Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist and senior scientific advisor to the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) in London, discusses the IAEA’s failure to find a long-rumored explosion chamber for testing nuclear weapons at Iran’s Parchin military site.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for being here.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest today is our friend Yusuf Butt.
He is a senior scientific advisor to the British American Security Information Council.
That's BASIC in London.
He is a nuclear physicist, a legit one, not just some crank who claims he's one to the Washington Post, which unquestionably repeats it.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Yusuf?
Good.
Good to be here.
Everybody knows I'm talking about David Albright, who he never apologized, but he did have to stop calling himself a scientist.
Anyway, hey, happy to have you here.
Everybody, you should know, I don't know if you do, but there's this great blog called armscontrollaw.com.
It's written by a guy named Dan Joyner, and he's got a lot of great stuff on Iran specifically in here, what I know of, and oftentimes he has guest posts like this one from our friend Yusuf Butt, and this one is called elephant not in the room.
Whither the mythological Parchin explosion chamber?
Great question.
What happened was the IAEA went to Parchin and they inspected the suspicious room, I guess adjacent to the pink tarp, which was actually just insulation.
But anyway, and they went in there and there was no explosion chamber.
And so you're asking where did it go?
But of course, you know, the obvious answer is, well, the sneaky devils took it apart and got it out of there.
So, you know, evidence of absence or absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
How do you like that?
Yeah.
So, you know, the story on Parchin is that there's supposed to be this big chamber where they conducted experiments to do with related to nuclear weapons.
And once, you know, a few years of controversy leading up to this visit, and finally the IAEA gets in there, and it turns out that they didn't see the chamber.
Now the IAEA has been twice before to Parchin.
They went to different buildings.
And they also did not see any chamber or any suspicious activity or any trace of nuclear materials.
So, you know, at this point, you begin to wonder after they've been to three different sites and have not found anything suspicious, you know, what exactly is going on.
And, you know, my feeling is like a lot of the other so-called evidence, not all of it, but like much of it, this appears to be something that is not very trustworthy.
All right.
Now, so, okay, that's the Occam's razor explanation is that the whole thing was made up by the Israelis, just like the smoking laptop and the rest of this so-called possible military dimensions.
And why should anybody believe any of these accusations when we've all read Gareth Porter's book?
We all know this is a manufacture crisis about a nuclear weapons program that never existed.
So get over it.
On the other hand, though, there's a great counterfactual that you can't disprove, I think, maybe that they could have had a chamber and got rid of it.
Well, you know, that's what the ISIS think tank has been putting forward, that they somehow cut this big chamber up and smuggled it out.
But there's a great post by Robert Kelly, who's actually a weapons engineer and a remote sensor, like was leading the remote sensing lab of the DOE at military air force base.
And he says, there's no way you could cut this up and make it out just given the dimensions of it.
And the amount of, you know, amount of trucks, etc, that would be needed to cart away the degree given that there's trained by US satellites, their radar satellites, as well as the multi spectral satellites.
So even at night, even during bad weather, you can, you can look through and you can monitor the site.
And you can be sure that they were monitoring this site 24 seven.
So basically, ISIS is wrong that you could smuggle out a huge chamber.
I mean, this is the size of a double decker, London bus, you know, those are the rough dimensions of things made out of solid stainless steel, and it's got a huge concrete collar around it.
That's not something you can just put in your pocket and walk out of.
Yeah, especially when it comes to the concrete.
Kelly shows an example of the kind of rebar matrix, reinforcement steel bars that would have been would have had to have been then filled with concrete in order to be I think most people are familiar with like, if you're going into deconstruction site, you know, where they're breaking down one of these buildings, and they have that huge crane outside, and they're smashing it in by the pneumatic hammer.
That's the kind of, you know, that's the kind of devices you need to take this thing apart.
So it's not and this is especially reinforced, like even much more than normal building.
So you know, you'd need to take in one of those cranes and you'd need to take out the material finally, and there's no evidence that that happened.
Yeah.
I mean, the funny joke is that they could ever put this thing together there in the first place without the Americans knowing.
Yeah, I mean, there, there may be chambers that are in there.
I mean, the people do use the explosion chambers, but this specific large size one that they're saying was specifically for having to do with nuclear weapons testing.
