12/05/07 – Gordon Prather – The Scott Horton Show

Alright folks, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 959 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and welcoming back to the show Antiwar.com's in-house nuclear weapons expert Dr. Gordon Prather.
He served an entire career in the U.S. Navy and as Chief Scientist of the Army at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as an advisor to senators on how they should handle nuclear matters and so forth.
We're here today and Sunday at Antiwar.com.
All his archives are Antiwar.com/Prather.
And as far as I can tell, and believe me, I look around, this is the single best source for understanding nuclear weapons and international treaties and particularly in regards to America's relationship with the so-called axis of evil.
And it's my honor to welcome back to the show Dr. Gordon Prather.
Dr. Gordon.
Okay.
Well, I don't know how long I've got, but this is a very complicated subject.
You've got as much time as you want.
Okay.
Let's start with the press conference that National Security Advisor Steven Hadley had earlier this week.
Alright.
After a bunch of shucking and jiving, he had this following statement to make.
In the last few months, we get credible evidence that gives them, that is our CIA, a high confidence that they, that's the Iranians, had a covert nuclear weapons program to weaponize weapons-grade highly enriched uranium into a weapon.
And he also says, and that suggests that part of the program that the Iranians are alleged to have had was a covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related facility.
Okay.
That's his claim.
Now, what the hell is he talking about?
In my opinion, it's just exactly the opposite.
That is, the Bush-Cheney administration have been trying to provoke, since at least 2003, the Iranians into doing something stupid, like withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty, kicking out the IAE inspectors, and giving them an excuse to attack Iran.
Okay.
In 2003, when slam dunk tenant was still CIA director and director of Central Intelligence, are alleged to have obtained a stolen laptop computer from an Iranian engineer who was engaged in an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Now, almost all of the information we now know, or we've been told by people who've seen it, including David Albright and reporters for the Washington Post and others, almost all of the information on that laptop was in English, which is kind of strange.
And it had to do with missile development, and the development of a reentry vehicle that could be capable of carrying a nuclear weapon.
Okay?
Now, let me stop you right there real quick, if it's all right.
I don't mean to get you off track, but I read a letter, an argument, basically, between nuclear expert David Albright and Brod and Sanger at the New York Times, where he was saying, stop calling it a warhead.
It's a reentry vehicle, and a reentry vehicle is something that you put a warhead in, maybe, but it's not a warhead.
And in fact, from what I know of Iran's technology, if they were able to make a nuclear bomb, it would be too big for this reentry vehicle anyway, and so get your reporting straight.
And if David Albright has said all that, then he's absolutely correct.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, the only thing, according to Albright and others, that on that laptop, that allegedly stolen laptop, that had anything to do with nuclear was something called the Green Salt Project, which was allegedly an attempt by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard to get a private sector entity to design for them a uranium conversion facility, that is, a facility that would convert yellow cake to uranium tetrafluoride.
This was in 2001, allegedly, when this occurred.
Now, in 2005, when the Iranians broke off, for cause, negotiations with the Europeans, the Brits, French, and Germans who claimed to be negotiating on behalf of the European Union, the Iranians broke off these negotiations and notified the IAEA that they were intended to partially resume activities that were, at that time, were under seal by the IAEA, and they notified the IAEA because they were going to have to take those seals off and resume their monitoring of the Iranian enrichment-related activities.
Okay?
Well, Bonkers Bolton had a cow, and Condi Rice had kittens, and so somebody in the intelligence community, presumably, went to the IAEA headquarters and either let them have a peek at or told them what was on this allegedly stolen laptop.
To put it mildly, the IAEA was unconvinced that it was illegitimate data, you know?
And so they decided to do nothing about it.
Okay.
This was the summer of 2005, and this is about the time that this so-called NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, on Iran was developed.
The last one.
What?
The last one before this most recent one.
The one in 2005.
And the one that they're now claiming that was accurate, except that, unbeknownst to them, in 2003, the Iranians had put this program, which they had learned about, or claimed to have learned about, from the stolen laptop, had put it on hold.
That's the claim.
Okay?
And they're still making that claim.
Well, now, let me make sure I understand you here.
But what you're saying is, as best you can tell, all the accusations that they were developing nuclear material for a weapons purpose is still all just information from this laptop.
That they don't really, that any new information they have is about them shutting the program down rather than, you know, bolstering this information about the green salts and so forth.
