For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I appreciate everybody tuning in to the show today.
Our first guest today is Dr. Gordon Prather.
He worked formerly in the U.S. Navy at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, and his advisor to Senator Henry Bellman was the chief scientist of the Army.
Basically, he spent a career making and testing and knowing all about nuclear weapons.
Not a poser like you read in the media all the time, but the real thing.
Original.antiwar.com slash Prather for his most recent archives.
Welcome to the show.
Doc, how are you doing?
All right, I think.
How about you?
I'm doing okay.
Glad to have you here.
Now, I thought this was funny.
Of course, a good friend of mine, actually, Jamie from the Smooth and Demented Show, sent me this link from the London Times.
Iran is ready to build a nuclear bomb.
It is just waiting for the Ayatollah's next order.
And of particular note, I don't know if you want to comment on this, but I just kind of want to get this out of the way here.
I thought it was important here that they don't even really cite even an anonymous source for the following assertion of fact.
The Iranian Defense Ministry has been running a covert nuclear research department for years, employing hundreds of scientists, researchers, and metallurgists in a multi-billion dollar program to develop nuclear technology alongside the civilian nuclear program.
They don't even pretend to cite a source for that assertion.
But there is a secret military nuclear program in Iran, apparently, and we're just supposed to accept that assertion as plain fact.
Dr. Prather, what do you think about that?
Well, in the first place, if it does not involve treaty on nonproliferation of nuclear weapons prescribed materials, if that research program does not involve, for example, uranium in any form or plutonium or a number of other things that are associated with nuclear weapons, then it's none of the IAEA's business.
However, when the Iranians agreed in 2003 to abide by the terms of an additional protocol, which they signed but which the Iranian parliament has never ratified to this day, and after some of the Bolton-inspired stuff that went on in 2006, the Iranian parliament not only announced that it was not going to ratify this additional protocol, but they specifically told their nuclear agency to quit cooperating with the IAEA, as they had been doing for three years.
It was a direction from, not maybe Khomeini, but essentially the same thing.
So under that additional protocol, when the IAEA was doing all that, more access to the Iranian nuclear facilities and so forth than they have under the basic IAEA safeguards agreement, did they find any evidence that there was a massive parallel secret program?
Well, no, but the additional protocol provided for, and the Iranians essentially complied with it for more than two years, it allowed for the, or it essentially suggested to the director general, at that time Mohamed ElBaradei, that he quote-unquote attempt to form a complete picture of the Iranian nuclear program.
And that means, you know, trying to figure out intent and things like that.
And so he might have been legitimately interested in figuring out whether or not the Iranians did have this program to develop the components that did not involve nuclear materials, that, you know, their intent.
Were they attempting to make, for example, a high-explosive implosion multipoint detonation system?
He would have had some reason for making some discreet inquiries of the Iranians, and he did.
And the Iranians complied with his request in most cases, and he and his inspectors went to these sites where they thought maybe something like that was going on, which would not have been a violation of their basic safeguards agreement, and wouldn't have been a violation of the additional protocol.
But it would have enabled ElBaradei to form a more complete picture of what their intentions were.
Now under the basic safeguards agreement, what they're doing that doesn't involve NPT prescribed materials is literally none of his business.
And anything that he finds in his investigations and in his inspections that is of a proprietary nature, for example, the design of the Iranian PAC-2, they're called, or P-2 gas centrifuges, that information he's required by the IAEA statute and by the Iranian safeguards agreement to hold confidential.
He's not supposed to allow that, or any of his inspectors, he's not supposed to allow anybody access to that information.
That's in the statute, and that's in the safeguards agreement.
Well now, in the reporting of all the best reporters on this issue in the National Intelligence Estimate, which of course was the unclassified version, released in 2007, did it say in there that there was a secret parallel program?
Do you know of any good journalism anywhere, even, that says that even some agents at the CIA really, really believe that there is one, but any evidence whatsoever about this?
If there was any evidence, it would have been leaked.
You had David Albright on your program a while back, and he said he considered it his moral authority, and I don't want to put words in his mouth.
He considered it his goal or duty or something like that to publicize even those IAEA confidential reports, so that everybody would know about them.
And you can bet if there was anything in there of a nuclear weapons associated program in Iran, he would have blabbed that all over the world.
But he actually, as you noted, and to his credit, when the smoking laptop information was first floated around and the New York Times said that it contained information about a program to develop nuclear warheads, ICBM delivered nuclear warheads, Albright had fit and wrote a number of letters to the New York Times saying, no, I've seen the smoking laptop information.
I can't explain how he did, how he managed to see this smoking laptop.
And what he said was, at best these are plans for a re-entry vehicle, but that doesn't necessarily mean it would be a nuclear bomb inside of it.
He specifically says the word nuclear, in English or Farsi or whatever, is never even mentioned on anything on those smoking laptops.
