joe Ferranzione calling you back.
Hey, what happened?
We had a problem at our end.
Our phone system just collapsed.
Oh, really?
Okay.
And the whole system went down, and I could hear you, but I couldn't talk.
And now the whole system shut down, so I'm calling you back on my cell phone.
Oh, okay.
Well, I appreciate that, and I guess, you know, that just proves we're having such an important conversation that the National Security Agency would see fit to destroy your whole foundation.
Phone system?
All right.
Okay.
All right, so the awesome question that I was asking when the phone system went out was about your speculation as to why the neocons are pushing this line.
Is this about Syria?
Is this about North Korea?
A little bit of both?
Well, here's what seems likely, that Israel, for its own reason, conducted this strike on Syria.
I don't know exactly what's there, but the best informed speculation I heard was that this was actually a missile program that North Korea and Syria had been working on, not nuclear at all.
But once that happened, the neoconservatives here seized on it as an opportunity to strike a blow against a deal they've never liked, which is a U.S.
-negotiated deal with North Korea to end the North Korea nuclear program in exchange for the U.S. giving diplomatic recognition to North Korea.
The neocons, particularly John Bolton, those at the Weekly Standard or the American Enterprise Institute, see this as appeasement.
In Vice President Cheney's words from 2004, we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it.
And they are actually against negotiations with regimes like that in North Korea or Iran or previously in Iraq, because they believe that we should use the U.S. military to overthrow these regimes, not to somehow accommodate them.
So they stirred this pot up, leaked what was supposedly intelligent about the Syria-North Korean program in an effort to try to derail the six-party talks.
Fortunately, so far, they've failed.
The six-party talks are set to convene again later this week in China.
And it looks like we're really heading towards a breakthrough on the Korean peninsula, where the North Koreans will, in fact, agree to dismantle their program in exchange for security assurances and economic assistance.
And now, basically, they have a better deal now than they had when Bush lied and accused them of having a uranium enrichment program back in 2002 in order to break the deal from back then.
Well, that's right.
The Bush administration was against the deal that the Clinton administration had negotiated.
Remember, during the Clinton administration, North Korea didn't produce any plutonium.
They shut down their whole weapons program.
It was completely turned off during the Clinton years.
But again, the Bush administration, led by the neoconservatives, never liked the deal.
And when they uncovered some evidence, which appears real, that the North Koreans were cheating on the edges of the agreement, had imported some kind of nuclear enrichment technology, uranium enrichment technology from Pakistan, they used this as proof that you couldn't trust the North Koreans.
Therefore, we had to pull out of the deal, which they then did.
The whole North Korean arrangement fell apart.
North Korea started up its reactor, started producing plutonium again.
And we processed enough plutonium for, we think, about ten nuclear weapons, so about five times what they had at the beginning of the Bush administration, and then ultimately tested their nuclear weapons last October, making the whole situation far worse than it was under the Clinton years or under the agreed framework.
It was then, and only then, that the Bush administration began to change its policy.
Some of the more pragmatic officials in the administration, like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, prevailed, and we started actually negotiating with the North Koreans.
That showed results.
The program has now been turned, we're sort of winding the clock back.
The program has been frozen again.
The North Koreans have agreed not to test, and if we can continue this process with the help of our allies and China, I think we can actually put this particular nuclear genie back in the bottle.
Well, now, I'm just puzzled, honestly, why the neoconservatives, and I'm not even being sarcastic, I guess that came out sounding sarcastic, I honestly am puzzled, why it is that Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives don't want to have this deal with North Korea.
Is it just a matter of image?
We don't deal with anyone, everyone must capitulate?
Because what you're describing is the path to North Korea no longer being a nuclear weapons state.
Yeah, that's exactly right, but it's a matter of ideology.
It's policy, but it's more ideology, it's how you view the world.
And they fundamentally believe that you do not negotiate with these kinds of regimes.
For them, they see almost the entire world through this pre-World War II prison.
They look at the mistakes that England and others made with Hitler, and they believe that those mistakes can be summarized in negotiation, which they consider appeasement.
