All right, folks, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas, streaming on the Internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
Introducing Joe Cirincione, he's the president of the Ploughshares Fund and is a nuclear proliferation expert.
You can also find what he writes at the Huffington Post.
He's a pretty well-known policy wonk there in D.C., formerly of the Center for American Progress and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He's the author of the books Bomb Scare, The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons and Deadly Arsenals, Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
Hey, it's a pleasure to be on.
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's very good to have your expertise here, and I really appreciate you lending them to the radio show today.
The last time we spoke, I believe the primary topic that we were interested in covering there was the bombing, a little more than a year ago now, of a so-called supposed reactor in Syria by the Israeli government.
It was a very strange thing, because the Syrians didn't really complain about it.
Everybody was sort of quiet, and the accusation from the war party, at least, has been that there's no doubt that this was meant to be a plutonium, weapons-grade plutonium-producing nuclear reactor, and that this so-called preemptive strike was justified.
I don't really know all the details, but I'm sure a lot more evidence has come in since then.
I know that the IAEA has gone and done an inspection, and supposedly they were expecting to find graphite spread around everywhere and found none.
I just wonder if you can update us on what all we need to know about what that building was.
Was it a nuclear reactor?
Did the North Koreans help them build it?
Were they giving weapons-grade plutonium to the Iranians or preparing to?
What's going on there?
Sure, I'm happy to.
You're very well-informed.
You summarized it very accurately.
At the time of this mystery strike in the desert, this was Israeli F-15 fighters hitting a target not too far from their borders, a mystery building that Syria had constructed in the desert and had gone through great pains to hide, was blown up by the Israelis.
It gradually made its way into the paper.
It wasn't that the Israelis or the U.S. were eager to talk about it, and the Syrians, as you say, didn't complain about the strike.
At the time, I was extremely skeptical.
Syria does not have a serious nuclear weapons program.
They don't have a financial or industrial or technical basis for maintaining a program.
So I thought this was crazy that it would be a reactor.
Well, just because something's crazy doesn't mean the state won't do it.
And there is now pretty strong circumstantial evidence that something nuclear-related was going there.
And that's based primarily on photos that the CIA released showing what looks like a reactor vessel.
This is a very distinctive kind of structure.
We don't know for sure whether those pictures are genuine, but they appear to be.
And it does appear that something was going on there.
And if Syria was doing this, the likely supplier of this technology was North Korea.
But nothing is known for sure about this.
And as you say, the IAEA inspectors went to the site, and I just spoke to an IAEA official this week about this, and they were looking for signs of a reactor.
There wouldn't be any radioactive material, but there would be graphite.
Graphite is like the stuff in a pencil.
It's used as a moderator.
It's sort of put in between the fuel rods of a reactor.
And some of that would have been left there after the destruction.
They couldn't find anything like that.
So this remains a mystery.
I would say the evidence is circumstantial but strong that something nuclear-related was going on there, but we still don't know.
Whatever it was, it was very far away from any bomb capability.
This was a preliminary facility, not something that posed an immediate threat.
Okay.
Well, a couple of things to follow up there.
First of all, how convincing were those pictures?
Because I thought there was a whole kind of scandal on all the blogs and everything that people were laughing at these.
The pictures in the New York Times, some of them were clearly photoshopped.
I mean, they were as bogus as could possibly be, at least a couple of them, There was a scene of a Korean official next to a Syrian official.
This is part of the evidence that was presented that did look funny, looked photoshopped.
I was thinking the pictures of the buildings, too.
And so this is controversial.
And as I said, we don't really know.
So I don't dismiss anybody's questions about these photos.
And they do look a little funny.
It seemed like they did a better job with Lee Harvey Oswald holding the gun.
But, and I've talked to several reporters who have dug into this on both sides, reporters who are convinced that it really was a nuclear facility and there's no question about it.
And they've spoken to senior officials in the administration that have no ax to grind here, that are not dubbed the neocon persuasion.
And these officials are convinced that there was a nuclear facility.
And I've talked to other reporters, much more skeptical about this, who still insist that there are people in the intelligence community that think this is a fraud and a hoax.
Well, I'm just telling you what I know.
And that is, we don't know.
The jury's still out on this.
Well, satisfy my curiosity on this point, if you could, please.
Aren't the North Koreans completely inept here?
I mean, they harvested plutonium from a reactor that the Soviet Union built for them back when there was such a thing as the Soviet Union.