Is that, am I understanding you right?
Yeah, except that my view, Gordon Prather's view, is that the new information is not that they shut down the program in 2003 or put it on hold.
My sense is that ElBaradei, in recent months, has had almost total access to the Iranian records on all of the things that they've been doing over the last 20 years or so in their nuclear program.
They made an agreement to have all questions settled by the end of the year.
That's correct.
And his report that came out like the first week in November said there were only a few things left that they had to get straightened out.
And the report was basically very sympathetic, and it said that as well as they could tell so far that the Iranians had been telling the truth, that their documentation on all kinds of things, including some things that nobody had even suspected, such as that they had viewed the contractual records for a contract that was signed in, I think it was 76, I can't remember the exact year, for a laser isotope uranium enrichment facility.
That's a research facility, of course, because no one has a production facility that involves uranium enrichment.
I mean laser uranium enrichment.
Okay.
I sort of got off the track there, but okay.
So ElBaradei made this report in recent months, in early last month of November.
And this is what he said in announcing this agreement in September to work with the Iranians and to get total access and to have answers to all of his questions as the resolutions by the IAEA Board of Governors and the resolutions by the UN Security Council require.
Both of them make a, both of those, all of those resolutions essentially put the onus on Iran to satisfy ElBaradei by name.
Okay.
The smoking and laptop allegations in announcing this agreement in September.
Iran reiterated that it considers the following alleged studies as politically motivated and baseless allegations.
The agency will, however, provide Iran with access to the documentation it has in its possession regarding the green salt project, the high explosive testing, and the missile reentry vehicle.
As a sign of goodwill and cooperation with the agency upon receiving all related documents, Iran will review and inform the agency of its assessment.
Okay.
That's what he said in September.
My guess is, and it's only a guess, is that the recent information that is being leaked from the IAEA inspectors in Iran to our intelligence community is exactly the opposite from what Hadley said.
Namely, they are, they will, they are essentially going to conclude, in my view, the IAEA is essentially going to review, conclude, that the smoking laptop allegations are bogus.
Far from getting credible evidence that gives our intelligence community a high confidence that the Iranians had a covert nuclear weapons program to weaponize weapons-grade highly enriched uranium into a weapon, ElBaradei is essentially going to report that, as best he can tell, there never was a program.
Now that's a guess, that's a guess, the way things seem to be going, and it would explain why these people were in such panic to release this new national intelligence testament on Iran that they had been deliberately preventing from being released for, according to most reports, at least ten months.
Damn scheduling conflicts, I really wish I had all three of y'all in one big interview today to discuss this, because that is a very interesting spin on this case.
Rather than the intelligence agency putting out the truth, standing by their guns, that there is no nuclear weapons program, not anymore, that what this really is is at least a half a triumph for the war party in getting out there the idea that it's somehow a proven, admitted fact that there was a nuclear weapons program.
When in fact the only real evidence they have to support that is a bunch of garbage from this so-called stolen laptop that's about to be debunked by Mohamed ElBaradei at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Well that's my take on it, and I don't fault the intelligence community because it's Hadley, national security advisor Hadley, who was deputy national security advisor when the bogus national intelligence estimate on Iraq of 2002 was made public.
Oh yeah, he's Mr. Niger Uranium himself.
That's right.
He's the one who took the rap for including it in the State of the Union.
And I could be wrong.
It may very well be that ElBaradei is going to come in and say, whoops, I've had this total immersion in the Iranian records, and I've had access to all the people that have been involved that are still alive, that are still in Iran.
And it may be that he comes in and says, they really did have a program up until 2003, but they put a stop to it.
I would be extremely surprised if that's what he comes up and says.
Right, and your perspective on this is not just from keeping up with the news reports and stuff, it's an educated guess for technical reasons.
You don't seem to think that this, what, laser enrichment of this green salt, whatever the hell that is, that that's a good way to make a bomb in any sense is basically what you're getting at.
Well, I'll go further than that.
It doesn't make sense that the Iranian Revolutionary Islamic Guards would have contracted, as the Green Salt Project alleges, with a private sector entity in Tehran to design for them a facility which would convert yellow cake into uranium tetrafluoride, when at that time, 2001, the Iranians had already declared years before the facility that they were then completing that would take yellow cake and convert it first to uranium tetrafluoride and then on to uranium hexafluoride, which would then be fuel or feed for their, the gas centrifuge uranium enrichment cascades that they were at that time constructing.
