All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live from ChaosRadioAustin.org and from Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our guest today is our in-house nuclear physicist at Antiwar.com, Dr. Gordon Prather.
He spent a career in the Navy at U.S. nuclear laboratories.
The Lawrence Livermore Insanity National Laboratory was an advisor to senators, the chief scientist of the Army, and on and on and on like that.
This guy, unlike the nuclear so-called experts quoted in your New York Times, actually knows a thing or two about nuclear weapons and knows a thing or two about how well the accusations against the so-called axis of evil countries might stand up to the facts.
And that's why he's one of my favorite writers at Antiwar.com and one of my favorite guests on this show.
Welcome back, Gordon.
Good to be back, Gus.
All right, now, I got this article in front of me here, Aluminum Tubes, the sequel.
Now, we all remember the original aluminum tubes that the neo-crazies claimed, even though the Department of Energy said, nah, these are for rockets.
They bought them on the open market, perfectly legal, no big deal.
They spun this whole lie that Iraq's purchase of some aluminum tubes intercepted in Italy for part of an advanced nuclear weapons program of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis to enrich weapons-grade uranium and then nuke us all in our jammies, as you like to say.
So we all know that story, but now we have the sequel, another bunch of accusations about aluminum tubes, Doc?
Yeah, they basically go back to the same time frame, which was 2002.
This was in 2002 when Valerie Plame, in her non-proliferation activities, undercover, covert activities, were involved in intercepting these things, and then there was a big hoo-ha within the CIA as to whether or not these tubes were for their intended purpose, which was to serve as bodies for rockets, 91mm rockets, as I recall, as the diameter for the Iraqis.
And then also, at the same time, we were claiming, this was in 2002, John Bolton and the rest of them were claiming that North Korea was also involved in this, and that they had a bunch of these aluminum tubes.
As I say, there were some tests performed by some guy who was a consultant or an advisor to the CIA, and he maintained that they were only suited for, useful for making the rotors for gas centrifuges, and that was the basis for a lot of the statements made by Condoleezza Rice and all those kind of people back in those days.
Okay.
Well, it turns out, of course, that in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where we went in there and invaded and occupied the country under false pretenses, and discovered, at least to some people's horror, that the full, complete report that Saddam Hussein...
You're talking about the 12,000 page dossier that the U.S. actually stole and cut all the interesting parts out before they gave it to the U.N.?
I didn't know about that, but I do know that after Bush got the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution in, I think it was November, maybe it was October of 2002...
Right, Resolution 1441.
Yeah, okay.
The Iraqis promptly turned over this full and complete accounting that had been required earlier, under a previous U.N.
Security Council resolution.
And what we said was, well, there's nothing new in it, it's just like the one that you gave us back in 97 or 98 or something like that.
Well, it turns out that the one they gave us back in 97 and 98 was virtually complete, and then the one that they did turn over in November of 2002 was complete.
People such as Scott Ritter and everybody else who said, you know, that was truthful, it was the best accounting we'll ever have of all the weapons of mass destruction programs under Iraq.
Okay.
So there was a parallel there, and it turns out that the aluminum tubes were exactly what the Iraqis claimed they were for.
Okay, so we knew by the summer of 2003 that the Iraqis had basically been telling the truth at least for the last 10 years, and that all of these claims were false.
But when we made these accusations against North Korea, essentially the same kind of accusations based upon the same kind of quote-unquote intelligence about these aluminum tubes, they didn't take it kindly.
And President Bush used that accusation in the summer of 2002 as a rationale for abrogating, unilaterally abrogating the agreed framework of 1994, and he cut off the oil shipments to North Korea, let them freeze in the dark.
And so the North Koreans said, well, the agreed framework is dead.
Under the agreed framework, we had promised, President Clinton had promised to, I've got a section over here I can read, the principal thing that the North Koreans would have gotten out of the agreed framework was, it says, the U.S. will provide formal assurances to the DPRK, that's North Korea, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S.
Okay.
So that was the principal thing that the North Koreans had gotten out of that agreed framework.
And in return, they had agreed to freeze, under IAEA supervision, all of their activities, all their nuclear activities.
In other words, the IAEA went in there and put blocks and seals on every damn thing.
Okay.
When Bush, President Bush, unilaterally abrogated that agreed framework, the North Koreans decided, well, maybe it's not such a good idea that we're still hampered by all these blocks and seals on our nuclear stuff, and so we're going to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that will abrogate our IAEA safeguards agreement on all these nuclear facilities.
We're going to take these seals off, and we're going to start running them again.