If people just Google up maybe David Albright, warhead, New York Times, something like that, you can read that exchange back and forth, the letters to the editor that he wrote and the original David Sanger, William J. Broad column that he's talking about and so forth.
So we got that, I think, pretty much out of the way.
Let's move on to some more of the meat of this article.
Again, we're talking with Dr. Gordon Prather, a nuclear weapons expert, about this article in the London Times.
Iran is ready to build a nuclear bomb and is just waiting for the Ayatollah's order.
Now, this part will get a little bit complicated, but it will be worth it in the end, I'm sure.
Iran scientists have been trying to master a method of detonating a bomb known as the multi-point initiation system, by wrapping highly enriched uranium in high explosives and then detonating it.
The sources said that the Iranian Defense Ministry had used a secret internal agency called Supply, led by Moshin Fakhrizadeh, a physics professor and senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Council.
The system operates by creating a series of explosive grooves on a metal hemisphere, which links explosives-filled holes, opening onto a layer of high explosives enveloping the uranium.
By detonating the explosives at either pole at the same time, the method ensures simultaneous impact around the sphere to achieve critical density.
Now, let me set up my question this way.
You've told me before, and we've discussed, about how the Hiroshima bomb was a simple, what you call, gun-type nuke, where inside the bomb is a shaft, and it's basically a giant shell, or a giant shotgun bullet of uranium is shot into another piece of uranium, and that's what creates the detonation, as you've told me before.
They didn't even bother to test it in the desert here in the United States, because they knew it would work.
That would be what most people would assume would be the easiest, quickest path to a nuclear bomb that the Iranians could take, if they were trying to take the path to a nuclear bomb, that's what they would do.
But now this Times article is saying, no, they're going for this much more sophisticated implosion method, still talking about highly enriched uranium, not plutonium here, but they're going to use this method that they've worked out in order to ensure perfect achievement of critical mass and nuclear detonation.
But, Dr. Prather, you've actually made real nuclear bombs.
Does this sound like a plausible story to you?
Well, I've never actually made them, but I've tested them.
And when I was in the Navy, I was the head of a training group that, in those days, nuclear weapons had to be assembled out of stockpile and prepared for use.
And so I'm intimately familiar with those kind of relatively simple nuclear weapons, first generation or maybe even second generation nuclear weapons.
Okay.
Now, that having said all that, since you asked me to be on this program, I went and did a Google search for something that I knew existed.
And I will now call your attention to the column I wrote, which I called Stuff and Nonsense.
Oh, yeah, I remember that.
Here, I'll Google it up myself.
Wait a minute.
That's not the one.
It's the other one.
The one that says, yet another, where is that?
I've got it up here somewhere.
Okay.
Well, at any rate, I concluded that column, one of those columns, at the moment I can't remember which one it was, by quoting from a final IAEA report on the Iraqi nuclear program.
Not the Iranian, the Iraqi.
And at the end of that...
Now we're talking pre-'91.
We're not talking about Dick Cheney's fantasy here.
We're talking about in the 1980s when Saddam was backed by the United States and had a secret program.
According to the IAEA's final report, and maybe I'll write another column, this is the one that's labeled, what, Stuff and Nonsense?
Let me look.
Yeah, Stuff and Nonsense.
Google Gordon Fraser's Stuff and Nonsense, and this will come up.
According to the U.N.
Security Council, final report by the IAEA to the U.N.
Security Council, Iraqi engineers had developed but had not tested in about a two-year effort a complete 32-point implosion system, including an electronic firing system, detonators, and associated high-explosive lenses.
Okay.
Now that, they developed it but never tested it.
Now, in other information that we got from after the first Gulf War, we learned when we got in there and the IAEA got to looking at all the documents for the nuclear program that they discovered, and the IAEA discovered it, okay, and it had all been destroyed by then.
But we discovered that in 1989, before the first Gulf War, some Iraqi scientists had attended a symposium in Portland, Oregon, the summer of 1989, where they learned for the first time about these multipoint detonation implosion systems, high explosives.
They didn't know anything about that.
So that's when their work began was in 1989, and that's when the two-year program ended in 1991, when the Gulf War came along and they destroyed all this stuff.
Now, you can go see that there had been since 1951, I'm sorry, yeah, since 1951, there have been I don't know how many now, 14, 15 maybe, international unclassified symposium on high explosive detonation, and many of the articles that are on there describe in considerable detail how you go about designing a workable, a sophisticated multipoint high explosive detonation system.
It's fairly obvious that that's, after attending that symposium in 1989, that's what the Iraqis, the Iraqis did, okay, but they never tested it.
Okay, now the Times or this article that you just quoted, they're claiming that the, and I stress again, all of these symposiums, you ought to go look at them, you know, the papers that are given there, it takes care of all of these things.
And I guarantee you, I haven't looked through all those papers, but I guarantee you that nobody has proposed making a high explosive groove in a metal shield to go to little holes, 32 holes, let's say, in a metallic shield filled with high explosives.