How could it be that the North Koreans are helping the Syrians build a nuclear reactor?
I mean, seriously, come on.
That's right.
And this actually is a British design.
So this is this is very old technology.
But so are their missiles.
You know, their so called no dung missiles are based on scud designs that are based on Nazi Germany designs.
These things are very, very sort of primitive, but workable technology.
So even though it's old, and we wouldn't be doing it, we wouldn't build it, that doesn't mean that they're not doing it.
And there were we know there were North Koreans.
And then, you know, the North Koreans are a quirky country, but they do trade in missile technology.
There's some indication that they've traded in nuclear technology.
We just don't know.
Here's what here's the key issue for us.
This has become an issue in the US North Korean relationship, because we're engaged in talks to have them end their nuclear program.
And US officials have confronted the North Koreans about this.
And what they say is, we won't do it again.
They don't admit having ever done it.
They don't acknowledge any trade with the Syrians on this.
But they've said they won't, they won't do it again.
I just spoke with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who was at a seminar we sponsored up at the University of Maryland a couple days ago.
And he said, Well, that would be good enough for me.
That would be good enough for me.
One of the problems we're having is that some in the US government are insisting on a full confession from the North Koreans, or else they don't want to go ahead with the with the deal.
They don't want to go ahead with the negotiations.
This is the kind of thing that we will learn about eventually.
But it's going to take a lot of steps going to take a new climate of trust between the two countries before I think the North Koreans will come clean on their whole history.
Well, now, as far as we know, right now, with the limited information available, do you know of any evidence that, I guess, first of all, that the North Koreans actually imported uranium enrichment centrifuge technology from the AQ Khan network?
And then secondly, is there an atom of evidence anywhere in the world that the North Koreans actually used any of that uranium and equipment because this was the supposedly this was how they broke the agreed framework with the United States before the United States broke it with them.
But it's clear, I believe, it became scientifically proven fact that when they tested their nuclear weapon back a couple of years ago, that it was made out of plutonium, not uranium.
It was harvested from their old Soviet reactor.
Right.
Absolutely.
Okay.
So there's two ways to make a bomb.
And in World War Two, we use both of them.
You can use highly enriched uranium or you can use plutonium.
Highly enriched uranium these days is made through centrifuges.
But what Iran is trying to do is you spin uranium gas around and you enrich it so it's of high pure and pure quality until you have a quantity that's good enough for a bomb.
The other way is to build a reactor.
And this is what the North Koreans did, build a reactor and you radiate fuel rods.
And in that process, some of it is turned into plutonium.
You then can extract the plutonium fuel rod.
If you have somewhere between four and eight kilograms, you can make a bomb.
That's the North Korean route.
And you're absolutely right.
The bomb they detonated in 2006 was plutonium bomb.
And all our estimates of their capabilities is based on how much plutonium we think they produced.
So we think they have enough for between six and 10 bombs.
The evidence is pretty clear that they did buy some uranium enrichment technology from the A.Q.
Khan Network.
We know this because parts of the A.Q.
Khan Network told us they did this, at least told it to Pakistanis who told it to U.S. officials.
And when confronted with this evidence back in 2002, they admitted it.
Now, is that a fact that they admitted or that's what John Bolton said?
It's a little unclear because there's a little question of translation.
And now the North Koreans say they never admitted it.
But I've actually spoken to some of the officials engaged in this.
And they see and these guys, again, are not neoconservatives, don't have an axe to grind.
And they felt that they were being told, yes.
But they were being told, yes, we do have that.
And let's talk about it.
Let's put that on the table.
The North Koreans are willing to make a deal.
What happened was the Bush administration in 2002 used this as an excuse to break a deal they never liked.
They didn't want to be negotiating with North Korea.
This was against their whole ideology, their whole foreign policy.
It's still one of the big divides in U.S. foreign policy between, for example, Senator Obama and Senator McCain.
And it's summed up by Vice President Cheney, who in 2004 said, we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it.
So they didn't want to be negotiating with Iraq or Iran or North Korea.
They wanted to topple those regimes, this regime change strategy.
But on that particular point, Joe, it wasn't just John Bolton claimed that some anonymous munchkin told him that the North Koreans told him at a cocktail party.
But there's actually some real indication besides John Bolton's assertion.
Yeah, yeah, there really is.