All of those things were subject to IAEA safeguards, all of them.
Their facility at Istifan, is that the name of it?
That's the uranium conversion facility.
And according to this laptop, at that time, the Islamic Guards, for reasons, you know, incomprehensible reasons, were having a private sector design, entity designed for them, a facility that would only take it to the uranium tetrafluoride level, okay?
And wouldn't even finish it.
And it was a small facility, whereas the safeguarded facility, which the Iranians had completed from plans supplied to them by the Chinese before Bill Clinton twisted the Chinese arm and said, you've got to cancel this contract that you've got with the Iranians to supply them a turnkey uranium conversion plan.
Okay, now hang on a second there, because that leads to a whole other line of questioning there about Clinton's intervention.
But let me see if I can parrot some of what you just said back to you in English for the audience's benefit.
The smoking laptop, according to our government, says that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards made a contract with a private company to convert yellowcake to tetrafluoride something or other, in a way that that would be the best they would be able to refine it.
Whereas the Iranians already had a plant at Ischafan that can change the yellowcake not just into uranium tetrafluoride, but into uranium hexafluoride, which is further along into, that's the gas that you need to introduce into the centrifuges in order to enrich the uranium to 235 above 90% purity that you can make a bomb out of it.
I don't know if that's in English or not, that's my best attempt.
What you're saying is it makes no sense that they would be doing this green salt tetrafluoride thing when they had the Ischafan plant right down the street that was doing more and better.
Now my question there is, first of all there's two questions, did I understand you correctly, and then secondly, wouldn't it make sense from the war party's point of view that maybe they would want to do this separate thing at this private plant because everything at Ischafan was already declared and monitored by the IAEA and this would be something secret where the IAEA wouldn't be able to notice the diversion of resources and so forth.
Yeah, but if the claims by the, you didn't say anything that sounded not English to me.
Once again, according to the reports in the Washington Post and elsewhere, this contract supposedly was let in the year 2001, very specific to a very specific entity.
Oh I see, so this is before they ever had the safeguards agreement with the IAEA in effect at Ischafan is what you're saying?
No, no, the, shortly after Clinton got the Chinese to cancel the construction of that plant at Ischafan or whatever the name, whatever it's called, the Iranians invited ElBaradei down, it was still in the design phase at that time, and they essentially declared that facility.
Way, way in years ahead of when they actually would have been required to under their safeguards agreement, which only requires them to make that declaration, six months prior to introducing yellow cake into the facility.
They did it years before, and not only that, but they provided them design information on what they were going to do, and they updated it over the years, which they were not required to do, but they did anyway.
Okay, now, what the Warhawks keep saying, the neo-crazies, whatever they are, Cheney and the rest of them, is that the Iranians can use the facilities they've got, their uranium conversion facilities and their gas centrifuge cascades, to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
I'm not, weapons-grade uranium, almost pure uranium-235, and make bombs with it, and that they could do that in a year or two or something like that, and what they all completely ignore is that in order to do that, the Iranians first have to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty, which makes their safeguards agreement null and void for all of those facilities, and then they can proceed to try to make almost pure uranium-235 from the uranium hexafluoride that they produced in their ishtafan plant, okay?
That's the thing they never mention.
As long as those facilities are safeguarded, nobody can do anything.
So that's why they're saying, okay, well, there's a covert program somewhere.
We don't know where, but at least we know that at one point, they claim, in 2001, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, the people that have just been declared a terrorist organization by the Bush-Cheney administration, had made this contractual arrangement.
And according to now Hadley, in 2003, they put that project on hold.
That's what Hadley has just got through claiming, and he says that's what the National Intelligence Estimate says, and that they have just now got this credible evidence that gives the intelligence community a high confidence that the Iranians did have a covert nuclear weapons program to weaponize weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium into a weapon.
That's it.
So there really is, unless they have some secret intelligence that they've never even referred to before, that's all they got, is that these guys were going to do this laser enrichment of this yellowcake to green salt, and that wouldn't be any good for anything anyway.
Let me just play devil's advocate here for a moment.
Where has our intelligence community gotten credible evidence, more credible, than what the Al-Barada and his inspectors, who have got total access to what the Iranians are doing and to their past records?