So instead of negotiating with these people, letting them buy time, or make agreements with them that they will ultimately cheat on, what you have to do is confront them early and confront them forcefully.
Now, in fact, sometimes that policy is right.
But the mistake they make is thinking that North Korea is somehow Nazi Germany, or that Iran is Nazi Germany.
These are far smaller threats than anything we confronted during World War II.
We're in a much more powerful position than we were before World War II.
And we have a multiple means to contain and reduce these threats, short of war.
What worries me is that all of this is aimed not so much at North Korea, but at Iran.
And working behind all this is their fear that if you negotiate a deal with North Korea, then that will increase the pressure to negotiate a deal with Iran.
And that's what they really don't want to see happen.
Before the Bush administration leaves office, I believe the neoconservatives are going to make a real concerted drive to open up another war in the Middle East, to have a military strike against Iran.
Now, if we can put that out for just a moment and start with North Korea, just two weeks ago, I think, the two presidents got in kind of an argument.
The president of South Korea and the president of the United States in front of the cameras, I guess we can all chalk it up to a mistranslation or something.
But it basically came to the forefront that the South Koreans want a peace treaty.
They want to end the war that has been going since 1952 or whatever.
They want an official end of the war, and they want to eventually reunify with North Korea.
And George Bush just basically said, absolutely not.
What's going on here?
What the South Koreans want is for the U.S. to be clearer, to be more clear about what exactly the benefits will be to North Korea should they finally dismantle their program.
And the South Korean president was publicly pushing President Bush to specify that there would be diplomatic recognition and would be a peace treaty, the official end to the U.S.
-Korean war.
And President Bush was pushing back that, no, he wasn't going to do this, he had been as clear as he wanted to be.
I'm basically sympathetic with the South Korean position on this and think that the clearer the U.S. is about the carrots it's offering, the easier it's going to be for us to get North Korean compliance with the deal that they've initialed.
I've read one place where they sort of characterize it as the South Koreans saying, let's do the peace treaty first, then we can do the final nuclear negotiation second, and the Bush administration's position is the other way around.
Is that basically right?
Yeah, there's some truth to that, but that's the kind of thing that we pay negotiators for.
I mean, countries come in with different positions, these things can be reconciled.
My basic view here is that there's a deal to be made with North Korea, it's just a question of what the terms are and what the price is.
Okay, now back to this Syria angle on North Korea.
Raw Story is reporting today, Larissa Alexandrovna is quoting former CIA officer Vincent Canestraro as saying, this has nothing to do, what was struck by the Israelis had nothing to do with the nuclear program, it was as you indicated before, a missile program that they struck, and then all these nuclear assertions are basically just background rumors.
Yeah, I think that's the more likely case.
North Korea and Syria have had a long missile cooperation program, the Syrians basically got their Scud missiles, these are short range missiles that fly about 300 miles from the North Koreans and they've helped develop them into slightly longer range missiles, still short range, we're talking about missiles that can threaten Syria's neighbors like Israel, but not Europe or the United States.
And it's much more likely that the North Korean ship that was spotted at the Syrian port three, now four weeks ago, was carrying missiles, not nuclear technology.
I think in the next few weeks we should get more details of this, now complicating it is the fact that neither North Korea nor Syria want to admit this missile exchange, if Syria was importing additional missile technology from Syria, it's technically a violation of a UN resolution passed last year, in which all UN members, of which Syria is one, were prohibited from importing any weapons technology from North Korea, it was part of the pressure the UN was bringing on North Korea to stop its nuclear program, so Syria, if they admitted to this, would be admitting that they had violated this UN resolution, I think that's why nobody wants to say anything about this strike.
Now Newsweek's running this story, Israel's raid on Syria prelude to a new crisis, whispers of war, and this is basically concerning the idea that if, when, America launches an attack on Iran, that there will be an Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria at the same time, does that seem likely to you, that this is the path we're on?
