03/31/14 – Barbara Slavin – The Scott Horton Show

Man, you need some new stickers for the back of your truck.
Scott Horton here for LibertyStickers.com.
Aren't you sick and tired of everyone else being wrong about everything all the time?
Well, now you can tell them all what's right with some stickers from LibertyStickers.com.
At LibertyStickers.com, they're against everything.
So you know they're good on your issue too.
Whether it's the wars, police, state, gun laws, the left and right of the president, LibertyStickers.com has hundreds of choices.
So you can find just the right words to express your opposition and contempt for those who would violate your rights.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Barbara Slavin.
She's at the Atlantic Council and writes for, geez, I think still Al-Monitor.
And here she is at Al Jazeera today.
Obama administration confidant lays out possible Iran nuclear deal.
Welcome back to the show, Barbara.
How are you doing?
I'm OK.
Are we live or taping?
We're live.
OK.
All right.
So, by the way, did I get that right that you write for Al-Monitor?
That's right.
I still write for Al-Monitor.
OK, good.
Yeah, I thought so.
I wrote a story today for Al Jazeera America.
I also write for them as well sometimes.
Right.
OK, good deal.
And, hey, quite a story here.
So this was, I guess, this morning you went to the Brookings Institution, and they unveiled what seems like what's fair to call a trial balloon, final nuclear deal with the Iranians, or the shape of what that would look like, huh?
Well, actually, I got a copy of the report in advance, so I didn't go to Brookings this morning.
But I read the report very carefully and wrote a story about my impressions of it.
The author, of course, is a very influential gentleman, Robert Einhorn, who was working with the Obama administration up until about a year ago on the negotiations with Iran.
And he's very close to people still in the administration.
He worked for the Clinton administration as well, and knows people like Wendy Sherman, our chief negotiator from that period, too.
OK, good deal.
And then, so, boy, I can't even read my notes.
They're too small.
I guess one of the first points that you kind of, to set up the story, you talk about how important the internal politics are in America and in Iran.
It's not just what, or I guess at least, the negotiators have to keep in mind all these kind of extraneous issues in the minds of the politicians back in Tehran and back in D.C.
And that has really kind of limited the range of their options in their negotiations.
Is that right?
Yeah, well, I wouldn't call them extraneous issues.
I mean, if a deal is going to work, it's going to have to have the support of certainly the elite foreign policy circles in both countries, as well as the general public.
It has to be something that both sides can portray as win-win.
So, you know, Einhorn, I see this proposal as a trial balloon.
It's put up to see what the Iranian reaction will be, but also what the reaction will be in the U.S. Congress and, you know, the reaction in Israel, other places.
Oh, yeah, that was what my note that I couldn't decipher was about.
Your impression was that Mr. Einhorn must have shown this to the administration and sort of got their wink to go ahead and publish it as this trial balloon.
That's your understanding, correct?
Sure, sure.
That sounds important.
That had to have been the case, even though the State Department won't confirm it.
Okay.
And then, so now you talk in the article about ISIS, the Institute for whatever, David Albright.
Science and International Security, yeah.
Yeah, Science and International Security, exactly.
And they've been working out all the theories of how long it would take to break out under these or those conditions, how many centrifuges they have up and running or available to run at any given time.
And do I understand it right that you're saying that Albright's position now or his understanding now is that they could break out in about two or three months, they could have some weapons-grade uranium ready to make a bomb out of, but that what they think would be an acceptable deal would be to leave them with a nuclear weapons capability that would take at least six months to a year before they would be able to put together a nuclear weapon if they broke out and tried.
And that would be about what the American side would be willing to settle for.
Do I understand that correctly?
Well, you know, there are various permutations and combinations.
The creation of this agreement has been compared to solving a Rubik's Cube.
So, you know, if you have X number of centrifuges of a certain quality and X amount of low-enriched uranium or medium-enriched uranium, it takes X amount of time to produce enough high-enriched uranium for a weapon if you were to break out.
By break out, it means leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick out the inspectors, and go as rapidly as possible toward trying to produce that amount of material.
All of these things are really theoretical scenarios.
Of course, the Iranians say they're not interested in building nuclear weapons.
But if you're going to have a deal, you have to assume the worst case and protect against it.
That's what the American and European other negotiators are doing.
So David Albright works with a guy at the University of Virginia named Houston Wood, and they put out these breakout estimates for various permutations and combinations of centrifuges.
And everyone pretty much relies on it.
I wrote a piece for Almonitor last month called The Gatekeepers.
And, you know, these are the people who put out these analyses and who will give the seal of approval or not to whatever comes out of the negotiations with the Iranians.
And now Einhorn has, you know, on top of that, has come out with with some other ideas, some of which are quite sensible, I think, and some of which may be a little controversial.
Yeah, well, I'll ask you about those in a second.
But as far as the breakout times there and ISIS calculations, I wonder, did they explain in there what they mean by undetected?
Because I guess my understanding has always been that, well, like it says in the IAEA reports, no matter what else they're complaining about, they still always say that the non diversion of declared nuclear material is continues to be verified by the IAEA.
So I never really saw where they had the ability to divert uranium to any sort of breakout without going ahead like the North Koreans withdrawing from the treaty, kicking the inspectors out and beating their chest and declaring that that was what they were doing.
Exactly.
That's that's what, you know, Albright means by these breakout estimates.