And one of these things that we're going to start running again was a weapons-grade plutonium-producing reactor that was originally intended to be a research reactor, and it's small.
And it was provided to them by the Soviets in the 80s.
And when the Soviet Union collapsed in late 91, early 92, the Russians now came on and said, okay, you North Koreans have got to put this thing, make it subject to IAEA safeguards agreement, okay?
And so it had been, essentially, all that time.
In early 2003, the North Koreans, feeling they'd been provoked into doing it, withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which made their IAEA safeguards agreement null and void.
They began to operate this reactor producing plutonium, and then they made a pointed announcement, which was, whereas their activities had been peaceful up until this time with respect to that reactor, from now on they were going to rethink what they were going to do with the plutonium, weapons-grade plutonium that they were producing in that reactor.
All right.
Now, let me stop you there for a minute, Gordon, and see if I can sum up what you've been teaching us here and tell me if I got this right.
Right.
So what happened was, just like the aluminum tubes myth that was used to bludgeon the people of America over the head into believing that Saddam Hussein was a nuclear weapons threat to them, they used the same lies against the North Koreans and said that these guys have a secret uranium enrichment program, so therefore we're breaking the deal, the Bush administration, we're breaking the deal that the Clintons made with the North Koreans because the North Koreans broke it first, they accused.
So the North Koreans said, well, fine, if that's how you want to be, they withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as you just said, in the spring, I guess, or early part of 2003, they withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they kicked out the IAEA inspectors, and they started making nuclear bombs, not out of uranium, but out of plutonium from their old Soviet reactors that they had had.
Right.
And I'm a little uncertain about the entire history of that reactor, but my understanding is that it has been modified at least twice in the 30 years or so that it's been there, and the last modification involved it running on natural uranium, and the North Koreans have got that, they've got deposits of natural uranium, but they don't have any enrichment capacity, and at one time that reactor required highly enriched uranium reactor fuel.
Now, way long ago, it was when Schumer was still in the House, he got through a bill which essentially says, you know, all these researcher actors around the world, some of them in countries that are maybe unstable, that are running on highly enriched, and I don't mean just highly enriched, almost weapons-grade uranium, and there were a number of those, you've got to phase them all out, and so we'll first convert them, which you can do, to run on low-enriched fuel, or in the case of some reactors, you can use natural uranium, but don't have to enrich it at all.
And my understanding is, I've never been there, I don't know, is that the North Koreans themselves converted that Russian reactor from running on highly enriched uranium fuel to natural uranium.
But I can't be sure of that.
But anyway, it's important because of the sequences that occur.
If the reactor is, as I've just said, which is also the one that David Albright and others are claiming that the North Koreans have been trying to clone there in Syria, the one that got bombed, you know, the site that got bombed?
Right, last September 6th.
Yeah, that was supposed to have been the North Koreans building a plutonium-producing, weapons-grade plutonium-producing reactor.
If it was true, it would have involved the Koreans, presumably, supplying natural uranium to this reactor that they had modified to run on that.
And then, according to Albright and a few other people, the accusation is that the goal was to produce plutonium for Iran in Syria using a North Korean, you know, so here we got the axis of evil going full blast here, you know.
And all of a sudden, the IAEA is now, as we speak, or they were there for the first three days of this week, were at that site, which Albright and a lot of other people are claiming was a North Korean reactor, like the one I've just been describing, that was there for the purposes of producing plutonium for Iran.
Yeah, this thing is just the biggest story you've ever heard of.
What's the IAEA saying about that, if they've been there for the first part of this week?
Well, they said they didn't expect to find anything, because none of these people had claimed that any fissionable uranium, if it was really a North Korean reactor, it would have been run presumably on natural uranium metal.
If there has never been any fuel introduced into that so-called reactor or that alleged reactor, then they wouldn't be able to find anything.
But if there had been, then, you know, they would.
The detection methods are such, when you go on site, that you can determine, you know, if parts per million almost.
And not only that, but you can tell if something has ever happened, like if the uranium has been enriched, or if it has actually been in a reactor and has produced some plutonium.
You can even, there's a signature that's associated with the decay products of that.
Well, so, do you buy David Albright and the others' accusations that there was some sort of North Korean-Syrian nuclear, secret nuclear program going on at that building, or what do you think was going on there?
All I can tell you is that I read from this article, which, if you don't mind, I'll just read this part.
Oh, please go ahead.
Go ahead.
Okay.
This is from that column I just mentioned to you.
