08/05/13 – Yousaf Butt – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, next up is Yosaf Butt, and he is now the senior fellow, or a senior fellow, at the Federation of American Scientists.
Welcome back to the show, Yosaf.
How are you doing?
Good, thank you.
Well, thanks very much for joining us today.
Turns out, according to Wall Street Journal, I guess, that Iran's uranium enrichment program is just a red herring all this time.
It turns out that they're making weapons-grade plutonium, and they're going to blow us all up with it, or at least turn out all the lights.
Are you scared?
Yeah, well, yeah, you know, it seems to conflate what can possibly happen in the future if they build other facilities, you know, with, you know, just saying that that's actually the pathway to a bomb that they're using.
So it's just very, a biased and hyperbolic article, in my view.
Yeah, well, you know, that happens a lot at the Wall Street Journal.
Although, it used to be that the news section was a little bit separate and better than the opinion pages, but not anymore, I guess.
Yeah, I was surprised by the title and also the sourcing.
So the title basically implying that Iran is on a different pathway to a bomb, whereas if you actually were a responsible reporter and you went through the actual facts and interviewed people, not just on the European, American, and IAEA side, and actually had an unbiased set of sources, you'd see that basically what Iran has is a nuclear reactor that will start up in the future in about a year or so, perhaps.
So it's been delayed many times.
That reactor, as part of its irradiated fuel, might, you know, will contain some plutonium, which, if Iran were to create a reprocessing facility, they could separate out into making things for a bomb.
Now, you know, that's all things they could do.
But the point is, it's not a bomb factory.
It's a nuclear reactor, which is used for research or for generating electricity.
And it's provided by Russia, for the most part, which is one of the P5-plus-1 nations, these nations, the world powers negotiating with Iran.
So certainly nothing illegitimate about what they're doing.
Everything is consistent with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Okay.
Now, let me make sure I understood you right.
Did you just say if they had a reprocessing facility, then they would be able to separate the plutonium out?
Yeah.
So once they get this thing started, which won't happen until next year at the earliest, by 2016, they will begin to have enough plutonium in the irradiated fuel of this reactor that if they build another reprocessing facility that could separate, or separation facility that could take out the plutonium, then they could do it.
So it's a whole ladder of if-then statements that remain to be seen.
The main point is, yes, most of nuclear technology can be put to dual use.
But, you know, is this reactor illegal in any way?
No, it's not.
Everything is consistent with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
And if people don't like that treaty, they can propose another treaty.
But, you know, you can't make Iran sign a certain treaty and then just say, well, you know, we don't like this country and it might do all this stuff in the future.
Therefore, they're definitely on this pathway to a bomb.
Well, now, is it possible to make a simple gun-type nuke out of plutonium, or you'd have to make a very sophisticated implosion system to even set off a plutonium bomb?
Yeah, that would be for various reasons.
It's an implosion device.
You cannot use just a simple gun-type device, which you can with...
So you can make a gun-type nuke out of uranium.
And I know you can make, I think, you can make an implosion bomb out of uranium or plutonium.
But you're telling me you cannot make a gun-type nuke out of plutonium.
Yes, exactly.
That's right, yeah.
And then, is there any evidence anywhere in the world that the Iranians know the first thing about imploding a nuclear bomb?
Well, you know, the knowledge is out there.
You know, it's theoretical knowledge.
You can get a lot of it off of Wikipedia and other internet sources.
So, you know, in theory, yeah, I mean, nuclear scientists study this stuff.
But, you know, have they built such things?
Do they know the details of it?
You know, I strongly doubt it.
Well, now, Gordon Prather, who used to make nuclear bombs for the U.S. government back in the day, he tells me that in order to set off an implosion bomb, unless the Russians just give them one that's ready to go or some fantasy like that, that they would have to basically set off their implosion system hundreds of times with inert heavy metals like, say, depleted uranium or lead or something like that.