There are certainly people advocating this, likely, I don't want to go that far, there's no conspiracy about this, you can go to the web pages of the Weekly Standard, you can see the conferences that the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute have had recently, and they're all talking about military strikes on Iran, and they're all talking about continuing this process of regime change in the Middle East, you've got to remember that for these people, the war in Iraq was supposed to be the beginning of a process of regime change in the Middle East.
It was never supposed to end with Iraq, in fact, if you go back to the kinds of statements from officials there, including John Bolton, they always talked about Iran and Iraq, or Syria and Iraq, and for them, the war in Iraq was going to start a process of serial regime change, or what my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, Josh Moravchick, called a democratic tsunami that was supposed to sweep through the Middle East.
Now, of course, this hasn't happened, it was never realistic to think about this, but for some of these guys, they don't want to admit defeat, they don't want to admit that their policies have been a complete and utter failure, and they realize that their only hope is to keep pushing it, is to keep pushing this forward, and that the time to do it is winding down, because it's highly unlikely that the next administration, whether Democratic or Republican, is going to be willing to start another war, or maybe not even continue the current war with Iraq, so they feel that their time to move is really in the next 15 months, and really in the next five or six months before the election process gets too far along in the presidential campaign.
Now, this Newsweek story also confirms what Steve Clemons reported back in June, that a Cheney aide, who was later identified by the New York Times as David Woomser, was going around basically shopping around the idea that Cheney was sick and tired of trusting George Bush's good judgment, and that he was going to go ahead and try to arrange for Israel to start the war by striking Iran, and basically do an end run around the president, force him to escalate the war from there.
Here's Newsweek basically confirming that.
Well, this is very disturbing, and I take these reports quite seriously.
David Woomser is somebody who's been with the office of the vice president almost from the beginning, and he's notorious if anybody was going to do a Google search on him.
You quickly come across David Woomser in a memo called the Clean Break Memo, written by David Woomser and Richard Perle and other neoconservatives, to the then newly inaugurated head of Israel, Netanyahu, urging him to make a clean break with the labor policies of the past, stop negotiations with the Palestinians, and in fact launch a war against Iraq.
They were trying to convince him to take out Iraq as a way of weakening the Palestinians.
Netanyahu wasn't buying it.
Unfortunately, just five years later they convinced the president of the United States to buy it.
Woomser is still pushing this vision, and he believes that they've lost or are losing the policy battle within the administration, that they've lost a lot of their hardline supporters like former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, like Douglas Feith, like John Bolton, and that what he was trying to do was organize the neoconservative think tanks in Washington to start a campaign for military action against Iran.
I basically believe this is what's going on.
How well coordinated it is, I'm not exactly sure, but listen to the rhetoric coming out of the right wing, out of these think tanks, listen to the things that they're saying, and over the next few months you will hear them increasingly saying that we have no choice, that we have to take military action.
They will once again present this as a false binary choice between somehow allowing Iran to have a nuclear bomb, when in fact they're five to ten years away from any such capability, or going to war, and that war, however chaotic, is the better choice.
That debate, I believe, is happening now and will intensify over the next six months.
Isn't it strange how, not just after the run-up to the Iraq war, but four and a half years of the Iraq war, after all this time, the American media is still that quick to repeat the assertions?
Just the other night on 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley interviewed the president of Iran, I won't try to pronounce his name because I never can get it right, and he said, look, it's just not in dispute, you are supplying the bombs that are killing Americans in Iraq, everyone knows it, it's a proven fact, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and yet all we have to indicate that that's true is assertions of the American government, period.
There's still no evidence whatsoever, not that I've seen, perhaps you can correct me, I've seen no evidence whatsoever presented that Iran is supplying the bombs that are killing our guys in Iraq, and yet here it is out of the mouth of Scott Pelley as though he's seen the evidence when in fact all he's seen is the same assertion from five different people.
I think that's true, and I've talked to some of the reporters who have been covering this, and once again, there is this leap that they themselves make from evidence indicating that something is likely to fact that it's true, and some of the same reporters who made this mistake with the aluminum tubes in Iraq are making this mistake with Iran.
Now, it may well be that elements of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran are in fact supplying advanced munitions to the Shia militia, that very well could be, it's just that as you say, we don't know this for a fact.