Okay, the fifth round of the six party talks, that is, the ones that are being hosted by the Chinese, the PRC, People's Republic of China, includes within it an agreement that the United States and North Korea will have bilateral talks, agreements, to try to satisfy President Bush and some of the hawks, or something or other, about the North Korean nuclear projects, programs, and things of that nature.
Now, as far as the other members of that are China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea, and the United States, now, we're the only people that are really concerned about their nuclear weapons program, I mean, their nuclear program.
It is a nuclear weapons program now, thanks to President Bush, but it wasn't, at least they claim it wasn't, up until January of 2003.
Okay, China is happy as a clam about all this, and they want to get this thing resolved, and so does Russia, of course, who basically supplied this reactor and all this other kind of stuff in the first place.
Japan's principal concern seems to be, Japan occupied, or actually annexed, the Korean Peninsula back in 1910 or something like that, and at the time, at the end of the Second World War in 1945, it was essentially decreed by the Big Three that it was going to become a single independent country again, except that there was this division at the 38th parallel in spheres of influence, and that is Russia got the top, the Soviet Union in those days, they got north of the 38th parallel, and the United States got, presumably, in our sphere of interest, the southern half.
Yeah, and then they had a giant war, and they left the line right where it had been in the first place.
Well, it's even worse than that, because the war wasn't a war, and it really wasn't authorized by anybody.
The problem was, at the time, 1950, when the so-called Korean War broke out, Chiang Kai-shek had been run out off the mainland, and he'd retreated to Formosa, which is now called Taiwan, and there was quite a bit of ocean between the mainland and Formosa, so the People's Republic of China existed already, it had existed for a couple of years before the Korean War broke out, but we didn't recognize it.
The United States didn't recognize it, the UN Security Council didn't recognize it, and so nominally, at least, Chiang Kai-shek was still holding the veto card on the UN Security Council, okay?
And Russia, at the time, was boycotting UN Security Council meetings because the People's Republic of China had been denied their proper right, okay?
So when Truman went in to North Korea in 1950, or actually defended the North Koreans who had invaded from the North into the South, and we got some forces there rapidly and tried to drive them back out, and claiming a UN resolution, but we didn't really have one because neither China nor Russia, who had both veto authority over this, and for a veto-wielding power on the UN Security Council, not even being there is the same as if you vetoed it, you know?
So it's got to be an affirmative vote by all five of them.
Okay, two out of the five weren't even there, all right.
So on goes MacArthur and the rest of them, and we chase the North Koreans back in across the 38th parallel, which is where we should have stopped, because they had now objected the invader.
It's also important to note that since the United States and the United Nations did not recognize either North Korea or People's Republic of China, who were the major combatants on the North side, the armistice, which was signed in 53, and which is still in effect now, more than 50 years later, is between the commanding generals of our forces, that is the U.S., and the commanding generals of their forces, that's the People's Republic of China and the North Koreans, neither of which at the time, as I say, we recognized.
Okay, so you need to take that into account when you get to this next section, where it says, at the fifth round of the Six-Party Talks, that there was the agreement that essentially it would be between us and the North Koreans, and the Chinese would just sort of, since their army was a volunteer army, they would let the North Korean military types speak for them, in trying to get a peace treaty, and so this president that South Korea had last year, at the conclusion of these talks, down in, they were in Australia, okay, they had a press conference, and their president, named Roh, I guess that's the way you pronounce it, I don't know, R-O-H?
Right, yeah, I think that's right.
I think I did not hear, this is him saying, through a translator, I think I did not hear President Bush mention the declaration to end the Korean War just now.
If you could be just a little bit clearer in your message, that would be very much appreciated, okay?
This is what he says, their president says to ours.
To which Bush replied, I can't make it any more clear, Mr. President.
We look forward to the day when we can end the Korean War.
That will happen when Kim Jong-il, verifiably, gets rid of his weapons programs, and his weapons.
Okay?
Now, that ain't going to happen, probably, ever, at least for this Bush administration, and maybe even the successor to the Bush administration, they ain't ever going to believe Kim Jong-il or anybody else, unless they get in there and occupy the country for ten years or so, or whatever it is it takes.
This is the Rumsfeld standard, Doc.
This is the, you have to prove a negative that's impossible to prove, go ahead and fess up to what we know you have, or prove that you don't have it, which is basically impossible according to laws of physics and things that you understand better than me.
You can't prove a negative, it's illogical like that.