And then they would have to just do it hundreds and hundreds of times and film it with high-speed X-ray film.
And, in other words, it would take this huge amount of infrastructure and research just to be able to count on their implosion system working, because the different high-explosive lenses have to be timed to the microsecond in order for it to not fizzle a la North Korea, correct?
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, it's not a simple thing by any measure.
And the point is, you know, the premier source of intelligence, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, has clearly said, not only is there no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program, but he has a high level of confidence that whatever research that they were doing into it stopped by 2003.
So, yeah, there's a lot of things that you'd have to do, probably even tests, if you want to have any confidence in it.
So let's say you collect enough plutonium for a first device.
Would you just, you know, would you have confidence in that system without all these tests that you mentioned?
No, you wouldn't.
And then you'd probably want to do a live fire test of the actual device before you had any confidence in it.
So, yeah, there's many steps to be done.
But the overall point being that the Director of National Intelligence has said he has a high level of confidence that they stopped any, even any research into doing this kind of stuff back in 2003.
So, you know, I don't see where the worry is coming from, besides some unnamed U.S. and European officials and people at the IAEA, who are biased in this regard, obviously.
Well, and it seems like the narrative is really counting on, they're not trying to convince you, right?
They're trying to convince my audience or, you know, the average American out there that, hey, listen, nuclear technology is complicated and you can't take the risk that this isn't a danger.
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, so let us do what we want.
Yeah, that's basically correct.
And it doesn't help that, you know, nuclear, just the word nuclear has very negative connotations and sounds scary.
Hey, you're telling me I just interviewed Greg Mitchell about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Right, exactly.
So, you know, it helps them to write articles such as the Wall Street Journal article today, which, you know, just hypes the threat.
The point is, you know, even the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognized that, you know, there are legitimate things you can do with nuclear technology, and then there's weaponization, which is forbidden.
But, you know, these other things are allowed.
You're allowed to build reactors.
You're allowed to have nuclear fuel cycle, which means generating your own fuel for those reactors.
So these are all things that are allowed.
And now if some people in the U.S. government, I'm not even saying it's the whole U.S. government, because apparently the intelligence agencies are pretty legit on this, but, you know, some other people there, plus some European countries, plus the IAEA, if they don't like the NPT bargain, if they don't like any kind of nuclear technology going to some, you know, countries that have signed the NPT, then they need to come up with another treaty and get people on board with that treaty.
But you cannot ask people to sign a treaty and then say, well, you know, if you did X, Y, Z, then you could take this reactor, which is currently legitimate, and then make it into something that would provide fuel for a bomb.
I mean, it's just, that's just abusing the treaty.
You should just throw Iran out of the NPT if you want to do that.
Right.
Yeah, you know, Greg Mitchell was mentioning how, really probably because of the lack of revisionism about the use of nuclear weapons against Japan back in World War II, that we still kind of entertain the possibility of using them in the future.
And Barack Obama actually has scaled back America's first strike policy for the first time, I think, in a major step since the Cold War, saying we no longer reserve the right to use a nuke first strike against any country in the world.
Now we only reserve the right to use a nuke first strike against a nuclear weapons state or Iran.
Yeah, basically they said, you know, states that are not in compliance with their non-proliferation obligations, which is a vague term because...
For the national interest, I wrote a piece called Non-proliferation Misinterpretation.
And basically, you often hear European and American pundits and ex-government officials say that Iran is not in compliance with the NPT.
But that's not a true fact, because there is no enforcement arm per se of the NPT.
So there's no agency that actually enforces or says whether or not a certain country is in compliance with the NPT.
The only body that can be tasked with that is the International Court of Justice.
They could weigh in if they were tasked to do it.
So what the IAEA actually does is enforce a different set of treaties.
And these are bilateral treaties between the IAEA and about 140 other states.
And these are called the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement.
And now, their enforcement, again, is very political.
So a certain state, for being bad with its accounting of nuclear materials, can be found in non-compliance.