And what happened was Assistant Secretary of State Jim Kelly, who was then negotiated with North Korea, flew to Pyongyang.
And he had this information on the uranium enrichment technology.
This was in 2002.
And he confronted the North Koreans with it.
And there was a general hubbub.
There was a recess in the talk, the North Koreans came back, and they admitted it to Kelly.
Now that was unexpected.
Kelly didn't he was on a very tight leash.
There was there was very strict instructions by what he was going to do coming out of the National Security Council, run by, you know, then pretty much the New York conservatives were in control.
He didn't have talking points for what to say if the North Koreans admitted it.
They thought they were going to deny it.
He wasn't authorized to actually then continue the conversation.
He had to leave, came back to the United States reported what had happened.
And that and that's when the whole deal unraveled.
And the whole thing fell apart.
The North Koreans started then reprocessing more plutonium.
They kept taking step by step.
The whole thing got worse and worse until it led to the detonation of a nuclear bomb in 2006.
Only then did the administration start to reverse course.
By that time, Donald Rumsfeld was out.
The administration had lost the 2006 congressional elections, the whole balance of power in the Congress had shifted.
There was tremendous pressure to start negotiating again with the North Koreans.
They sent a new guy in Assistant Secretary Chris Hill, who did a great job and was able to start the talks up again and got us back to where we were in the Bush administration came into power.
That is a freeze in the in the nuclear program and then went even farther and actually got them to start dismantling the facility.
And that was progressing pretty good up until this most recent hiccup.
And now it's starting to unravel again.
Right now, this is what I want to get to is the order of events here.
And I want to hopefully get you to help perfect my understanding here.
If I remember this right, I'm not exactly sure what step had been taken by the North Koreans, but they did something right.
And so then Bush announced that he's going to remove them from the state sponsor of terrorism list.
They said, great, and tore down their cooling tower.
Then Bush said, we're not taking off the terrorism list.
And best I understand, nothing had happened in between that the North Koreans had done that gave him an excuse for that.
And then the North Korean response was, oh, yeah, well, we'll rebuild our cooling tower.
And we don't want to be off of your state sponsored terrorism list anyway.
How do you like that?
Is that right?
That's exactly right.
Oh, God, you were supposed to say no, no, no.
Scott, you missed an important point there.
No.
The New York Times might put it a little differently, but your facts are exactly right.
Well, Broad and Sanger always put the facts a little differently from what they are.
And the way to understand this is you have to understand that there's always been a struggle within the administration between the pragmatists and the hardliners, the ideologues.
And the pragmatists like Colin Powell and now Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, want to make a deal.
And if you let them do what they can do, they will get us a deal.
And they have gotten us a deal.
The hardliners don't want any part of it.
So the struggle continues.
And every time we get a deal, the hardliners are trying to kill it.
And by the way, there's similar struggles going on inside the North Korean regime.
So this is a very difficult set of circumstances.
So here we are cruising along with this deal.
They're blowing up their cooling tower.
The U.S. inspectors are all over the North Korean nuclear facility.
We're poking holes in the reactor.
We're building up relationships.
We're starting to get a history of everything they did.
They hand over to us 17,000 pages of information on their nuclear program.
Now, there's a lot of information there, but not all of it.
And we know, and we're pretty good about this, we know they're not telling us everything.
It's at that point where we're supposed to take them off the terrorism list.
This is just a piece of paper.
It's called a State Sponsors of Terrorism.
There's only four or five countries on it.
Cuba, Syria, Iran, North Korea.
We're supposed to take them off a piece of paper.
That's all.
We don't do it.
The administration comes back led by acting Undersecretary John Root of the State Department with a list of demands to verify what they've told us in their declaration.
The North Koreans freak.
They say, we're not Iraq.
We're not going to open up our country to dozens and dozens of U.S. inspectors coming in.
This was not in the original agreement.
This is the new demand that you're introducing.
We won't do it.
But they come back and they actually agree to about 70% of what we want.
But that's not good enough for the administration.
And the whole deal grinds to a halt and the North Koreans are now step by step starting to go back and rebuild, reopen some of the facilities that they've been shutting down.
But the way they're doing it indicates to me that they want to make a deal.
They're not going pedal to the metal.
They're not going all out.
They're doing it step by step.
It's kind of like they're saying, look, here I go.
I'm opening the door.
Okay.
I'm walking in.
Okay.
I'm turning on the light.