What we have is assertions of U.S. officials, some of which actually earnestly believe this to be true, but no independent verification, no intelligence assessment that this is true, no independent congressional investigation that this is true.
So it really is a leap to say that this is a fact, particularly in the Middle East, which is a arms bazaar, where there's a thriving black market that goes on in arms from all kinds of countries that flow across the border.
So are Iranian arms ending up in Iraq?
Almost certainly.
Is the Iranian government actually putting these in place in order to kill Americans?
That is a huge leap, and so far, a charge that's unproven.
And yet, still one that pretty much everyone, at least on TV news, is willing to make.
Yes, they jump right to it, and this is what happened tonight.
This is the problem with the Syria-North Korea story.
You are going to see this sort of accepted as fact.
It's a very disturbing process that goes on, where the claim is repeated often enough, and I don't know, there must be some number, maybe 10 times or 12 times, and suddenly it becomes a fact.
Yeah, it becomes a challenge for the question.
It becomes, well, we know this is true, and we know this is true, and we know this is true, so what are we waiting for?
Yeah, yeah, it's very disturbing, and I don't really have a good explanation from it.
And I'm actually going to talk to some of my reporter friends about the Syria-North Korea story in particular, because I know many of them had doubts about what their colleagues were reporting, and yet it seems that the pressure to get the headline, or the pressure to get the intelligence scoop is so great, particularly in this 24-7 news cycle, that reporters, even very, very good reporters, will rush into print with this.
And it works.
I mean, they make the front page.
They get the kind of, I guess, publicity or attention that, of course, the papers themselves want.
They may be being pushed by the editors.
There's a lot more that has to be done to talk about this problem, and how easy it is for administration officials to manipulate the media.
It's a constant problem.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Joe Cirincione from the Center for American Progress.
And now, our in-house nuclear expert at antiwar.com, Dr. Gordon Prather, is extremely concerned.
This is a common theme running throughout all of his articles, that the United States, that our current policy is destroying the international non-proliferation regime.
We have this non-proliferation treaty, and the IAEA that is assigned to enforce it, and so forth, and that with all this bombing by America here, and Israel there, and basically pretending El Baradei doesn't exist in the run-up to the Iraq war, and now again with the coming war with Iran, Gordon Prather is worried that by the time all this is over, the NPT is just going to be in the garbage, the IAEA is going to be like a sheriff without a revolver, and we're going to have states all over the world racing to produce atomic weapons.
Well, that's a very real concern, and one that a lot of people share.
In fact, there was what they call a high-level expert panel that reported to the Secretary General of the United Nations two, three years ago now, that included among its members Brent Scowcroft, and they warned that the non-proliferation regime was in danger of collapse, and if that were to happen, there would be what they called a cascade of proliferation.
And one of the reasons for this is not just that some countries, including North Korea and Iran, are violating this treaty commitment, this is real, they are doing this, but it's because one of the chief architects of the regime, the United States, has basically walked away from it in the past few years.
The Bush administration had a whole different view of how you combat proliferation.
And they didn't trust these treaties and international organizations.
They thought you could do it by direct action, that the problem was certain regimes who had nuclear weapons.
So instead of trying to limit the spread of nuclear weapons by treaties and agreements, you would take out the problem regime.
The war in Iraq was the first implementation of that theory.
It's been a miserable failure, and in fact, you are seeing, even now in the administration itself, a swing back towards moderation, a swing back towards negotiations to solve these problems.
We saw it with Libya, we're seeing it now with North Korea, but it's still a deeply divided administration, and the damage may be so severe that the regime collapses before we can repair it.
I actually do think we're in a race between sort of cooperation and catastrophe, if we don't restore this kind of international cooperation quickly, we may in fact see the entire regime collapse.
Is it the case that North Korea and particularly Iran are in violation of their treaty obligations?
My understanding in terms of North Korea was that when Bush abrogated the deal based on a lie, that they announced, we're withdrawing from the NPT in six months, just like the NPT requires them to do.