It's sort of like that movie Robocop, where the robot tells the guy to drop the gun or he'll shoot, and the guy drops the gun, and the robot says, now drop the gun or I'll shoot, and the guy picks the gun up and puts it back down on the table again, and says, look, robot, I put the gun down, and the robot says, drop the gun or I'll shoot, and that's it for him, you know?
Yeah, well, that's a good analogy.
Let me read that sentence again, though.
That will happen when Kim Jong-il, verifiably, gets rid of his weapons programs, and his weapons.
Okay?
Now, here's another aspect of something that the Bush administration has done, which is probably irreparable, and that is, in order to keep the Iranians from building a natural gas pipeline through Pakistan down into India, the Condi Rice whiz down there, and they set up this so-called agreement, whereby we were going to modify our law, United States law, and we're going to have peaceful nuclear cooperation with India, and that would involve also us getting the IAEA to set up some kind of special relationship with India, since it's not a member of the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and does not intend to be.
Furthermore, the nuclear suppliers group, its rules would have to be modified.
So here are these horribly complicated things that Bush promised to do, just to keep the Iranians from building a natural gas pipeline from Iran down to India.
Well, one of the problems is, is the Indians have got quite a nuclear stockpile, and the deal with them was, well, you don't have to be signatory to the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
You're going to waive all this kind of stuff, and you can get to keep your nuclear weapons program.
You'll get to go in and say, okay, this is civil, and this is weapons-related, and you can't find out anything about our weapons-related program, but we're going to treat you just like you were a member in good standing of the Treaty on Nonproliferation Treaty and all that other stuff, for the purpose of civil programs.
You've described so far as we're beating the, we have been beating the North Koreans over the head with the Nonproliferation Treaty and so forth, and as we know, with Iran, too, demanding above and beyond what the NPT requires, but at the same time that we break all the rules in order to beat these countries over the head, we break all the rules in order to allow the Indians to do whatever they want.
That's right.
The way it's going now, as time's running out, and Condi Rice and the rest of them are getting frantic, it's obviously, all of these things cannot be done in the case of India for India, but in any case, the precedent has now been established.
And so the North Koreans, they obviously now have, thanks to Bush, thanks to his abrogating that agreed framework, thanks to them restarting their plutonium, weapons-grade plutonium-producing reactor, and announcing that up to now, it had been all peaceful, but they were changing their views now, and of course, they actually built, apparently, and tested a nuclear device of some kind, at least semi-successfully.
We don't know how successful it was, but they definitely did do something.
And the Russian seismic results give a number considerably higher than what our estimates are, but those are very, very difficult to make, the yield measurements by the seismic signal.
You have to know exactly when the nuclear weapon was detonated, I mean exactly, and you have to have the terrain, when they shoot them underground like that, you've got to have the seismic properties of that particular area well characterized.
Well, but we do know that they set off something because they detected, I remember it was funny actually in the New York Times, I remember they said, well, so they do have some radiation readings and they seem to indicate this bomb was made from plutonium, not uranium, isn't that puzzling?
Yeah, exactly.
And so now here we are again, Bush announced today that we were going to begin the process of removing the North Korean, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, from the state-sponsored terrorism list or something like that, is that right?
Yeah, actually I didn't even get all the way through the article, I was hoping you did, but the title is Bush Lifts the Sanctions, and I don't know whether this is all of them, is this the nuclear ones or this is only in the name of the terrorism, it sounds like a carrot being delivered here.
Down in that article somewhere there's a U.S. spokesman saying, well, that part doesn't mean much.
Oh, good, yeah.
Well, but it's something, it's something though.
But if they are actually proceeding to take North Korea off this state-sponsored thing of terrorism, that's pretty funny, you know, he put them on there, or somebody put them on there, and he had them on his axis of evil as a state-sponsor of terrorism in his 2002 State of the Union message?
Yeah, the axis of evil.
Yeah, and so they didn't have nuclear weapons then, and they don't now.
Yeah, what do the North Koreans have to do with this thing in Syria?
You've seen the pictures of it, so-called pictures at least, of it, does this look like a plutonium reactor to you?
I mean, what the hell?
I don't know, it's just a cubicle building.
But the last thing I've got here, which was in April, was a direct quote from the spokesman for North Korea.
It has to do with the allegations that they were building this reactor in Syria, and also the allegations that they've got a uranium enrichment program.
Okay, and here it is, in their typical kind of strange English.
The US side is playing a poor trick to brand the DPRK as a criminal at any cost, in order to save its face.
The DPRK can never fall victim to the Bush administration's move to justify its wrong in 2002 assertion about the uranium enrichment program, back in 2002.