You know, they want to make a deal.
And I actually think there's a chance in the next couple of weeks that we're going to get this deal back on track.
Because George Bush himself as president wants to leave office with some foreign policy successes.
North Korea might be the one foreign policy success he's going to be able to claim.
I think that pressure might push us back to the negotiating table.
Well, I hope that that's true.
It's clear he can't claim Libya because they had been sucking up to the West for years trying to normalize relations.
And he refused to allow them to until after the Iraq war so that he could pretend to give the Iraq war credit for that.
So that doesn't count as a victory at all.
And really, since everything was fine when he took office on the North Korean issue, the best he could do is give them a better welfare deal than they had when he took power.
So even that would be a failure at best.
Right.
The deal that we're making now is one that was there in January 2001 when he came into office.
If he had let Colin Powell do what he wanted to do, which was continue the negotiations started under President Clinton, we wouldn't have a North Korean program now.
They completely screwed it up.
And that what we're now is we're trying to go, you know, walk it back and repair the damage.
But, you know, I North Korea is a failure.
Iran is a failure.
Both North Korea and Iran have made more progress in their nuclear programs this decade than they made in the previous two combined.
Well, now, speaking of Iran, I notice you called it a nuclear program and not necessarily a nuclear weapons program.
There was that a deliberate omission.
Yeah.
My evaluation.
This is actually that now the national intelligence estimate on Iran to our intelligence agencies agree that Iran does not have a dedicated nuclear weapons program at this point.
But they do have a civilian nuclear program by which they're acquiring the technologies and knowledge that would allow them to build a nuclear weapon sometime in the future should they decide to do so.
I think what the Iranians are doing is trying to do the whole thing sort of in their view, legally and openly acquire the nuclear technology, build the centrifuges, build a facility to enrich fuel and then decide down the road if they want to turn that facility into a bomb program.
This is basically the position the Japanese are in right now.
For example, they can begin to make a bomb and have everything ready in six months or so, but they haven't done that.
That's exactly Japan.
The only other country in the world that has done what Iran is saying and the Iranians point to Japan, that is, it's the only non-nuclear weapon country that has already the capabilities to build a nuclear weapon, and all they have to do is decide to do so.
Okay.
Now, first of all, did I understand the N.I.
E. right?
And then secondly, was the N.I.
E. right that if they perfect their enrichment workability, whatever, that under the presence of the IAEA inspectors, they're only enriching to low-grade, electricity-grade, rather than above 90% pure uranium-235 and such like.
Once they have their system perfected, is it a matter of what, six months or a year or two years before they would have enough to make their first atomic bomb?
Yeah, it's a question of two things.
So the way this works is these factories that are built to make fuel, and as I say, besides Japan, every country that has a factory like this also has nuclear weapons, so Iran would become the second state outside the nuclear weapon states to get one.
These factories enrich uranium to low levels for fuel, about between three and five percent enrichment.
The trouble is the very same machines can just keep going with some slight reconfiguration and enrich it to very high levels, 90% purity, and that's what you need for a bomb.
So it's a question of trust, and one of the ways the techniques that have been set up over the years is that you have inspectors in the facilities sampling the gas, watching what's going on, looking at the configuration.
So if Iran were to use the existing facilities now, we would know it because we have inspectors there.
The problem is what happens, say, a year from now when the whole thing is finished, they kick the inspectors out, declare they're leaving the non-proliferation treaty, and they go to build a bomb.
They might have enriched enough low-enriched material that they can just feed that back into the machines, and in somewhere between six months and a year of doing that, have enriched enough material for a bomb.
So yeah, they could be, and nobody knows for sure, but they could be somewhere between, you know, two and five years away from having a bomb.
Right, but that's still, I mean, right there, you said it, that's worst case scenario, is that they announce to the world, inspectors, get the hell out, we are now about to start making bombs, give us about a year or so, and we'll get back to you.
That's the worst thing that could happen here.
That is the most likely worst case.
There is some suspicion that they might have a secret facility someplace.
This is highly unlikely, and we have no indication that they do have a secret facility, and it's extremely hard for them, with their limited capabilities, to have a duplicate facility someplace else.
But I wouldn't, I wouldn't completely rule it out.
So for all practical purposes, the worst case facility is they build, they continue to build their enrichment facility at Natanz, and then at some point in the future, kick the inspectors out and leave the treaty, and that we would know what they were up to then, and the countries of the world could decide what kind of action they wanted to take.