And other states, such as South Korea, can be found in compliance if they feel like it.
It's a very subjective call on part of the IAEA.
And they happen to have found, roughly a decade ago, that Iran was in non-compliance.
But by 2008, the IAEA wrote a report, and all the legal concerns that amount to anything substantive were resolved in Iran's favor or were written off as non-concerns anymore.
Then they brought up this other set of issues that were off some laptop whose provenance is unknown.
We don't know where this laptop came from.
And Iran says it's all fabricated, that they had some designs on there, some nuclear weaponization studies.
But apparently, all the information on that was in English.
There was nothing in Farsi.
So even people from Western countries who've looked at the data on that laptop say that they're not convinced that it's genuine.
So that's the only thing holding up progress right now.
And even that is not a legal concern.
That just happens to be a concern.
So it's not a legal matter anymore.
So basically, as far as the IAEA is concerned, the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement violations should also have been lifted by 2008.
But they're still trying to keep coming up with these vague concerns such as this ARAK reactor in Iran that was in the Wall Street Journal story.
So basically, my take on this is some elements feel that Rouhani, the new president in Iran, will actually resolve the issue.
And they cannot stand that, that they need to dream up something scary, nuclear-sounding to make into an issue to confront him with, just as there's some hope for resolving this issue.
So it's just a never-ending cycle of vague concerns that are basically legal.
It's like saying, it's like the police saying, why do you have a red sports car?
That means you're going to go faster than the speed limit.
So let me just arrest you right now.
Right.
All right.
Well, and yeah, like you're saying, they're trying to cause trouble, trying to, somebody here has an agenda to try to undermine the possibility of a breakthrough in the talks with the new president.
But I'm going to get back to him in just a second and make sure that I understand you about these so-called international obligations here.
What you're telling me, I believe, Yosef, is that they're not in violation, the Iranians, they're not in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and they're not in violation of their safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency that they've agreed to sign up for under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
What they're in violation of, if anything, is a series of UN Security Council resolutions that say you're not allowed to enrich uranium at all.
You have to open up non-nuclear facilities for inspection by the IAEA, like, say, the plant where you make your centrifuges or you make your missiles and these kinds of things that are far outside the IAEA's actual jurisdiction.
And then when they refuse, oh, and you have to answer an unending list of questions based off the Israeli-forged so-called smoking laptop that even Ali Heinonen doesn't believe in, the worst hawk that was ever at the IAEA, won't vouch for.
And I think it's Gareth Porter has pretty much proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the Israelis that forged that laptop based on a lot of educated guesses about what some Iranian documents might look like if they were what they were.
But in any case, point being, and you can get back to laptop if you want, I'll give you time, but the point being that when Barack Obama or anyone else says Iran is in violation of their international obligations, they're just making stuff up, and then they're saying that Iran's in violation of what they've made up.
Just like you just said about the cop in the red car, that if the guy refuses to be arrested and jumps in his car and drives away, oh, he's in violation of my attempt to arrest him without cause.
And so the cops can beat their chest about that, but that doesn't make them in the right.
Yeah, and coming back to the Security Council resolution, so those, basically, those can be enforced, the sanctions, et cetera, can be enforced only if there's a finding of a threat to peace.
That's a specific point in, you know, in applying these sanctions.
So, and it's hard to see how you can square a threat to peace when the Director of National Intelligence says he has a high level of confidence that nuclear weaponization work in Iran finished in 2003, was stopped in 2003.
So, the whole thing is internally inconsistent.
I mean, how can something, you know, and it would be a threat to the peace in case Iran did XYZ, so it's not even a present threat to the peace, and it's not even a future threat to the peace if they don't have a present program, according to the DNI.
So, it's just, you know, the whole thing is concocted.