You know, I mean, that's not sophisticated, that's crazy.
Yeah, well this morning I was sitting here drinking my coffee and I get my email subject, Iranian scientists teach pigs to fly.
And you call this thing a Rube Goldberg scheme.
Your point that you're making here about the IAEA report about these symposiums is that if the Iranians, the IAEA report again about the Iraqi former program, that if the Iranians were actually going to make an implosion bomb, they would use, I don't know, some of the blueprints that are already all over the world instead of making up this, what sounds to you obviously on its face, like a ridiculous brand new Iranian invention of a better way to detonate an implosion bomb.
Doc, is that the point here?
Yeah, I mean, it's one of the, I can't think of right offhand, the quite loony tunes, that's it.
This is loony tunes.
If the Iranians really have perfected this thing, which of course they haven't, we ought to start outsourcing our nuclear, you know, close down Los Alamos and outsourcing to the Iranians, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and I think, you know, you told me on the phone earlier when I asked you to be on the show that it's possible that the way that these kind of internal implosion devices are set off now could be improved upon, but it wouldn't be the Iranians who did it.
It might be us, maybe the Russians or the Chinese or somebody like that.
The Italians have been really big on all this use of shaped charges with high explosives.
And that's what this is, basically.
It's a special kind of shaped charge.
All right, so...
And there have been all these international, unclassified symposiums where every, you know, incredible detail.
You go and look at these papers that have been given, and there's a list of them.
I sent you the URL on it, and maybe you want to post it somewhere.
I don't know.
But if you go look at that, you say to yourself, what's the big deal, you know?
And so, okay, so now back again.
What if while ElBaradei and the Iranians were proceeding along the lines of the additional protocol, and they were, and they went and they showed ElBaradei a lot of these things that he wanted to see, some of which were at military sites, which he had no business going to, but he asked and they said, well, okay, but, you know, we want to be completely transparent here, and we'll do whatever you say.
And so they let him in.
And in many cases, these were snap inspections, and some of them they weren't, because they said, well, we've got some stuff going on there that we can't let you know about, so we're going to have to clean that up before you come in.
But I stress again that even under the additional protocol, he still had to ask them, and he said, well, I think maybe you're doing something here that you ought not be doing.
And they said, well, okay, come see, you know.
Well, that sort of, I think, is the end of that, is that we got this.
And by the way, if the Iranians had done anything like that that is reported in the Times, you can bet your bottom dollar that there would be a report in the IAEA files and that David Albright would probably have published it.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, you told me before, too, that if they were testing any kind of implosion device, whether the kind that everybody uses or this newfangled kind, make-believe stuff, Looney Tunes, as you call it, as described in the London Times today, we're not talking about something that the American intelligence agencies would be unaware of, the idea that they would be testing, as you told me, that they would have to test the method and the perfection of the implosion device over and over and over and over again to get it just perfect, and they would have to even use some natural uranium, not enriched, but they would have to use some depleted or natural uranium in the core as part of the test.
There's no way any of this could be going on that the American intelligence agencies don't go about it.
Isn't that right?
Well, I wouldn't say about the American intelligence agencies, because they've been wrong so often in the past.
Well, but that's usually deliberately.
Here's the thing.
The best source of what's going on in Iran by far, absolutely without question, is the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
After all, they've got inspectors on the ground until the summer of 2006.
They could go basically anywhere they wanted to, interview anybody they wanted to, talk to anybody they wanted to, that they had some reason to suppose that might be related to their nuclear program.
And I want to state again, safeguarded materials in Iran include the mines themselves in a way, because they mine uranium in several different mines in Iran.
And from the time that it's mined, all of that is under IAEA safeguards, the bookkeepers, the accountants, and they keep track of every gram of it, every gram of it, throughout its entire history from then on.
And that would include natural uranium metal that might be used in the testing of one of these implosion systems, or even they don't have, yeah, yeah, they've got depleted uranium.
All of that is an NPT-prescribed material that is subject to IAEA safeguards.
And they continuously, continually, I should say, several times a year report to the IAEA Board of Governors that all of the NPT-prescribed materials in Iran are accounted for, and that none have been diverted to a military purpose.
All right, and again, you know, I mean, let's be pretty clear about this for people to understand in an easy format for you.
The Iranians are the Branch Davidians, and the IAEA are the ATF, and they're itching for an excuse.
They're the cops.
They've got their hand on their gun.
If they had a way to say, Aha, look, the Iranians diverted their uranium, they would be taking it.
It is not as though a previous London Times article put it this way, I believe one time, Mossad says, Mohammed ElBaradei is an Iranian spy.
No, actually, Mohammed ElBaradei is the head of the ATF, and he's itching to go in there.
If he had an excuse, he would, and it's the same thing for the rest of all of them.
No, I don't agree with any of that.