Explicitly speaking, the DPRK has never enriched uranium, nor rendered nuclear cooperation to any other country.
It has never dreamed of such things.
Such things will not happen in the future, too.
Now, that's pretty explicit, like he says.
And it's credible, too.
I mean, it really seems here like what we have is this fiction that's created that is meant to indict the North Koreans, the Syrians, and the Iranians all together.
You explained in your most recent article, or maybe it was two articles ago, that if you want to make a small plutonium bomb that's small enough to deliver on a missile, you have to miniaturize it, and you need all this other technology in order to be able to miniaturize a plutonium bomb.
You've explained to me before, a plutonium bomb is a much more complicated affair than a simple gun-type uranium bomb like Hiroshima and that kind of thing, which would seem to be what they were going for, if they even had a nuclear weapons program.
That's what all the hue and cry about the uranium enrichment is.
But you explained in your last article that, wait a minute, it doesn't even make sense on its face that the North Koreans and the Syrians would be working to create this plutonium thing for the Iranians, when they have no such capability to miniaturize this weapon with all these other ingredients and other technology and so forth.
This whole thing just sounds like a bunch of smoke, a lot of smoke being blown at the axis of evil countries here, and that basically it's all ring and hollow.
Is that not about right?
Yeah.
That's pretty good.
I would say that this word miniaturization is unfortunate, the people who have used that.
All right, help me out.
Okay.
I point everybody to Chapter 2 of the Cox Committee Report of 1999, where a whole bunch of stuff got dumped, and it was approved by the Clinton Administration and by the Clinton Administration Department of Energy.
So that's what I do, is I say, okay, here's the official stuff, all right?
And as I say, or you say, it's true.
I was in the nuclear weapons business for almost 20 years, and most of the things that I know about that are probably not secret anymore, but I'm not allowed to go around telling you whether this is true or not true or anything else like that.
Well, right, but this was the Congressional Committee, Scooter Libby and Chris Cox wrote this thing up.
Yeah.
But they had a classified version, and then they ran it past the Clinton Administration in late 1998, and the version that eventually got produced says, okay, this is fine.
You can go ahead and say all this, and what that says in their official U.S. government document, as official as it could be, congressionally written and vetted by the Department of Energy, is that in order to make a warhead small enough to be missile-delivered by most missiles, it needs to be what they call boosted.
That is, you need to make a pit of plutonium.
I guess you could make one out of uranium, but it would be a lot bigger.
But anyway, you make a pit of plutonium, and then you inject into that pit tritium or some in some form.
And then you set off the device.
You implode it, and then the boosting, it's complicated nuclear physics, but nevertheless, the result is you get really substantial increases in the yield of the device.
And therefore, you don't need nearly as much material, and it's much smaller, and all that sort of thing.
Now, David Albright, in his recent report on the so-called Tanner documents, the things that were supposedly found on the computers of a guy named URS Tanner, who was being prosecuted for being a principal in the so-called AQ-Con nuclear smuggling ring, had digitized blueprints for such a device.
He doesn't tell us that it's plutonium, he doesn't tell us that it's boosted, and maybe he doesn't know it has to be.
Maybe Albright doesn't know that much about nuclear weapons, I don't know.
But if not, he ought to go read chapter two of the Cox Committee report.
Maybe he'll learn something.
But in any case, what that means is that when Iran or North Korea or Iraq or whoever, back in 2002, were alleged to have uranium enrichment capabilities, or having nuclear weapons programs that were based upon uranium enrichment, that's all it took.
Because if you can enrich uranium to 90% U-235+, and you can manage to accumulate 120 pounds or so of it, that's a lot.
120 pounds of almost pure U-235, then you can make a gun weapon.
And almost anybody can do that.
I mean, it doesn't take much technology.
You just keep the two pieces apart, and then you bang them together just as fast as you can.
That's the reason they call it a gun weapon.
And let nature take its course, as it were.
But the minute you start talking about plutonium, then you've got a whole new ballgame.
And now we know that, thanks to George Bush, North Korea now has the capability to make a plutonium nuclear weapon, and has the material.
But they could modify the reactor to make tritium, but there's no evidence that they have.
And in order to make a deliverable nuclear weapon, that's what they'd have to do.
And so would the Syrians, and so would the Iranians.
But if they had the plutonium, they still couldn't make a deliverable nuclear weapon, by missile at any rate, unless they also had this other capability.