Now, has there been any information uncovered by the inspectors that would lead you to believe that the Iranians have pursued a plutonium bomb of any kind?
Because this goes back to the Syrian accusations, was that they were going to make plutonium and then hand it over to the Iranians to make a bomb out of, again, a totally different kind of bomb than enriched uranium.
The Iranians are constructing a reactor capable of producing plutonium.
It's at a place called ARAK, A-R-A-K.
They are building that, too.
So this is, this is another path to a bomb.
And this reactor does have civilian purposes, and they say that's what they're using it for.
That's, but, I mean, this, this looks awfully similar to what exactly what you would do if you wanted to build a bomb.
So that's why most of us are suspicious of Iranian attention.
I don't, I believe there's factions inside Iran, and there are some who want to go build a bomb.
I think President Ahmadinejad is one of them.
I don't think the government has actually decided in itself, you know, among its various factions to go do that.
And so I believe we still have time to make a deal with, with Iran, but we won't know whether such a deal would work unless we actually try, and we just haven't tried.
Well, now, a couple of things there.
First of all, it's much more difficult to detonate a plutonium bomb, isn't it?
That's why the, the North Koreans' bomb only kind of half fizzled or whatever they said, right?
It is hard.
It's a tougher technology.
The bomb we dropped in Hiroshima was a uranium bomb, was a very, what they call a gun assembly device.
You put one chunk of uranium at one end, you put another chunk of uranium at the tube about six feet long at the other end, and you explode one, you accelerate one chunk into the other.
It's a very simple design.
It's probably the design a terrorist would use.
And, and it's sort of a first generation bomb.
A plutonium bomb is much more difficult.
If you shape the plutonium in a sphere surrounded by conventional explosives that have to be detonated with exquisite timing in order to compress that sphere into a smaller sphere, you hit critical mass, and that's when it detonates.
It's like turning a basketball into a baseball with explosives.
It's much harder to do.
The North Korean design didn't work very well.
That's why they get a much smaller explosion than they expected.
So having the material is the hardest and most difficult step, but it's not the only difficult step.
You then have to get a design that works and test it.
All right.
Now, you brought up the deal and the possibility of a deal.
Of course, there's a new report out.
Again, we seem to learn all these things from Flint Leverett and Hilary Mann Leverett, now his wife from the National Security Council, that the Iranians were cooperating with us as much as they could on Al Qaeda and rendering, I believe they said, 3,000 something Arabs back to their home countries and cooperating with us.
And of course, we know that there was, well, what Gareth Porter called the burnt offering in 2003, where the Iranians offered to put everything on the table.
We'll negotiate the nuclear deal, our relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah and Iraq and everything else.
So how likely do you think that deal is?
And then I guess secondarily to that, if they are absolutely crazy and refuse to deal with us in any way and are hell bent on obtaining nuclear weapons, would you think that that's so objectionable that America ought to launch a preemptive war to avert their nuclear program?
Okay, let's walk through it.
First, the deal was real.
I have talked to the Iranian official who wrote the deal.
I've talked to the...
Really?
Yes.
I've talked to the State Department.
Well, Flint Leverett knew of the deal.
And I've talked to the Swiss ambassador who transmitted the deal.
So this was real.
This was not people that aren't making this up.
And this was in April 2003, right after we invaded Iraq, the Iranians, then with the reformist president, Mr. Khatami, offered to talk about everything.
The nuclear program relationship with Israel, support for Hezbollah and Hamas, both of whom are much less powerful than they are now.
But this was one of the great missed opportunities after 9-11.
A chance when we had everything, we could have made a deal with these guys, fundamentally changed the relationship.
There would have been no nuclear program.
We weren't interested.
We didn't even answer.
Because we thought we were on a roll.
John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld thought that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was just the beginning.
We would have serial regime change in the region.
There was some even talking about overthrowing the North Korean regime.
This is the way we were going to remake the world.
It was a miserable failure, a complete failure of judgment, complete failure to understand the limitations of your own power.
The Iranians felt insulted, spurned, ignored.
And they sort of solved the debate inside Iran.
They said, Okay, these guys, there's no dealing with these guys.
There's no pleasing them.
We have to go ahead.
And they started accelerating their nuclear technology program.
Could we still make a deal?
Yes, I think we could.
But the price has gone up.
They're getting stronger.