If Iran were to stop cooperating with the IAEA, you know, which is, of course, what they have been doing, at least as far as we know, this is, you know, how long it would take them.
There is also I mean, some people think that if Iran were to ever to try to, you know, build a nuclear weapon, they wouldn't use facilities that have been declared to the IAEA that they would have some covert facility somewhere.
But the Iranians have not been particularly successful at hiding their program.
All of their facilities that they, you know, originally didn't declare to the IAEA, all of them have been discovered.
Natanz, Arak, Fordow, all of these have been discovered.
So I think, you know, we have a pretty good understanding of their their program, and it would be difficult for them to do anything major that we wouldn't find out about.
All right, now, well, speaking of Fordow, I want to ask you about Fordow.
But first, we ought to quit burying the lead here.
It seems like one of the most important parts of this, as you talk about again, it's Obama administration confidant lays out possible Iran nuclear deal by Barbara Slavin at america.aljazeera.com.
And you talk about how, oh, man, I just hate the sound of this, that there ought to be sort of a preemptive authorization to use military force as part of this deal, that Obama should go to the Congress and get them to pass an AUMF just in case Iran ever gets the idea they want to break this deal, that we can go ahead and attack them.
That sounds like maybe a little bit too much, maybe almost even could amount to sabotage, if not deliberately.
That might be too much to get in a deal, right?
It could.
I mean, I think it's a bone thrown to the Iran hawks, you know, and there are some on Capitol Hill.
I think it's a way to deflect domestic criticism that Obama doesn't have the guts to confront Iran if it really were to break out and try to build a nuclear weapon.
I, you know, I'm uncomfortable with it myself.
I don't think that the Iranian nuclear program merits the use of military force.
I don't think that would be a solution to anything.
But I can understand why Einhorn put that in there.
As I said, it's a kind of way to cover the administration's flanks against criticism that Obama is somehow an appeaser and too soft and afraid to use military force, that kind of thing.
The Iranians, of course, would object.
But, you know, there'll be other elements.
And Einhorn, he talks about the elements of the nuclear side of stuff, but he doesn't deal with the sanctions part.
And, of course, the unraveling of the sanctions, there's going to have to be a road map for that as well that Congress will have to, you know, buy off on.
And that will be the carrot that would entice Iran, if anything will.
Also, the fact that under this proposal, Iran basically gets to keep all its nuclear facilities.
It has to modify them in such a way as to make them less proliferation prone.
But it gets to keep all the buildings that it has built.
And that's a big concession to Iran, the fact that it would be able to continue to enrich uranium at a low level.
That's a big concession to Iran as well.
Well, I'm glad they're finally getting around to negotiating that, because that's sort of been implicit ever since Obama took power in the very first fuel SWAT negotiations.
It was at least sort of implicit there that you can go ahead and enrich as long as you keep it to 3.6 percent for the electricity reactors.
But it's the 20 percent makes us nervous because you start counting a little higher there on the toward weapons grade.
That's absolutely right.
That's absolutely right.
So this is in the spirit of those original concessions.
All right.
And now on Fordow, they're supposed to that's the secondary facility they built there.
They're supposed to turn that into kind of a research sort of facility, right?
Yeah.
And no longer be enriching uranium there.
That's the facility that's built into the side of a mountain that, you know, would be very hard to to destroy in a military strike.
And so it makes a lot of people, particularly the Israelis, uncomfortable.
So the idea is they can keep it, but turn it into an R&D facility for testing more advanced centrifuges and doing other nuclear research.
And it's interesting, too, that you say here that one of the conditions could be converting the Iraq facility to a light water reactor.
It's currently not one, but I guess it's not up and running yet.
But when it is, it could be producing weapons grade plutonium.
But I guess, is it that easy to convert it to be a light water reactor from what it is now?
It's not easy.
That's one proposal.
Another proposal is that if you use enriched uranium as the fuel instead of natural uranium, it actually lowers the amount of plutonium that could come out of it.
You could also reduce the power level of the reactor, and that would reduce the amount of plutonium that would come out.
And, of course, Iran doesn't have a reprocessing facility.
So, I mean, technically, even if it went ahead with the heavy water reactor, it couldn't separate out the plutonium.
But another way to just provide confidence that Iran will never build a reprocessing plant, will never get the plutonium, is to make sure that the facility doesn't have that much of it in the spent fuel.
And then can you talk a little bit to wrap up here about what's been implemented so far under the interim deal and whether all things are looking positive from here?
Yeah, I mean, so far so good.
The Iranians stopped producing 20 percent uranium.
They're converting their stockpile.
They'll have none of it left in a form that would be easy to further enrich.
You know, in a couple more months, that stockpile will be all in a powder form or will be diluted down to under 5 percent.
You know, they stopped major work at ARAK, A-R-A-K.
So, you know, they've provided more access to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
So basically, they're complying and they're getting some sanctions relief in return.
All right, good times.
And then they meet again April 7th through 9th, correct?
That's right, on the political director's level.
But the technical people are talking essentially every day.
So there's a lot of work that's being done.
I don't know if they'll meet the deadline, but they're working hard.
And then the big guys are supposed to meet again, what, in early summer?
No, the big guys are meeting April 7th, the bigger guys.
OK, well, thank you so much, Barbara.
I sure appreciate it.
My pleasure.
OK, everybody, that's Barbara Slavin.
She's right here at america.aljazeera.com.
Obama administration confidant lays out possible Iran nuclear deal.
We'll be right back.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scotthorton.org.