Well, yes, but before they withdrew, they were clearly violating both the letter and the spirit of the agreement.
It was crystal clear that North Korea was using the technology that they had acquired for peaceful purposes, research, etc., to actually develop a nuclear weapon program.
And only when they were confronted with this did they then say, oh, forget it, we're pulling out of the entire treaty.
They violated their safeguard agreements.
We should be clear about this.
I mean, these are, in fact, the evil, despicable regimes trying to cheat on the treaty.
The question isn't, are they just being innocent victims of the United States?
No, these guys have done bad things.
The question is, how do you stop it?
How do you correct it?
And is military force really your first and only option here?
And the argument that seems to be prevailing, African, is that no, there are ways to contain and then negotiate an end to this problem.
And we now have two clear models.
There's the Iraq model, which is that you invade a country in order to overthrow the regime.
And there's the Libya model, which is that you negotiate in order to change a regime's behavior.
That model is much more effective.
It's the one we're now implementing with North Korea.
If we can do it there, that will set a precedent for how we can resolve the Iranian program as well.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, you'll certainly get no argument from me as far as whether we ought to bomb people or try to negotiate with them.
I still want to, if possible, I want to try to challenge the question or the premise of the question just to make sure that I have it right.
My understanding was that all the North Koreans had done in so-called violation was that they had bought some uranium enrichment equipment from the Pakistanis, but not that they had ever used any of it.
It was a bunch of junk from AQ Khan's garage sale and it just sat there.
It was the plutonium that they were making drugs out of, not uranium.
Well, okay.
On the violation in this century, in 2002, what we're talking about is they had, in fact, both in their plutonium production program and they were keeping safe with that part of the deal, which is where they get the material for their bombs, so they weren't actually making more bombs.
But it does appear as if they were, as I say, cheating on the edge.
They were violating an agreement they had also reached not to have a uranium enrichment program that was part of a separate deal between North and South Korea.
And by importing this uranium enrichment technology, we believe it's about 20 centrifuges from AQ Khan, not enough to actually do anything, but enough for a research program, that they were violating that and they shouldn't have done it.
Going back to the previous decade, it's clear that under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the reason we had the nuclear crisis back in 1994 to begin with was they were violating the treaty then.
They actually were engaged in a nuclear weapons program and clearly, the treaty says you cannot have a nuclear weapons program.
They clearly were doing this.
So the violations over the whole two, three decades almost, have to all be taken into account.
Okay.
And now, I'm sorry, if I can keep you on just a couple few more minutes when you talk about Iran's program.
Sure.
I appreciate that.
Joe Cirincione, everybody from the Center for American Progress.
And now, do you believe that Iran's uranium enrichment is part of a nuclear weapons program that's yet to exist?
I believe the best way to look at the Iranian program is that the Iranian government as a whole has not yet decided yet.
But what they have decided is to try and acquire the technology that could put them in a position to make either nuclear fuel or a nuclear bomb sometime in the near future, should they decide to do so.
And they're trying to do this sort of legally and openly.
That is, the treaty allows a country to acquire the technology for enriching uranium.
This is a legal procedure that many countries have used.
Japan, for example, does it.
Brazil does it for the production of fuel.
And Iran is saying, that's all we're doing too.
The question is, do you trust them?
Do you believe that that is really their end purpose?
So the trick here is not to be expecting that we're going to uncover some, oh, you know, Dr. No Scale secret program, a crash program to build a bomb.
I don't think that's there.
There's certainly no evidence of anything like that.
I think the challenge is really to stop them and contain the program at this stage before they can get to a real nuclear weapons capability.
We've got about five years to do that.
And now, when it comes to the possible war, and we've talked about different scenarios for it getting started by one group or another, perhaps, and I guess this is the most common theme from people like yourself and the know that I've heard lately, is that rather than Bush ordering massive strikes, if it does start, it will probably be a conflict in the Persian Gulf or a terrorist attack in Iraq or something that gets blamed on them and it starts small and works its way up.