Well, and all the accusations against Iran this whole time have been about uranium enrichment, whether the accusation was that they have a secret nuclear weapons program that hasn't been discovered yet, or sometimes they just turn the dial a little bit, and the accusation is that the current nuclear program that they have, which is monitored and safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is only enriching uranium to a measly 3.6%, not above 90% purity, like you would need for an atomic weapon, as you've explained, it's always been centered around uranium.
Because I don't think, Gordon, that they were going to try to buffalo us before with the idea that the Iranians now have a plutonium nuclear weapons program, because they have absolutely nothing to indicate that.
Other than what?
These documents on this guy who was on the CIA payroll's laptop, computer, or something?
Yeah, and even if they did get the plutonium to make an implosion device, can't make a gun weapon with plutonium, even if they did get the plutonium, the device they would be able to make, the North Koreans have made, and the Iranians might be able to make, or the Syrians, or the Tahitians, or somebody, it wouldn't be deliverable by a ballistic missile, it would be pretty much like the Fat Man, that's the one we dropped on Nagasaki.
And that thing weighed, I've forgotten now, is it 10 tons?
Oh, you tell me, but I know they called it the Fat Man, the other one was Little Boy, and they called it the Fat Man because it was a hell of a lot bigger and more complicated device.
You've explained to me before, you have to have this perfect firing mechanism where all these, I don't know how many dozens and dozens of charges must go off, and absolute perfect timing to the millisecond and all these things.
That's for an implosion device.
I guess it's 10,000 pounds is what they made, is what each of them weighed.
The reason the gun weapon weighs so much is because once you bang these two pieces together, you gotta keep it together as long as you can to allow the multiple fissions to occur.
And that's typically done by surrounding it with something really heavy, inertially heavy, like Uranium-238 or something like that.
But again, the point is that it looks like the administration or somebody in the administration, the Cheney Cabal or somebody like that, has got these two or three, what would you call them, scenarios or plays or projects, I don't know.
Yes, narratives.
I call them narratives, they're trying to sell us.
Well, in any case, they are all interconnected, you know, with the Syrian and the North Korean and Pakistan and India and just about everybody except Tahiti.
And the wheels are coming off all over the place, you know.
There's a dramatic effort in the administration to try to put some of the demons back in Pandora's box that they let out.
I'm not laughing about this, it's really something because when you've done such terrible things in the name of protecting soccer moms from getting nuked in their jammies, that almost every single thing they've done has made that more likely.
If you just go back to what we talked about with North Korea withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty, it wasn't right after, it wasn't immediately after all the false accusations and America breaking our end, Bolton and Bush breaking our end of the agreed framework.
It was right around the time of the invasion of Iraq, which seems to me that the decision making leaders in North Korea decided that there's a lesson here.
If you don't have nukes, they'll accuse you of having nukes and bomb you and invade you.
So the lesson here is we've got to make some nukes, man, and it works.
Or at least pretend to, I don't know.
It seems to have worked.
But in the case of North Korea, they did it.
If a backward technological country like that can do it, just think about what some other countries might decide to do.
North Korea hasn't got anything.
Their only cash crop basically has been missiles, which they've been selling around.
They've upgraded or increased the range or something of the old Soviet, the Scuds missile, which were liquid fuel.
The warhead wasn't even detachable.
They were basically follow on of the old V2 rockets of the Germans during World War II.
And so North Korea, you know, in many respects, it's almost its sole source of income was to sell World War II type liquid fuel ballistic missiles, practically unguided, to Iran and Iraq and whoever else would buy them.
Pakistan.
They've got a little more than that, you know.
Well, and during the Gulf War, they made it out like the Scuds were the worst things in the world.
And, in fact, they used that as one of the talking points to lie us into war in 2003, was that they still have all these secret Scud missiles and a captured fighter pilot and all this other crap, none of which was true.
Yeah, it's not generally known, but in the Iran-Iraq War of the 80s, each side fired about more than 100 of those Scuds at each other.
That is, the Iraqis fired more than 100 at Tehran and the Iranians fired more than 100 of them.
You know, and it's just like the blitz, World War II.
The damn thing, it's got high explosives, no chemical or nuclear weapon warhead, and it just makes a big hole in the ground where it hits, and that's about it.
Yeah.
Now, we're over time and out of time and everything, but as long as I'm going to try to keep going here, let's keep going, because I want you to explain to me what you think about this whole AQ Khan everything.
I know that somewhere in there you think this is overblown, but what is the deal with the AQ Khan network?
Is it a CIA project?
Is it something that they're trying to contain but can't anymore?