We're getting weaker.
I think we could have shut it down and no centrifuges back in 2003.
A few centrifuges back even in 2007.
Now, we're going to have to have some kind of compromise that allows them to continue some kind of centrifuge activity.
And we want to keep it as limited as possible until we can improve the entire relationship and maybe then walk the program back, shut it down.
But it's going to be a difficult set of negotiations, probably the most difficult we have to conduct.
If those negotiations fail, this is assuming we get a president who actually wants to talk to them.
If those negotiations fail, and they go ahead and get the bomb, I think attacking Iran at that point would be suicidal for us.
It would put a third war in the region, completely alienate broad sectors of the Muslim populations around the world and jeopardize US strategic interests, maybe for generations.
I think you'd have to fall back to a policy of containment, trying to contain a nuclear Iran the way we've contained, well, a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear communist China, or for that matter, a nuclear Pakistan.
It's not preferable.
I don't want to be in that position.
That would be the unpleasant choice you would have then.
Well, now on the deal, wasn't there just news in the last week, I think maybe last two weeks, I think just in the last week, that the Iranians actually indicated some degree or another, I'm not sure what level official that perhaps they actually would be willing to negotiate a situation where they import low and rich uranium from outside the country, which is something that this is the sticking point of all sticking points.
It is.
At the Plowshares Fund, we fund people who do work on areas like this, so groups and individuals, and we fund several efforts of what's called track two diplomacy.
People outside the government talking to Iranians, some of whom are in the government, some of them are outside, exploring negotiated compromises here.
And those sets of private, off the record negotiations or talks have led many of us to believe that there's openings there, that there are pragmatists in the Iranian government who want to make a deal.
And the right combination of pressure, keeping up the sanctions, threatening more sanctions, and incentives, offering them a way for them to be part of the game in the Middle East, to sit down at the negotiating table, to be part of a new security arrangement in the Middle East, recognizing them, leading a process that would lead to mutual recognition between Iran and the U.S., lead to the return of Western investments in Iran, that that set of combination and incentives could work to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program.
It is certainly worth a try.
Now, forgive me, because I know this isn't your area of expertise, but you obviously have a very sound judgment on these issues.
And I wonder whether, you know, being very plugged into, you know, movers and shakers up there in the halls of power, as you are, do any people that you look to as sources of credible information and insight also believe that you can't deal with these people because of the eschatology of Shiite Twelfth Imam, whatever?
Or is that, does anybody take that seriously where you live?
Or is that simply propaganda for the rubes out there?
Iran is a big country with lots of political factions, and there's no question that there are radicals in the government, and I would include Ahmadinejad as one of them, who don't want to make a deal, who do see Iran as having a messianic destiny to lead the rise of a Shia nation, and are heavily religious, and do see all this as just, you know, the earthly dimension of a greater spiritual struggle.
Yes, those people exist.
I wouldn't actually include the supreme leader in that.
Khamenei, even though he's the religious leader of the country, he's much more practical, much more pragmatic than some of the secular radicals like Ahmadinejad.
So you've got, just like you have in this country, just like you have in other countries, you have zealots, you have fanatics.
The question is finding the people you can make a deal with, and doing what you can to strengthen them, and limit the fanatics.
And of course, when it comes to foreign policy, and military policy, and diplomacy, and everything else, it's the Ayatollah who decides, not Ahmadinejad.
That's exactly right.
It's not even clear that Ahmadinejad is going to survive the March elections next year.
He's very unpopular inside Iran.
You know, the youth unemployment has hit 50 percent, inflation is 30 percent.
I can't imagine what this global recession we're entering into is going to do to Iran.
Things are tough inside Iran, and Ahmadinejad is getting the blame for a lot of it.
All right, now we're sort of running short on time here, and before I ask you about the India deal and Russia policy, if I can fit those topics in at the end of this interview, I want to ask you, I saw, I read somewhere that you, at least for a time, if not currently, you were at least advising Barack Obama on some of these issues, and I wonder if you've taught him that there's such a thing in the world as the IAEA, and reports that they issue that say, for example, that they can continue to verify the non-diversion of any nuclear material to a military or other special purpose, because right about a year ago in a debate, he said they're making nuclear weapons, nobody thinks they're not making nuclear weapons, and Denis Kucinich in the debate said, you're wrong, you must have never heard of Mohammed ElBaradei or the IAEA before, but there's no evidence whatsoever that they're making nuclear weapons, and you don't know what you're talking about.
