05/15/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Our next guest is the great Gareth Porter, and he's got a brand new one out at Truthout.
No, it's not.
It's at IPSnews, IPSnews.net.
U.S. political breakout demand could derail nuclear talks.
Well, breakout demand, I think I know what you mean there, Gareth, but why does political get scare quotes?
Welcome back to the show.
What's going on here?
Well, first of all, thanks for having me back again, Scott, and I'll explain the scare quote, or at least the quotes around political.
It was very deliberate.
I talked to my editor about this.
We went back and forth a minute or so and agreed that it was justified because in the article I basically quote the primary source of the whole idea that the United States is going to, is in fact perhaps at this point already done it, but a few days ago was planning to demand a steep cut in the number of centrifuges that Iran now possesses on the basis that of something called the breakout, the breakout theory or the breakout argument.
And this, it turns out to be an extremely political notion.
It's not objective.
It's not neutral.
It's not just technical.
It's really a tool that has been used very effectively by hardliners to essentially press the United States policy in the direction of taking a very, such a hard line in the talks that it makes agreement with Iran on the nuclear issue virtually impossible, if not simply impossible.
And I think that, you know, my theory, I didn't say this in the piece, but my theory is that that has indeed been behind most, if not all, of the writing about breakout in the last few years.
So, so that's what political is all about in this context.
All right.
Now, so, well, let me put it this way.
I guess is, does the IAEA have a dictionary, a glossary definition of breakout?
Because it seems like if you wanted to, you could say that Iran has enough ore in the ground that they could have 1500 nuclear weapons and they're only 10 years or they're only three years.
I don't know.
Hey, let's, let's, I don't know.
I'm making it.
I don't know the technical details, but I don't know.
Let's say they really had a process and they wanted to double, triple, quadruple down and bust ass and convert as much of that uranium ore to yellow cake and then refine it and turn it into uranium hexafluoride gas and then enrich it.
Maybe they could make, I don't know, this many hundred bombs in this much amount of time.
Where on that scale is a breakout capability?
The breakout capability is defined, everyone, you know, does understand what is meant in strict technical terms by a breakout capability.
It measures the amount, excuse me, it measures the two things, the amount of high enriched uranium or weapons grade uranium that could be produced in a given period of time or how long it would take to produce enough high enriched uranium or weapons grade uranium for a single bomb.
Okay.
And it measures the time that this theoretical decision by Iran or whatever, you know, government is in question here to have a bomb, to at least have the high enriched uranium for a bomb.
So it's an amount of, it assumes an amount of high enriched uranium for a single bomb and it says how long would it take them to enrich that once the decision is made.
So it doesn't, it doesn't include all the other stuff, okay.
It doesn't include what comes before, it doesn't include what comes after.
And in my story, I point out that there's still a lot that remains to be done to actually have a weapon after you've got the amount of high enriched uranium that just gives you high enriched uranium.
And I quote a senior Iranian official who was quoted in the international crisis group report that just came out last week saying essentially that everybody knows who's serious, that even if Iran actually wanted to get a nuclear weapon, you know, they wouldn't be able to have one for years and years.
I mean, this idea that, you know, breakout is going to take a few weeks or a few months, it's meaningless essentially is the significance of what he was saying.
And that's really why I argue that it's political and misleading.
Well now, so Gordon Prather tells me that, I forget, you know, the number, but there's some minimum amount that you would need.
But once you have enough weapons grade uranium, you know, really above 94%, people say 90, but it's really above 94% that you need.
But then at that point, it's a relatively simple process to make a Hiroshima bomb as compared to a Nagasaki bomb.
And not just the difference between uranium and plutonium, but the difference between a gun type nuke versus an implosion system.
And in the Hiroshima bomb, basically the reason the bomb was so big is because there's a giant shotgun barrel in there.
And it's shooting a uranium bullet at a uranium target, basically.
And you do it hard enough.
They didn't even test the bomb.
They knew it would work because it was such a simple technology to use and to do.
And then the test in Nevada, the Trinity test, that was a test of the Nagasaki bomb, which was much more complicated in timing the implosion system and everything like that.
So I don't know exactly how long they would need metallurgists to form.
They would need explosives and they would need the metallurgists to make the target and the uranium bullet, basically the uranium shotgun slug, I guess you could call it.
I don't think that part of it would really be the difficult part.
The difficult part would be making the weapons-grade uranium in front of God and everybody and getting away with it without the U.S. and Israel starting the carpet-bombing campaign before you're able to do a damn thing.
But he doesn't have too much to say that's good about the idea of breakout as it applies to this situation.
And he points out that breakout only applies when you're talking about using the officially declared facilities.
And that's because that's the only scenario, using officially declared facilities is the only scenario where you can actually measure how much centrifuges they have and you can tell how...
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I'm trying to figure out, OK, what does this mean in the context of all that you've just talked about and more, you know, the degree to which the atmospherics have changed, you know, over the last, you know, nine months or so.
The problem that I have is this, or maybe there's more than one problem, but it's a cluster of problems that are closely related.
You know, the question that I would ask is, if indeed the United States intends to make a deal and sort of has a clear idea of the path to that deal, as suggested by the sort of things that you just mentioned, why would you feel it necessary to say out loud the United States is going to demand that Iran reduce its centrifuges by, you know, three-fourths or four-fifths or whatever, in order to, you know, increase the breakout time to a given hour?
And I interpret that as a signal that they are responding to what they regard as some very compelling political considerations, as well as a very strong conviction that the United States cannot live with less than what they're talking about.
Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way I've put it together.
Yeah.
No, I see what you mean.
I mean, the whole thing here, too, though, is, I mean, never mind that, oh, and I'm sorry, Gareth, I completely neglected, but...
He said, well, it's just worth pointing out at this point that the Obama administration has been living under a breakout of less, you know, of far less than six months for the past four, I forgot whether you said four or six years, but anyway, for several years.
I think you said four years.
And he said just a data point.
And the obvious significance of that is that, you know, this is not something new.
The deal just shows that Iran is...
Which perhaps is completely ridiculously unfounded here, but that, you know, maybe, I mean, god dang, why would they be doing this at all unless they thought there was a good enough chance that they could do this and, I mean, get the nuclear deal signed?
Why would they be going through the rigmarole unless they really thought they could get the nuclear deal signed?
And why would they even be interested enough in actually getting a nuclear deal signed?
This is my slippery slope argument.
I can already hear it.
Why would they be interested enough to actually get this much work done and get a nuclear deal unless their plan was, we're going to go ahead and end the Cold War with Iran.
We're going to begin to break this ice and work these things out and end the old regime of American-Iranian politics and figure out something else.
I mean, what the hell better way to protect Israel from the menace of the Shiite crescent than to befriend the Iranians?
They'll never be our Shah Reza Pahlavi sockpuppet dictatorship again, but we could have a sort of China relationship with them and respect their independence and trade.
What you're saying makes perfect sense.
Isn't that...
We have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now, they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
In the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
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