And one thing that I've heard floated from different sources, and I guess I can go through and name them if necessary, is that the nuclear weapons option is on the table for dealing with Iran, perhaps in terms of destroying the Natanz facility buried under 85 feet of granite and perhaps also to threaten them that they better not fight back in any effective way once we do start bombing them.
And when I talked with Gordon Prather last week, his real fear is that the tactical nuclear weapons are basically useless for the kind of war we'd be fighting and that if they do end up using the nuclear option, basically the only thing they have that's effective at all are these giant multi-megaton city killers.
And I wonder if that just sounds like paranoia to you?
Do you think that it's possible that Dick Cheney would use nuclear weapons on Iran?
There's several issues here, and one is there's pretty good evidence that there was a push by the civilians in this administration to include nuclear weapons as one of the options under plans for attacking Iran.
All administrations have contingency plans for various things, and it's unreasonable to have attack contingency plans.
The danger here, of course, is that it goes from contingency to operation real quick, but when they tried to get nuclear weapons included in the contingency plans, it was the military that resisted it.
The joint chief said, no, we don't want to do this, and they refused to have those options included.
Cy Hearst did a terrific article on this almost two years ago now in The New Yorker.
I've heard of the nuclear option being raised since then.
Right.
But it's always there.
It is possible.
And in fact, it's B-52 that was flown just a few weeks ago, apparently in error, from North Dakota down in Louisiana, carrying six nuclear weapons on it.
Each of those weapons, those are cruise missiles, that's the kind of weapon you could consider being used in a situation like this.
They have a yield of in between five kilotons, so 5,000 tons of explosive force, up to 150 kilotons.
So those aren't the megaton weapons your other guest was talking about, those are the kinds of weapons one could consider using in a facility, and what he was probably talking about was it turns out that if you want to attack a deeply buried, hardened facility like Natanz, you need a pretty big bomb, that a five kiloton isn't going to do it, and 150 kiloton isn't going to do it.
This is where he's going.
It turns out in order to get a crater that actually takes that facility, you need a very large bomb and you start getting up close to that megaton range.
And that is why the Joint Chiefs are saying, this is insane.
We're not going to do it.
And here I think the majority of the military is an ally in this struggle.
Admiral Fallon, for example, the Commander in Chief of Central Command right now, is said to be adamantly opposed to a war with Iran, that he understands the fragile situation our Army and Marines are in, he understands what it would mean to start a conflict with Iran, to start another war in the Middle East, and they're dead set against it.
So that's, to just get back to what you were saying, my great fear is not that the President's going to decide to actually go do this or he's going to get the agreement with the Joint Chiefs to do it, my fear is that with tensions so high and the rhetoric so hot that some incident will happen in the Gulf that could trigger a larger clash or some incident could be sort of manipulated in order to stir up the American population in order to find a cause for going to war.
And now, well, I guess, do you think that the permanent government as represented by Admiral Fallon, for example, the guys at the intelligence agencies, even Robert Gates, do they have the power to withstand Dick Cheney and George Bush on this?
From the beginning, this has been a divided administration, and you start on the earliest days, and whether it was Colin Powell going up against Rumsfeld or Paul O'Neill, Secretary of the Treasury going up against Cheney, and it's still a divided administration.
So yes, it's a mistake to think of this as sort of a dictatorship.
There are struggles that go on, there are fights, very serious fights that go on.
Right now, Vice President Cheney and his forces are in the minority, and the more or less, what you might call pragmatists, including the Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and Condoleezza Rice, have the upper hand.
And that's exactly why David Wormser and others were going around this summer trying to get a pro-war campaign going.
They understand that.
If you were to ask me to bet on this, I would bet it's not going to happen.
I would bet that the common sense of actually the American people and a lot of the officials is going to stop something like this from happening.
But this is a determined group of people.
They took something that was hugely unpopular, a war with Iraq, and they made it happen.
You can never underestimate these people.
It's going to be nip and tuck, I think, from now through the end of this administration.
Joe Cirincione, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
He's also the director of nuclear policy there.
He's the author of the book, Bomb Scare, the History and Future of Nuclear Weapons.
Thanks very much for your time today, Joe.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