So Joe, does he know what he's talking about yet?
Because when I turn on TV and he talks about Iran, he sounds to me as though, at least, he's pretending he's as well-informed as John McCain on this issue.
Well, in my personal capacity, outside of my plowshare's duty, I have given advice to the campaign of Barack Obama, but I've never met the senator, I'm not a senior advisor by any means, and he has hundreds of people advising him.
And the non-proliferation team is made up of some of the top experts in the field that are advising the senator, and everything that I've seen him say is quite well-informed, and he does get this issue.
You'll notice when he talks about it, he talks about the changes that we need in the world, especially when he's talking about the foreign policy debate two debates ago, he brings up this issue of eliminating nuclear weapons.
So this is part of his view of the change that we need.
Now, one of the encouraging things that I've seen in this election is that John McCain has also adopted very progressive positions on nuclear policy.
Really?
Yeah, absolutely.
You can go and see his stuff.
He made a speech out here in Los Angeles, March 26th, where he said as president he would leave the United States and put the leading United States in leadership of a campaign for global nuclear disarmament.
That was his words, nuclear disarmament.
I can't remember the last time a Republican candidate for president used those words, let alone thought they might help him get elected, and then followed it up a month later with a very comprehensive speech, talking where he broke with the Bush administration on several policies, including negotiating deep reductions in U.S.
-Russian arsenals.
So both the candidates recognize that the existing strategy has failed, that something new has got to be tried, and then there's questions of degree about how far each would go, and then how much of a priority each would make it.
But both of them, I've been in panel discussions where they had representatives from both campaigns, and I would say there's much more agreement on what the next nuclear policy should be than there is disagreement.
One of the big disagreement areas is over this issue of negotiating with adversaries, so Iran, North Korea, etc.
Well, forgive me please if I fail to see the nuance in their explanations of the situation between America and Iran that I hear in your statements on the issue, sir.
I just don't hear that.
Yeah, there are issues.
I didn't mean to gloss over it.
There are issues, and people can look at the two campaigns and make up their own minds.
So you don't hear them speaking as though it's an assumed truth that there's a nuclear weapons program in Iran?
There were many U.S. officials who talk about the nuclear weapons program in Iran, that's for sure.
I don't remember if Senator Obama talked about it that way, but I got to admit I wouldn't be surprised.
Democrats are often very skittish about defense issues during campaigns and don't want to appear weak, and they usually err on the side of talking tough, and I wouldn't be surprised if Senator Obama talked that way.
Well, you know, Joe Biden in his one debate with Sarah Palin did say, he didn't get into particulars, obviously, in the debate, but he did say, we have some time now.
They're not about to have a nuclear weapon in India now, like you might read in the news.
That's right.
So we'll at least give Biden a couple of points for that.
All right, now, geez, I don't know, I guess I promised you 40 minutes.
Is it okay if I keep it longer than that, or I should narrow down my questions to one more?
Let's try one more.
All right.
If we could do.
All right, we'll leave India for another time.
I want to ask you about Russia.
And first of all, and this will even be a two part.
There was an effort, the Nunn-Lugar effort to get rid of any excess weapons grade nuclear fuel in old Soviet states.
The Russians at least supposedly got a hold of all their actual nuclear weapons and have those back in Russia.
But any other old nuclear fuel from the former Soviet satellites and so forth, America was going to buy all that stuff up and keep it out of the hands of anybody else, proliferators of any description.
And I wonder if you can comment on that.
And then also, I wonder if you can comment on what I believe I know, I think I know exists, but don't know the details of very well, which is the evolution of our military posture so that apparently, hopefully, from the point of view of the posture writers of putting us in a position where we could have a nuclear first strike on Russia and not risk mutual assured destruction.
And I believe part of that is the construction of a new generation of of so-called usable nuclear weapons for use in a situation like that.
Am I anywhere near the ballpark?
Yeah.
OK, just, you know, I teach a course at Georgetown and I think I devote a class to each one of these subjects.
Oh, good.
So we'll be able to wrap this up in another minute and a half or so.
And then you'll have a degree.
We all set.
So let me just do it.
At least I know I'm asking the right questions.
You are.
You're very well informed.
This is right on point.
These programs, they're called collectively the Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs that we've had with Russia for 15 years have been some of the most successful national security programs we've ever run.