And, you know, what it's going to do, you know, what I fear is future treaties or like getting other people on board with the CTBT, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, other countries are going to say, look, look how you're abusing the NPT, and, you know, just like if countries are within their obligations to the NPT, you're calling them outside, you're saying they're outside their obligations, and now you want us to sign on to the other treaties.
Why should we do that?
So, it's going to scare people away if these treaties are applied in a political way.
So, that's one of my fears on this.
So, you know, and it's not just this Iraq reactor thing.
The ISIS group in D.C. is the one that wrote a, you know, a press release on this lately, which is why it's coming to the news right now.
The other thing they wrote about, which might come to the news in the future, is about laser separation.
Now, you have not only nuclear, but laser, which sounds extra scary, right?
The point is this laser technology that they're talking about that Iran might be doing because somebody at ISIS saw a new building on one of their sites.
This technology, the West has tried to perfect for decades and spent billions, and they haven't been able to do it.
So, it's very unlikely that the Iranians made some breakthrough to do this on an industrial scale.
I mean, they might be doing something with other isotopes besides uranium and plutonium.
It's not just for those isotopes.
Well, now, on that laser thing, Yosef, are they, is this the same thing as in the forged laptop where they claimed that they had the bench level experiments to see if they could make uranium tetrafluoride with lasers, which isn't even uranium hexafluoride, which is the gas you need to introduce into your centrifuges anyway?
Yeah, this is a completely independent way to separate uranium, the uranium-235.
And what you do is you use basically lasers to try to induce that separation.
And you can get...
So, the answer is no.
Wait, do I understand you right?
You're saying this is not about making uranium tetrafluoride.
This is an entirely different...
That's related to it, but this is entirely different.
This is not the laptop.
This is another facility in Iran where they were doing...
But it's not known that they were working on uranium specifically.
And it's certainly not known now.
And, you know, basically what the press release was about was a new building was built on a site.
And that implies, you know, that the IAEA needs to go in and inspect this, which is not a legitimate way of looking at it.
You know, just because there's a new building on some site doesn't mean the IAEA suddenly has authority to go into a country and do whatever it wants.
You know, the IAEA has very limited authority actually in most countries to look at only declared facilities.
So, you know, these are like new issues that are percolating up now, in my view, with basically a political bent to try to sabotage any future progress with the new president that's coming out in Iran.
That's like sort of the meta-narrative of all this.
Right.
All right.
Now, hold that thought, because I want to get right back to that in a second.
But I wanted to mention real quick here about Hersh's piece from...
I think it was 2010.
It could have been 2011 now.
I'm trying to remember.
Yeah, 2011, I think, yeah.
It was called Iran and the Bomb.
And there was a follow-up, too.
But this is in The New Yorker magazine.
And what he said there was...
And this goes back to your point earlier about the Director of National Intelligence saying he judges with high confidence that the CIA, etc., etc., judge with high confidence that they are not making nuclear weapons and hadn't even been dorking around with it since 2003.
And what's important here is that Hersh says, yeah, and the reason they're so confident is because Iran is crawling with JSOC.
There's CIA and there's Joint Special Operations Command operatives all over the place.
And they've got radiation sensors here and they've got weight sensors in the roads for measuring the dump trucks going to and fro.
They've got radiation sensors hidden in the street signs all over the place.
And so they're not just guessing from Austin, Texas, like me.
They're there.
And they know that Iran is not making nuclear weapons.
There is evidence of absence.
Plenty of it.
Yeah, exactly.
I can't vouch for the details of Si Hersh's thing, but I'm sure it's all very well fact-checked because the New Yorker is immaculately fact-checked.
But the point is it's very rare for an intelligence official to say he has high confidence in something.
I mean, that's basically saying, what I'm saying is true because we know it.
And not only the things that you mentioned, which are sort of James Bond-like, there were signal intercepts, actually.
So what they found was very high-level senior Iranian nuclear scientists who were working on this research-level project at the time, back in 2003 or early 2000 timeframe, were complaining that basically there was a political decision to even stop them from doing calculations into weaponry, which is allowed, actually, under the NPT.