Who in the world could provide any more credible evidence than they?
Why should we accept any of their assertions here?
Well, again, I don't want to claim that our intelligence community made those claims.
It's Hadley that's made these claims.
He's told us what's in the National Intelligence Estimate.
Well, I mean, but he does say that, doesn't it?
And unless your other folks have actually read the classified version of that intelligence estimate, we have only Hadley's word for that.
Right, the full version.
Yeah.
Well, but it does refer to a secret nuclear weapons program as an established fact in the declassified key judgments, doesn't it?
I don't know.
I've never seen it.
Oh, you haven't seen the key judgments of it?
I'll send the PDF to you.
Okay.
No, I haven't read even – all I've seen is the text of Hadley's press conference.
And I know there are lies in there.
In particular, he says that the – see, what does he say?
He says the plan under construction at Natanz in 2002 was secret.
It had not been declared as required to the IAEA.
Well, it was not under the existing safeguards agreement.
It was not required to be declared to the IAEA until six months prior to the introduction of uranium and hexafluoride into those centrifuges at Natanz.
But the plant under construction that supposedly was secret was an underground plant that, until fairly recently, had nothing in it.
And, you know, it was a big empty bunker underground.
Right.
They took the media on tours of it.
That's right.
Took pictures of it.
Read it in the BBC.
And invited the CIA to come down there and tour the damn thing, you know, if they didn't believe there was nothing in it.
Okay.
Now, at the Natanz facility in 2002, there was already, nearing construction and subject to IAEA safeguards, the pilot cascade, the pilot plant, you know, in a bunker below the ground.
It was up on top of the ground and fully subject to IAEA safeguards.
Well, and isn't it the case that they've had nothing but technical problems all the way through, their centrifuges flying apart in different pieces and so forth?
Yeah, I think that's what the reports are, and I tend to believe it.
If you want to have an efficient system, and by the way, even their system, which is first generation aluminum rotor technology, is more than we've got in this country.
Our uranium enrichment plants are the old gaseous diffusion plants of basically 1945 technology.
Well, and all our fission bombs are made out of plutonium rather than uranium, right?
That's right.
We've got an awful lot of highly enriched uranium or weapons-grade uranium, but hardly any of the bombs that we have, nuclear weapons, are based upon uranium-235.
All right, now let me ask you this.
Iran has a nuclear reactor at Bushehr, and that produces, if I understand correctly, the byproduct, plutonium-239.
No, it isn't operating yet, but there has not even been any fuel loaded into it.
Oh, the damn thing isn't even on yet?
IAEA just went over to inspect the fuel in Russia that was soon to be shipped to fuel that reactor.
Oh, right.
Well, see, I read that, but okay, so they do not have any reactors that are up and running at this point?
That's correct.
Oh, well, geez.
All right, so then if they did, the Bushehr reactor would produce plutonium-239 as a byproduct or not?
Well, in a way it would, but it would also produce other plutonium isotopes unless the fuel was removed from the reactor after a few months, or the Iranians to operate that Bushehr reactor at some point in the future in such a manner as to produce weapons-usable plutonium-239.
So they would have to, again, withdraw from the IAEA, I mean, withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty, kick out the IAEA, then go in and remove the fuel from the reactor before it had been in there for as much as a year.
And only then would they have, and then they'd have the problem of separating the plutonium out that had been produced and leaving it lying around for a while to some of the really hot stuff to decay, and then to americium-241, for example, and then chemically separate out the plutonium from the uranium and the americium and all the other things in there, and then and only then would they have something that could be used in an implosion-type device, a fairly sophisticated implosion-type device.
Well, now, Dr. Prather, darn you, you make making nuclear bombs sound so complicated.
It is complicated.
But the president, he wants it to be very simple, and he keeps lowering the bar, and he says that they can't even have the knowledge in order to produce a bomb.
And I guess if we were to interpret that conservatively or something, that would mean the ability to turn their enrichment facilities they have up higher or the ability to harvest that plutonium out of the reactor, as you described.
But if we take in literally just the knowledge, is it not the case that you can just get basically the plans, this is what you need to do in order to split uranium atoms in half?
Can't you just get that from the Federation of Atomic Scientists website?
Sure.
And you can also, you know, well, but the point is, is in implementing those instructions or those plans, that's the problem, and it involves an awful lot.