I think you mischaracterized the International Atomic Energy Agency and its secretariat incorrectly.
Now, the IAEA Board of Governors is a very different animal, and their people on that Board of Governors, including our elected, I mean, our special envoy, they would love to have access to some IAEA report which said things like that, and they would have, probably.
They would not have access to null reports.
That is, if the IAEA secretariat, the director general, and his inspectors, were to investigate, let's say, the design of an Iranian gas centrifuge, this is something that's going to be used, in this case, to enrich uranium.
All of that material, that information that the IAEA claimed would be proprietary, and they would be required to keep it secret from even the members of the Board of Governors.
None of their damn business.
Now, as I say, Albright seems to have made himself the official biographer or the leaker or whatever it is, and so you can be certain that if there are any IAEA reports, even though they're held confidential from the Board of Governors, apparently Albright has access to a lot of these, and that stuff would be now on the front page of, I don't know, some newspaper.
But it isn't.
You know, they are the authorities.
The U.S. intelligence agencies are certainly not competent to make those kind of determinations, and I doubt even that Mossad, who's got a vested interest in all this sort of thing, is capable of making those kind of determinations.
You've got to know what the hell you're looking for.
You've got to be an expert.
Well, I don't think there are any people in the CIA or in Mossad who are experts on nuclear weapons design and research and development.
Well, sure, and I mean...
Why would they be there?
I mean, there have been times, from Seymour Hersh's reporting, I think it was the next act, he says that all of his intelligence sources inside Mossad say they don't have any information about a secret program.
They kind of sort of think there is one, but they don't have any evidence of one.
And then it's been in Haaretz that the director of the Israeli Mossad has said, no, the nuclear program we're talking about is the declared one, the one that everyone knows about, the one that is enriching uranium to industrial grade 3.6%, not weapons grade 90-plus.
But anyway, we still want to bomb them anyway, because industrial grade is bad enough, he said, or whatever it was.
So it's not even really...
The official story coming out of the CIA seems to agree with what we hear from the leaks to journalists, to the best journalists on the lower level, and even candid comments by the head of the Mossad seems to agree with the National Intelligence Estimate of 2003, and so do the agents who are talking to people like Seymour Hersh.
Yeah, well, let me make the point as well as I can.
The IAEA is not a non-proliferation agency.
It is not a nuclear proliferation prevention agency.
It is a United Nations Atoms for Peace agency, and their principal responsibility to the Board of Governors of the IAEA and to the Security Council and to the UN General Assembly is to do what they can to help facilitate the widest possible distribution of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.
That is their chattel, that is their goal, that is their mission.
Now, when they are associated with a non-proliferation treaty required safeguards agreement, which Iran is required by the non-proliferation treaty to have negotiated with and to keep current with the IAEA, the IAEA is also required to make sure that none of the NPT-prescribed materials, like, for example, enriched uranium or even uranium ore, practically, uranium metal, certainly, and any number of other things, they are required to keep track of all of it and to make sure that none of it is ever diverted to a nuclear weapon or to a weapons program of any kind.
In my opinion, that would include the use of depleted uranium in anti-armor artillery.
That depleted uranium is an NPT.
Well, I mean, Doc, what you're saying is that the purpose of the IAEA was supposed to be this dream of spreading peaceful nuclear technology to the poor of the world and all this wonderful stuff.
And still is.
But that's why there are so many people, so many countries in the world, that are members of the IAEA General Conference and have signed the non-proliferation treaty.
Right.
And I guess, you know, the thing is, it's sort of, you know, it is what it is, but it's also casting a shadow, too, because, in effect, it has basically proven the negative.
It has shown that there's been no non-diversion of Iran's nuclear materials.
So I see what you're saying.
It's like a park ranger being turned into a cop or whatever, but he's done a pretty good job over there, it seems like.
Well, yeah, I guess so.
And this is important because John Bolton is on Fox News saying, yes, see, the Times of London says I'm right.
Dr. Prather?
Well, who cares about what the Times of London says, you know?
Well, John Bolton does and repeats it to millions of Americans on TV.
See, that's the punchline.
Yeah, and the IAEA says he's wrong.
Everybody says he's wrong.
Again, once again, as far as finding out whether or not nuclear materials or NPT prescribed materials have been diverted to a military purpose is concerned.
The CIA and Mossad are, you know, rank amateurs.
They don't have anything like the resources or the authority or, more importantly, the cooperation of the Iranian government in every aspect of their nuclear program, every aspect of it.
All right, now let's go to one of the other major headlines of the paper today.
If I can keep you on the air here a little bit longer, Dr. Prather.
North Koreans, of course, well, there's a whole back story.
I guess I'll let you tell it.
But today Bill Clinton, the former president of the United States, is over there, principally according to the headlines, negotiating about those two journalists who've been convicted of spying and whatever the rest of that story.