It's against the spirit of the NPT, but it's within the letter of the NPT to do these calculations and computer simulations because you don't have an actual bomb.
So they found that these guys were talking to each other and saying, oh, shucks, they're shutting down.
We can't even run our computers and do this stuff anymore.
They're shutting us down.
So that's why they have very high confidence because they heard complaints cross-checked.
Obviously, not just one complaint, but many people complaining that they won't be able to have fun doing their little calculations and all that.
So that's one of the reasons they have very high confidence, or high confidence that the weaponization research was stopped back in 2003.
Well, this is where we get back to the new president, Rouhani, did you see Gareth Porter's new piece where he said it was Rouhani that came in in 2003 as the something or other title, I forget exactly, and he's the one who made them all stop with their calculations and everything else.
Right, right.
So now this guy's in power and he can't extra stop what has already stopped.
That's why the new allegation...
No, no, no, I'm sorry.
He was the one who made them stop back in 2003.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the problem now is...
So the problem now becomes, what are the negotiations about?
If the program's already stopped, and they're consistent with the NPT, what they're doing in Iran, they've resolved the comprehensive safeguards agreement violations that they were accused of, which were basically accounting violations, like you didn't report when you had UF6 come into the country.
It was never like you were building a bomb.
It was always like, oh, where did this uranium go?
You didn't report it when it came in from China.
That's bad.
You get a slap on the wrist.
But it was never like you were building a bomb even at that stage when they violated their comprehensive safeguard agreement.
So in any case, they're consistent with the NPT.
They're consistent with the safeguards agreement now.
So in my view, what the negotiations should be right now is what sweeteners can we give to Iran to get them to agree to more tougher inspections that we want.
If you want something from somebody else and they're already consistent with the law, then you've got to offer them some sweeteners.
You can't say, basically right now, we're not even offering to stop beating them.
It's just sort of a bizarre set of circumstances.
Well, and you know, that's the thing.
The outlines of the deal from the American side are so obvious, Yosef.
Hey, listen, we'll lift the sanctions if you guys will re-adopt the additional protocol and stop with your enrichment up to 20%, which makes the Israelis nervous.
Keep it at 3.6 and we won't bomb you.
And then everybody shake hands.
That's easy as pie.
Right.
Yeah, but that basically, something similar was agreed to, brokered by Turkey and Brazil back in 2010 and at the last moment some people in the White House and Congress feared that such a deal would upset all these edifice of sanctions legislation that they made up.
They decided that it's more important to keep sanctions on Iran rather than resolve the nuclear issue.
So my feeling is, because of this intelligence finding, people aren't really nervous that Iran is building or wants to build a bomb even in the future.
It's a convenient excuse right now to keep the sanctions on.
Because if they were really worried, if you are really worried that somebody's going to build a nuclear bomb, then you do anything to get them to stop.
You'll say, hey, listen, we'll lift all the sanctions.
Just stop this stuff that you're doing at 20% and give us the inspections.
We'll do anything you want.
Why are we not worried enough?
It's clear that it's just being used as an excuse.
If we're really worried, we do whatever it takes to get in there.
They said, well, if you do some serious lifting of sanctions, we'll let you have more intrusive inspections.
We'll stop the 20% work, which was the deal with Turkey and Brazil.
We said no.
We can't take yes for an answer.
That's what it looks like from here.
The interesting thing right now is we have this intelligence finding from the Director of National Intelligence that weaponization has stopped, but the IAEA and the ISIS group in DC is the one that's coming up with these vague new concerns of theirs.
But if you look and you talk to the people who have been at the IAEA, how many people do you think at the IAEA know about nuclear weaponization, Scott?
I don't know.
Two.
There's two people.
I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
We're right up against the wall here.
We'll get back to this.
Thank you so much for your time.
He's a senior fellow at the Federation for American Scientists.
Writes for Reuters from time to time, too.
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