The evidence just not is not coming together.
I mean, this is the third time the IAEA went into parchment and has not found anything suspicious.
Now we are waiting on the results of the swipe testing with a test for trace nuclear material.
So it could be something comes up.
I don't know.
We'll have to wait and see.
But certainly this chamber is not there.
So whatever comes up is not related to this specific thing that the PMD file was so concerned with.
Well, I'm sure that all 150 million people on the so-called right in America missed the fact that the IAEA was allowed right into parchment, that there was no 24 day delay of dragging their feet, like in the gigantic fake talking point scandal that they had drummed up in opposition to this deal, that this is the only place basically where the worry was that they could delay and delay and delay up to 24 days.
And yet they said, yeah, come on in.
Even before implementation day has even begun, they had the director of the agency and all his scientists to come out and look at the damn thing.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, and then that delay actually doesn't apply to Iran declared nuclear facilities anyway, just basically applies to anywhere in the country that might be suspicious that they might want to look at.
So, yeah, you're right.
And so, you know, they walked in and the director of the IAEA was there and there was no no chamber.
And, you know, the swipe samples were taken by the Iranians and will be sent to central processing and we'll see what turns up.
But, you know, again, like I said, whatever, if and if it does, if anything does turn up, it's not related to this chamber because there is no chamber that we've seen so far.
So, you know, there we are.
It's just, you know, you can add this to the long list of fake concerns, like the Associated Press graphs, which myself and Brent, the look of arrest that Monterey Institute debunked and, you know, the polonium 210, the ring magnets and, you know, on and on.
The concerns I got off the top of my head.
That's all I have right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there's a list of, you know, concerns that come up and then they like fade away because they're not real concerns and nobody's really bothered by it.
And see, that's the most important point of all of this, right, is that it really doesn't matter whether any of this is true.
What matters is that all of these accusations make for great accusations on the day the accusations are made.
And that's all that matters is just politics, not science.
David Fanger and other people pick it up and put it in the premier newspaper without, you know, bothering to check with any real experts, you know, that the propaganda is done.
And there's huge proportions, maybe a solid plurality of Americans who believe Iran already has nuclear weapons.
Well, they've been told that they're making it for 20 years.
They got to have some by now.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the problem with propaganda, you know, how the public thinking on it is.
It's so biased because, you know, that's all that keeps getting leaked out in the press is these concerns and these concerns and these concerns.
But when you push people on the concerns, you know, it's all unauthenticated evidence or stuff that has alternate explanations.
So, yes, you mentioned like keep going.
So there was the exploding bridge wire detonators, which was a concern before.
And these could be used as triggers for nuclear weapons to synchronize, you know, the various detonations around the sphere so that there's incoming shockwave.
But there's also other explanations why a country might use exploding bridge wire detonators and that's to do with their oil industry.
So, you know, these things have alternative explanations.
But, you know, if you could just keep saying Iran, X and possible nuclear weapons and, you know, the end has been achieved that you wanted.
Yep.
Yeah, boy.
And you know what?
Even if we just stuck to accusations by the M.E.K. that didn't pan out, it would take the rest of the hour or something.
You know, the tunnels outside Tehran and the big vault door.
And they had one in The Sunday Times a few years ago where supposedly they would just take a core of, you know, like a sphere of uranium and just cut grooves in it and then just line those grooves with detonation cord and then just set that off.
And that would nuke your whole city, they said in The Sunday Times.
And there's a million of them.
Oh, yeah.
No, I'm not.
I'm not familiar with that.
Yeah, it could be.
I'd have to look at it.
Yeah.
No, I mean, there are a whole bunch of those.
Gordon Prather was was really getting a laugh out of that when I remember specifically cutting the grooves, laying det cord in the in the grooves of a uranium sphere.
Come on.
You can look this up on Wikipedia and do better than that.
Like, come on.
Anyway.
Yeah.
All right.
Anyway.
Hey, I'll let you go.
Thanks very much.
Come back on the show.
You appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that is Yosef.
But he I never pronounce anybody whose name is Yosef correctly.
Sorry.
Here he is at armscontrollaw.com elephant not in the room wither the mythological parchment explosion chamber.
He is a nuclear physicist and senior scientific adviser to the British American Security Information Council in London.
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