But one of the stories I read anyway said that he may try to negotiate with them or make a little breakthrough on the nuclear issue and all that.
And this is such an important story, I think, for people to know about how it is that the North Koreans ended up armed with nuclear weapons and what kind of position they're in as compared to the United States for Bill Clinton as the starting point for Bill Clinton trying to go over there and at least make things the way they were during when he was president.
What do you think?
Well, he cannot possibly be successful.
When he came in in 1993 as president, there already was a desked up between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the North Koreans, who at the time were in the process of subjecting all of their nuclear programs to a safeguards agreement required by the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The IAEA headed at that time, the Secretary headed at that time by Hans Blix, you know, Hans Blix later on.
They had some questions about the previous operation of that Russian-supplied, actually Soviet-supplied reactor, the one you've heard so much about, whether or not they had to examine the operating records of that reactor that had already been operating for several years without being under safeguards to try to figure out how much plutonium was in the spent fuel elements that they had in a pile there somewhere.
And they had some questions about it because they thought maybe the way the reactor had been operated, there was more plutonium there than the North Koreans were claiming was there.
And so they made a complaint to the IAEA board, and the IAEA board went to the UN Security Council and said, you know, make these guys comply with Blix's request.
And the UN Security Council declined to do that.
And, of course, that's what the UN Security Council should have done back in 2006 when Bolton got the IAEA board to make all these, what would you call them, entreaties, appeals to the UN Security Council about the Iranian, quote-unquote, nuclear programs.
But back in 1993, 1992 actually, the UN Security Council declined to take any action on these complaints by Hans Blix.
Well, in any case, that angered the old man, Kim Il, whatever his name was, I've forgotten.
Kim Il-sung.
Yeah, okay.
And so he said, you know, you guys are still conducting military exercises twice a year in South Korea, and now you're trying to get the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on you, all because we are trying to negotiate a safeguards agreement with the IAEA as required by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
So to hell with you.
We're withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is our right.
And so about that time in comes Clinton, and he had this goal, and it's also the stated goal of Barack Obama, that everybody, including Israel and India and Pakistan, should become members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would have meant they had to place all of their nuclear programs, including their nuclear weapons programs, subject to IAEA safeguards agreements.
Well, that wasn't going to work then, and it's not going to work now for Obama.
But in addition for Obama, he's now got the problem that in trying to keep everybody into the Non-Proliferation Treaty, President Clinton had his people negotiate what's called the Agreed Framework with the North Koreans, where they would agree not to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to put everything nuclear in the whole damn country under IAEA lock and seal, freeze it right where it was.
And in return, Clinton promised that he would normalize relations with North Korea and finally sign a peace treaty with the North Koreans.
There had been an armistice in place since 1953, and so here it was 1993, 40 years later, and we were still operating under this armistice, and the North Koreans wanted then, as they want today, a peace treaty.
You know, that war is over.
It's been over for 50 years now.
Well, at any rate, they negotiated this Agreed Framework, and what the North Koreans got out of it was the promise that all this other stuff was going to be resolved and they'd have normal relations with the rest of the world and all that sort of thing.
Well, the thing is, and I'm sure that the existing North Korean officials know it, is that President Clinton, when he negotiated that agreement, never expected to have to live up to the terms of it.
Because they thought, everybody thought back then, I remember, that the North Korean government would just fall.
The old man died.
Kim Il-sung died and left it to Kim Jong-il, I guess they call him.
And this was the deal, and people always get all frustrated and say, ah-ha, see, the Americans made a deal, and it was, parenthetically, Donald Rumsfeld's company that got the contract to build a light-water reactor in North Korea, so that was part of their nuclear weapons program.
But the point of that was, here, we'll give you this light-water reactor, which, of course, like you say, they never lived up to, but this will produce nuclear energy, but you won't be able to turn any of it into weapons material, or at least it won't come right out as weapons material, like their old Soviet reactor produced weapons-grade plutonium basically as a byproduct, right?
Well, basically, as I say, the terms of the agreement were irrelevant, as far as President Clinton was concerned, because he never expected to have to honor them.
But, anyway, in 1999 or maybe 2000, they finally concluded, you know, this regime is going to, you know, they've continued to laugh, they've outlasted us, so now we're going to have to do something about it.
So then Clinton and they started having, making nice with the North Korean leadership.
There were some agreements that were, and there were actual meetings that would take place in 2001 between U.S. officials and North Korean officials.
There'd been no official relationship whatsoever in all these years.
And so immediately upon taking office, Bush and Cheney and Bonkers Bolton, they promptly informed both the South Koreans and the North Koreans that they had no intention of honoring any of the entreaties or the agreements that the Clinton administration had with North Korea.
And not only that, but they started claiming, well, the North Koreans are not even in compliance with the agreed framework, you know.
They've got this secret uranium enrichment program somewhere over there, and they've fooled everybody, you know, and all that sort of thing.