Is it a big deal that we're supposed to be worried about and creates excuses for war everywhere it goes, or is it not, or what?
Gordon, please explain.
Okay, my view is as follows.
George Tenet was trying to salvage something of his reputation just before he resigned, and he gave a speech at his alma mater, and somehow or another we got transcripts of it.
I've cited them in a couple of columns of mine.
And he basically said, this is the worst thing that's happened, and if it hadn't been for me, by now you would have been nuked in your jammies.
Okay, this was like 2003 when he made this speech?
Okay, in 2000, in the year 2000, James Defense Weekly reports attending a bazaar, a weapons bazaar, in Islamabad, I guess, I don't know, anyway, in Pakistan, where there was a booth for the AQ Khan laboratory.
And you can go find online, you can see copies of this brochure that was being plotted by the AQ Khan laboratory.
It was for uranium enrichment centrifuges and all the associated equipment you would need in order to establish your own uranium enrichment program, like theirs, okay?
These things were for sale, according to James Defense Weekly.
And they went up there and said, you can buy all this stuff?
And they said, sure, everything on here has been approved for export by the Pakistani government, okay?
Now, a lot of these things were actually not manufactured, were not to be manufactured in Pakistan itself, but there was this supplier network, okay?
Now, that's the thing that Tenet has demonized as the AQ Khan nuclear weapons smuggling network, or something like that.
And they say in a couple of columns, boy, that is really a hidden secret smuggling operation where they've got a booth at an arms bazaar, and they've got these guys hawking these brochures with all of this equipment that you need.
And here's Tenet out there going around and claiming that, boy, we infiltrated this network and great risk to some of our people, you know, their lives and all this kind of stuff.
And now we've put an end to it.
It's laughable.
Well, it's slam-dunk Tenet, you know.
It's not as if this is a fairy tale.
So my take on all this is that AQ Khan, who did not confess to supplying Iran and Libya and North Korea with anything, he did not confess to that.
Never, never, never.
Or at least he didn't do it on television, which is what everybody says he did.
And the lead-in says he confessed to transferring nuclear technology to Iran and Libya and North Korea.
And then you read what he says.
There's the whole speech.
He never mentions Iran or Libya or North Korea.
He never mentions them.
And you kind of wonder, well, what part of the English language are these reporters having trouble with?
Because his speech was given in English.
You can get it on YouTube.
You can find it.
But anyway, I don't want to be in the business defending these people.
AQ Khan clearly did things that were illegal.
He essentially stole designs from Urenco.
He worked for a country that was subcontracting to Urenco, which is the world's largest uranium enrichment private sector entity.
But AQ Khan himself says, well, the most important thing that he took were the supplier lists in various countries, including Germany and other countries like that, Holland.
And so it may be against their export laws, say the German export laws, for some of these things to be exported.
But that's not AQ Khan's fault.
Okay, well, I guess to help flesh out a little further what all this means, what about the role of Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings and the CIA's outed former front company for monitoring this kind of thing and the importance of that?
I know that you've written about that in the past.
How does that play into the relative importance or non-importance or danger of this network?
All I know is what I've actually seen and heard her say.
And basically what she says is that she felt that there was this sinister network in play and that it was her job to find out exactly who was doing what to whom.
And one of the principal things that she managed to do was to intercept these aluminum tubes that were supposedly destined for Iraq.
I don't know about the ones supposedly destined for North Korea.
And was frustrated.
That's her own word, frustrating, because she couldn't find any evidence to support this tenet scenario, you know?
Right.
It's just like, well, we got a bomb in Iran, but we're not sure if we know where all their different various secret nuclear weapon sites that we know they must have are.
That's because there aren't any.
Well, I don't know if she ever got involved with Iran.
I guess she did.
But the testimony has all been about Iraq.
Yeah, well, you know, Larissa Alexandrovna at Raw Story broke the story that she was working on Iran.
And I think it was David Schuster at MSNBC finally confirmed that a few months later, a couple of years back.
Yeah.
Well, clearly this scenario has not worked out very well.
Well, even Musharraf, not Musharraf, but the guy who's now in power over there.
Musharraf's still president, but he's not really running things anymore.
But the guy who is pretty much running things, they're essentially rehabilitating, it looks like, A.Q.
Khan.
And all of these people, the Pakistanis, including Musharraf, keep saying over and over again, A.Q.
Khan is a metallurgist.
He's not a nuclear physicist.
He doesn't know anything about nuclear weapons.
What he knows about is enriching uranium.
And that's what he did.
And that's what his network did.
Okay.