You know, you've got to have, and we are rapidly losing this capability because people are getting old in this country and our weapons program, retiring, dying, but you've got to have specialized machine plants, machining plants to machine plutonium or uranium or to cast it, and all of these kind of things.
You've got to have, if you're going to make a sophisticated weapon, you've got to have tolerances that are, you know, like in the millimeter kind of regime.
And just to give you an example, Si Hecker, who was former director of Los Alamos, went to North Korea and they showed him some of the plutonium that they had produced and separated, and an alloy, he thought, probably with gadolinium, because he's a metallurgist and he knew that that was probably what you would need to do in order to make the plutonium machinable and all that sort of thing.
But, you know, he saw nothing, he says, he reported to Congress openly, that he saw nothing while he was there that would lead him to believe that the North Koreans were capable of making a deliverable nuclear weapon.
And nobody that I know of has suggested that the Iranians have that capability of actually doing it.
Knowing how to do it is one thing, but actually doing it is another thing.
Well, now, when it comes to the blueprints, besides, you know, actually putting it into practice, when it comes to the knowledge, of course, everybody can go to fast.org and look up how to make a nuclear bomb, but there was also a story by James Risen from the New York Times about a CIA plot that went awry, where the national government of the United States actually furnished nuclear bomb materials to the Iranians, and the way I remember the story, and you can probably fill in the details if I get anything wrong here, but the way I remember the story was they wanted to give the Iranians blueprints for how to make a nuclear bomb, but it would have errors in it, but they would be real subtle errors that the Iranians wouldn't be able to notice, and then they would try to make a bomb, but it wouldn't work, and wouldn't that be, you know, sounds like, you know, Castro's exploding cigars, if you ask me.
But then, apparently, the nuclear experts took one look at the plans and said, oh, well, I can see your deliberately caused error right here and right here.
But they went ahead anyway, and they went ahead and gave the plans to the Iranians anyway, even though the so-called very subtle errors buried deep within the plans were readily, you know, eyeballable to any nuclear expert who just glanced at them.
And so it would seem if they have, you know, ready-made blueprints for how to make a nuclear bomb, the knowledge to make a nuclear bomb that is the bar, the hurdle that has to be cleared to start a war against them, it's the Bush government that gave it to them.
Yeah, well, that's almost right, at least that's not exactly what I recall.
What I recall was that a so-called Russian defector provided the Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency the plans for a Russian weapon, fireset, not the physics package, not the plutonium, uranium, high explosive, and all that sort of thing, but the fusing and firing mechanism that you need in order to set this thing off at the right time and all that sort of thing.
And it had certain errors in it, and the plan may have been simply to have planted in the Iranian files something that ElBaradei or somebody would find that could be used as a smoking gun.
You know, this fireset even had a Russian designation on it, okay?
Well, when the IAEA did get in and had access to all the Iranian files, they never found this thing.
Now, nobody knows for sure what happened to it, but it's quite possible that the Iranian ambassador said, boy, this isn't something I want to have in our files, and threw it away or burned it or something like that, because it's never turned out.
Now, but that Russian turned those, is it not the case that the Russian turned those plans over at the embassy at the behest of the American government?
Was that not part of the story?
I hadn't heard that.
What I heard was it was the so-called Russian defector.
Okay, well, yeah, I knew that part of it, but my understanding was that he was working for the CIA at the time.
I guess we'll have to get working.
And the CIA got him to plant, in my version of the story, this fireset blueprint on the Iranian ambassador, expecting him to hurry back to Tehran and share it with all the people there, and they would be in the files when they went in there to find some evidence of a Iranian nuclear program.
Well, nuclear weapons program.
Well, it's never turned up.
All right, well, I have a request for people in the audience, and I try not to do, you know, call to action type stuff, but I would beg you people to get familiar with Dr. Prather's writings at antiwar.com, and it is complicated subject matter, and it might take you, you know, reading through a few of them before you start understanding what the hell is going on, but it's such a valuable, just treasure trove of information, and all his columns are written with a real smart-ass tongue-in-cheek, too, which I like, and you can blame any editing problems on me, because that's my responsibility, but I urge you, go back, you know, take some columns at random over the years, and understand what Dr. Prather has to say about particularly Iran and North Korea.
It's worth its weight in platinum, no matter what the dollar's doing up or down, and I want to thank you very much for your time today, sir.
You're welcome.