Well, finally in 2002, Bush, in the fall, September, I think, of 2002, Bush unilaterally abrogated that agreed framework and said, you know, we're never going to establish normal relations with that outfit until their nuclear weapons program is destroyed and no longer exists.
Well, now let's emphasize this part of the show.
Bill Clinton, again, okay, 1994, the old man dies right as this agreed framework is coming together.
The agreed framework promised fuel oil and welfare payments and all this stuff.
But the main thing it promised the North Koreans was normalization of relations between the United States and North Korea.
And even though the Clinton administration never lived up to that, the North Koreans basically stayed within the nonproliferation treaty.
They still had a safeguards agreement, although not necessarily that everything was humming along just fine.
But then when Bush took office, it was Bush that unilaterally abrogated the agreed framework that Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher had signed in 1994, which was the deal that kept the North Koreans inside the nonproliferation treaty.
And then, as you say, they're a sovereign country.
They have the right, it's in the nonproliferation treaty, of course, to be able to withdraw from it.
They were supposed to give, I think, six months' notice or 60 days' notice or something.
And they did that and withdrew from the treaty.
But it was George Bush and Bonkers Bolton, as you call them, that picked the fight.
Yeah, worse than that.
Almost immediately upon taking office in 2001, they refused to honor the commitments that President Clinton had made when he finally realized that that regime was not going to go away.
And so he proceeded to start making nice with their leadership and getting the Koreans and the North and the South Koreans to talk and all that sort of thing.
But there was a notable press stuff that there was a new president, as I recall, for South Korea, and he came to the United States.
South Korea we're talking about now.
And Bush flat told them, you know, to hell with all this stuff that Clinton did.
There's no way in the world we're going to ever normalize a relationship with that bunch.
And now when they finally did actually abrogate the agreement, it was in the name of this so-called admission by the North Koreans that they had a secret uranium enrichment program, whatever became of that.
Well, it was worse than that.
They made all their nuclear bombs out of it, right, that they have now?
Wait a minute.
It was worse than that.
It was a secret nuclear weapons program unknown to the, that involved uranium.
You know, the program that they had was not a nuclear weapons program.
They'd never, ever separated out the plutonium that they produced in that Russian-supplied reactor with the intent of making a nuclear weapon with it.
In January of 2003, when they announced that they had completed their withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty and they were restarting that plutonium reactor, they'd taken the seals off and the padlocks and all that sort of thing, and they were going to make more plutonium, they said, and by the way, you know, we're going to separate this plutonium out and we may have a different intention now than we did back in the old days.
So now that people can read, but Doc, when people read on the front page of the newspaper that North Korea has nuclear weapons, they might, you know, by reading broad and saying, or conclude that George Bush and John Bolton were right when they accused them of having that secret nuclear weapons program, but I guess there's a difference in the recipe.
One would have been made out of uranium, but apparently doesn't exist.
What they did detonate came from bombs made out of plutonium, which came from, as you say, this Russian-built reactor.
There's still no evidence that they had this secret uranium program at all, is there?
Right, and not only that, but when the IAEA went in in 1994 to implement that freeze, maybe even before that, there were allegations then that they had a secret high-explosive test range wherein they were attempting to develop an implosion system for nuclear weapons.
And so the IAEA went there and found no such program and duly reported it to the IAEA Board of Governors.
You can go find that.
They said, you know, this was way back there, you know, 1993, 1994, somewhere in there.
And so these allegations were made about North Korea back in the early 90s.
They were never made about Iraq, but they turned out to be the case, because going back again, these Iraqi officials – I'm sorry, did I say Iran?
I meant Iraq.
These allegations were not made in the late 80s about Iraq, because as I said earlier, the Iraqi types that went to that organ in the summer of 89, that international unclassified symposium, there have been at least 13 of them held now, 14 maybe, I don't know.
But they're still having them.
And if you want to know how to make an implosion system, you go to them, or you read the papers, or you get the proceedings of all that sort of thing, and you'll learn how over a 40-year period, 50-year period now, you go about making one of these systems.
And I have not read all of them.
I cannot be sure.
But I'll almost guarantee you that there ain't none of them that involve having explosive tracks grooved into metal and go to little portholes that are filled with high explosive.
That's loony tunes.
That's funny.
Well, so it seems like no matter where in the world the accusations are being hurled, they're always based on a bunch of ridiculous false premises.
And I guess basically the deal is when you're just a regular person, nuclear this and nuclear that has got to be an expert issue left up to somebody else.
Nobody figures that they can really do this on their own.
I can.
And a lot of the other, you know, boy, I guess even broad and sanger to compare you to or whatever, you know, I wouldn't have a handle on this either.
It's complicated stuff.
A lot of people just figure, you know, if it's nuclear and the government says it's dangerous, then there you have it.
But they accused Iraq, which had no nuclear program whatsoever.