You know, it's unprecedented where a former adversary opens up their doors and allows us to come in and dismantle the weapons that threatened us for decades.
And that's what the Russians agreed to do.
We ponied up most of the money.
It cost about a billion dollars a year.
And the good news is what we've dismantled and secured about half the material in the states of the former Soviet Union.
The bad news is we haven't gotten to the other half yet.
And that's the flaw in these programs.
They've been moving much too slowly.
And now as U.S.
-Russian relations deteriorate, the Russians are cooperating less and less.
They're much more suspicious of our of our intentions.
So you really need to, you know, fundamentally fix the U.S.
-Russian relations.
I think Henry Kissinger and George Schultz have an editorial about this in The Washington Post on Wednesday morning, talking about not having a renewed Cold War with the Russians and how we need to have a working relationship with them for so many issues.
Iran, for example, energy, for example, but particularly this, solving the nuclear problem.
They still have about 2,000 warheads ready to launch at us on 15 minutes notice.
And we have about 2,000 warheads on missiles ready to launch at them on 15 minutes notice.
You've got to change that posture.
The Cold War has been over for 15 years, but the Cold War weapons remain.
This has got to be at the top of the next president's agenda.
Taking those weapons off, high air trigger alert, accelerating the programs to eliminate the material, not just in the states of the former Soviet Union, but everywhere.
There are about 40 countries that have material that they use for civilian purposes that Osama bin Laden could get and turn into a bomb.
You've got to accelerate those programs, prevent the terrorists from getting the weapons before it's too late.
Fortunately, this is the new posture.
This has also got to be at the top of the next president's agenda.
You've had this remarkable development in the last couple of years where Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, two Republican stalwarts, rock solid conservatives, have joined with Bill Perry, former Secretary of Defense, and Sam Nunn, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, two conservative Democrats, to call for a world free of nuclear weapons, to urge their colleagues in both parties to make this a top priority, to be serious about eliminating nuclear weapons, the number one threat to the United States, whether it's on the top of a missile or in a terrorist backpack, to eliminate these weapons before any of them is used.
They acknowledge it's going to take a long time to do this, but they outline a series of practical steps that can start us on that road, all of which would make us safer as we take them, all of which would help convince other countries to cooperate with us to prevent that ultimate disaster of a nuclear terrorist assault.
I'm actually very optimistic that the next president will take steps in this direction.
I think Barack Obama would do it quicker and faster and fuller, but John McCain also would take a number of these steps.
So I think we're on the verge of seeing a fundamental transformation in U.S. nuclear policy, but it won't happen just by the politicians doing it.
It requires an active and informed citizenry.
It requires us to be demanding that whoever is elected implement the promises he made during the campaign.
That's why I'm the president of the Plowshares Fund.
That's why I'm out there raising money to help fund some of the groups all over the country that are doing this kind of work.
I think this is one of the most important threats to life on this planet, and I want to do whatever I can to reduce that threat while I'm still alive.
Yeah, that's great.
You know, Pat Buchanan on this show recently characterized the relationship between America and Russia as the single most important thing on Earth, period.
There's really nothing else that can quantitatively compare to the importance of our, at least if not, you know, best buds kind of friendship.
At least we've got to be able to get along with these people.
Kenny, I'm sorry I'm keeping you over time.
Can I ask you to speak to the first strike doctrine that seems to have been evolving in these Bush-Cheney years parallel?
During the Cold War, both sides developed postures where they could think about developing a first strike that'd be so devastating it would eliminate the other side's ability to strike back.
It became pretty clear that you couldn't really do that.
Each side just built more and more weapons, so it was impossible to guarantee.
What the Russians are now worried about is that we're starting to build conventional weapons that could actually strike their nuclear facilities.
Precision-guided conventionally armed cruise missiles, for example, or putting conventional warheads on former nuclear missiles.
I've been in Moscow twice in the last 12 months and had conversations, and they are concerned about this, as well as NATO expansion, as well as the deployment of missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.
So any new discussions we're going to have with them about reducing nuclear arsenals has got to bring in those issues as well.
All right.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me on any time.
All right, folks, that's Joe Cirincione, president of the Plowshares Fund, and his website is plowshares.org.
He is formerly from the Center for American Progress, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and is the author of Bombscare, the History and Future of Nuclear Weapons and Deadly Arsenals, Nuclear Biological and Chemical Threats.