We get in there, we, the United States, get in there, and we discover these drawings, these blueprints, we call them, in Libya.
And now supposedly in the files of Juerz Tener, this is that Swiss national who recently was extradited from Germany, where he may have broken some laws, export laws, I don't know, to Switzerland.
And apparently the Swiss have discovered, well, he hasn't broken any Swiss laws.
So I don't know where it's all going.
But these people are in a tizzy because they claim, David Albright claims and other people claim, that in his computer hard drive, encrypted, which when they finally deciphered it, there was this blueprint for this, what can only be, if they're accurate, a plutonium, tritium-boosted nuclear weapon.
Albright has gone further and says, well, the Pakistanis realize it must be one of their designs.
Well, maybe it's one of their designs.
But there's no reason to suppose that any of their weapons are like that, because they say, over and over again, the Pakistanis say, the fissile material is removable and is stored separately from the rest of the warhead.
And you ain't going to do that if you make a missile-deliverable, plutonium-implosion, tritium-boosted nuke.
You can't take that fissile material out and store it somewhere else.
So who is this guy, David Albright, exactly?
Because it seems like, I remember not too long ago, I think he was the guy who wrote angry letters to the New York Times, saying that they were inaccurately characterizing some of what's probably completely bogus, so-called intelligence anyway, from the so-called smoking laptop, which said that they were trying to figure out how to make a delivery vehicle for a warhead.
And he was complaining to them that they were conflating these two terms, and that even if we conceded that they were trying to make a delivery vehicle, this thing wouldn't fit a nuclear warhead anyway.
It seemed like he was on our side against the neo-crazy media sycophants that time, but you've often been very critical of this guy.
I know he's in the newspapers all the time as the expert on what's going on with the axis of evil and the nuclear programs.
Do you know this guy used to work at the nuclear lab with you, or what?
No, hell no.
In fact, he doesn't even have a PhD in physics, so he's not a member of the club.
He doesn't have the union card, and he shouldn't be able to call himself Dr. Albright and allow other people to think that he's got a PhD in physics or nuclear physics, which he does not have.
I understand he does have some kind of honorary degree in something or other, but I don't know what.
Yeah, that doesn't count.
He tells somebody that he was a former IAEA nuclear weapons inspector.
He never was.
We have testimony of Scott Ritter and others as to exactly what his role was.
He was not an employee of the IAEA.
He was at best a consultant, and he learned more than he provided in that consulting business.
Okay, so he's not a nuclear physicist.
He doesn't know diddly-squat about nuclear weapons.
The basis for, as best I can tell, his so-called knowledge about nuclear weapons was as Ted Taylor.
He used to be a designer of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, who was in a hospice or something like that in Maryland or Northern Virginia or something like that.
He claims to have had a number of conversations with him.
It's just like Bob Woodward, though, you know?
How do we know?
Bob Woodward claimed to have interviewed Casey when he was comatose, former Director of Central Intelligence.
At the time, he was Director of Central Intelligence.
Bob Woodward claims to have gone in and had this big interview with him when he was in a coma.
Well, you know, Bob Woodward says a lot of things.
He's pretty good, though.
I actually know Bob Woodward.
I've never met David Albright.
All right, well, listen, I've probably got a million more questions, but I can't keep them all straight.
I think you've helped clear up a lot of this stuff.
The archive for anybody who tuned in late to this extended interview with Dr. Gordon Prather, it will be available at antiwar.com slash radio probably by sometime late tonight.
Let me summarize, Scott.
All right, go ahead.
The Bush-Cheney administration nearing its end has opened Pandora's box and there are demons all over the damn place.
And their aims and their goals and what they're trying to do in India and in Iran and in Syria and in North Korea and even in Switzerland, for goodness sake, are all incompatible.
They're just going off in all directions.
It is almost chaos, and that's not good.
Right, it seems like even the North Korea policy, you know, they've got them lifting some sanctions on one hand.
At the same time, we're still beating them over the head with forcing them to try to prove a negative on the other hand.
And even all these brand new, you know, fantastic accusations about North Korea in Syria and so forth really does seem like the right hand and the left hand don't even know each other exists up there in the Bush administration sometimes.
Yeah, and then you've got the Russians and the Chinese and the Indians all sitting around here saying, well, how can we profit from this mess?
Well, I'm sure they'll figure out a way, Doc.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gordon Prather.
He's our in-house nuclear physicist at Antiwar.com.
You can read all his great stuff at Antiwar.com slash Prather.
Thanks a lot.
All right, Scott.
Thank you.