They accused Iran, which put their hands up and said, Look, opened up all their books and opened up everything to inspection, and that's never good enough.
And then they made false accusations against North Korea, forced them out of the treaty, and ended up pushing them to go ahead and get nuclear weapons.
That was pretty good tackling of the axis of evil there, wouldn't you say?
Well, except for the thing where you said they had nuclear weapons.
They did have a nuclear weapons program from about 89 to 91.
Oh, yeah, no, I meant at the time of the invasion.
That's right.
Well, that's a whole other story about how the Israelis bombed their safeguarded nuclear program in 1981 and drove it underground, and it became a nuclear weapons program after that.
But not really a significant one until the very late 80s, very late 80s.
You know, they didn't, you know.
Well, the only thing, you know, in a way, Clinton's got some credibility when it comes to the North Koreans, because he did attempt near the end of his presidency to try to honor that safeguard, that agreed framework.
He did try to do that.
And maybe the Obama administration will try to honor our end of that agreement or something like it.
That is, we will attempt to make some kind of normalization relations with North Korea.
But the genie's out of the bottle.
The North Koreans have built and tested nuclear weapons as a direct result of Bush, Cheney, Bolton putting the kibosh on that agreed framework and essentially forcing the North Koreans to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty and kick the IAEA inspectors out.
And my impression is that at least as far as the Bush-Cheney administration was concerned, and maybe to a certain extent those people are still worms or moles or something or other in the Obama administration, that's what they're attempting to do to Iran.
They're attempting to make the pressure on Iran so intense that the Iranians finally say, oh, to hell with this, we're withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty.
But they don't do that.
Every time the Iranians make a statement, they say, we want to reinforce the nonproliferation treaty.
We want everybody to sign on.
We want Israel to sign on.
We have no intention of ever having a nuclear weapons program.
And not only that, but our supreme leader, is it Khomeini?
I've forgotten his name.
Khomeini.
Yeah, he says it's against our religion to do such things.
Well, and Dr. Prather, I actually, to wrap up this interview, I actually have here a short clip of John Bolton on a conference call that was recorded.
It's on, well, if you just Google John Bolton Iran conference call, it'll come right up.
And it's John Bolton explaining to members of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee that their purpose was exactly what you just said, to make the pressure on Iran so intense that they do like the North Koreans did, throw up their hands and go ahead and withdraw from the treaty.
Fine, you know, if surrendering isn't good enough for you, we just won't even participate in this charade any longer.
That's the purpose, is to drive them out of the treaty.
That way it makes war apparently a more viable option.
Although Bolton denies that.
He says he wants to support a revolution from within or whatever.
But still, and so I'll be playing that right at the end of the interview.
Although if I can keep you for another couple of minutes, Dr. Prather, I wanted to ask you about one more issue here.
Okay, sure.
It's Dr. Gordon Prather, nuclear weapons expert at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com, slash Prather.
And now we've talked about this before, but I think it's important because this is the kind of thing that it's kind of interesting in a Hollywood kind of way and people can really latch on to it.
It's the kind of propaganda that floats around the goofier parts of the war party right, I think.
And that is the idea that the Iranians or, you know, everything we just discussed, notwithstanding about their nuclear program, or the North Koreans could somehow float a nuclear missile on a barge or something to our coast and then launch it into the sky over the United States.
And that would create an electromagnetic pulse that would turn out all the lights and destroy our civilization and millions of people would die and we'd all turn into cannibals and I guess the sun wouldn't rise anymore.
And so I just wonder how awesome of a nuclear weapon do you have to have to actually create an electromagnetic pulse that would destroy, not just turn out the lights overnight or something or for a day, but would destroy the electrical infrastructure of a country like the United States?
I mean, I guess everybody pretty much understands there's a difference between a regular fission atom bomb of uranium or plutonium and a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, which is I guess both, but is ultimately a fusion weapon.
I mean, but how much more advanced than that would it have to be?
Is Newt Gingrich right that this is a dangerous and immediate threat to our civilization, this EMP nuke?
Well, so far as I know, Congress was specifically asked, and I've forgotten the year, but it was during the Clinton administration, Congress was specifically asked by the Department of Energy for permission to develop a device that might do that.
And that says two things.
First of all, we didn't have one then, okay?
We didn't have a nuclear weapon that was specifically designed to be designated outside the atmosphere that would generate as its primary kill mechanism a electromagnetic pulse, and this electric pulse, this dipole, multi-dipole pulse, essentially would only affect loops, secondary transformer loops on the ground.
So if you've got a transmission line that's not shielded very well, that runs around in a circle or something like that, you will induce in that loop a secondary pulse.
It's the same way that the old auto-ignition systems used to work.
There was a primary and a coil and a secondary coil, and you send a pulse through the primary and a secondary pulse gets induced.
Okay, that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about producing an electromagnetic signal, dipole or multi-pole pulse, that then induces in a secondary loop a pulse.
Okay, now go back again to when Congress was specifically asked for permission by the DOE weapons lab to do some studies or to develop such a nuclear weapon.
That says two things.
That says two things.
One, we did not have at that time such a weapon.
And two, it says, and the second thing is, Congress expressly prohibited their doing that.
Okay?
So we didn't have one then.
Well, but we all have seen on the Discovery Channel, Doc, that when they did a hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific, it turned the lights out, and they said, oh, wow, maybe we could, you know, use that as a weapon.
Well, I was semi-involved in all that.
Okay, so then isn't it still true, like Newt Gingrich says then, that if the Iranians launched one of their nuclear bombs over our country, that it would destroy all the electrical short circuit, what have you?
Well, first of all, that was a multi-megaton nuclear weapon that was not intended for that purpose.
Its intended purpose was to irradiate an incoming Soviet ICBM warhead, okay, and to disable it while it was outside the atmosphere.
That was the purpose of those nuclear weapons.
I don't know whether we've still got any of them or not in stockpile.
Well, and when you say multi-megaton, that means a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb.
Oh, many, many, yeah, sure.
Multi-megaton.
And it was intended to bring down, you know, maybe they would come in with a ten multiply independently targeted warheads, reentry vehicles.
Well, I think you wrote at one point, Dr. Prather, that if an atom bomb launched by the North Koreans or, you know, I don't know, 15 years from now the Iranians or something at the United States is close enough to turn your electricity off, it's close enough to go ahead and blow you apart.
So your electricity is the last thing you need to worry about.
Well, even worse than that, if Al-Qaeda or somebody gets a hold of a nuclear weapon and, you know, Well, they've got to be able to deliver it to outer space, right?
Oh, yeah, it's really absurd.
Okay, but once again, the prohibition on their development by the DOE weapons lab was listed on bunker busters, I believe.
But the ones that were supposedly designed to produce the electromagnetic pulse, as far as I know, that prohibition was never lifted.
And no funds have ever, as far as I know, no funds have ever been requested for making such a device.
So even though this commission that's doing this EMP type study, they claim that the Soviets did, that the Soviets actually developed a weapon that would do that.
But they do not make a claim, even though there are a couple of people on that commission that should know what we've done and what we haven't done in our nuclear weapons laboratories.
And as I say, I don't, because that stuff is all highly classified.
But they can't do something if Congress expressly prohibits them from doing it, you know?
It doesn't matter whether or not what they've done is classified or not.
If Congress says don't do it, that means don't do it.
And no money would be appropriated for it.
Well, obviously there are a lot of exceptions to that rule, but let's all pray to whatever religion that nuclear weapons isn't one area where the executive just...
No funds appropriated under this or any other act shall be used for this or that.
You damn well better not use appropriated funds for this or that.
And the guy who will go to prison, the first guy to go to prison is the contracting officer.
It's the bean counters that we depend upon to keep government honest.
Well, all power to the Congressional Budget Office.
The General Accounting Office, I guess is the one I mean.
Or the ones in DOE.
They don't want to go to prison for life.
All right, well, we've got to cut it there because I want to play this clip and then I'll still be running late to get Eric Margulies on.
But I really appreciate your time on the show.
What do I do?
Can I just leave my phone on and hear him?
Yeah.
No, you can't.
But you can go to antiwar.com slash radio and click on listen live.
Okay, I really like to listen to that guy.
Yeah, Eric Margulies is great.
Coming up next on Antiwar Radio.
Thanks very much, Dr. Prather.
Appreciate it.
All right, folks, and then I hope this is the short version of that clip for you.
This is John Bolton on the phone with the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee verifying what Dr. Prather just said, that their purpose in lying and misusing the Nonproliferation Treaty and the IAEA safeguards agreement with respect to Iran is to drive them out of it.
Let me turn now to the question of Iran and what I think the situation is there.
The Security Council just passed a resolution that the Security Council passed at the end of last month imposing certain limited sanctions on Iran, obviously the product of a long effort based on Iran's refusal to comply with the earlier Security Council resolution that gave them until August 31st to cease their uranium enrichment activities.
I'd have to say, because I'm a private citizen and therefore a free man again, and these are my personal views now, that this resolution, this sanctions resolution, is very disappointing.
It is not as tough as I would have liked to have seen it.
In many respects, the Russians did an outstanding job from their point of view in protecting Iran and narrowing the scope of the sanctions in limiting the effectiveness, I think, of many of the things that we wanted to try and do to prevent the Iranians from continuing to make progress on their nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
I think the Iranian reaction to the sanctions resolution has been very telling in that respect, although they've passed a resolution in Parliament to re-evaluate their relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
They have not rejected the sanctions resolution.
They have not done anything more dramatic, such as withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty or throwing out inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which I actually hope they would do, that that kind of reaction would produce a counter reaction that actually would be more beneficial to us.
