All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Mohamed Sahimi, Professor of Chemical Engineering at USC, writer for PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau website and also antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Mohamed, how are you doing?
Thank you for having me on your program again.
It's good to talk to you again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and I don't mind a little redundancy.
I hope you don't.
I think we're pretty much agreed that among the most important issues on the planet is that people know the truth about Iran's nuclear program, especially as opposed to the lies told by the war party, which is growing.
And so I was hoping we could just go through this IAEA report piece by piece and see, you know, what actually has weight here, whether any of those weeks worth of scaremongering we heard before the report came out were justified or not.
So I guess, first of all, if you could break it into categories, the different accusations in this IAEA report.
Obviously, there's the alleged studies documents accusations, which I guess I would categorize as one group.
And then there are these new accusations about a Ukrainian, former Soviet scientist and his role, perhaps in helping them develop implosion systems, this kind of thing.
How exactly would you break it down?
And then let's go ahead and go through the different sections the way you like.
Well, I mean, first of all, the report itself was divided into two parts.
The first part was about Iran's known nuclear facilities and how they are operating and so on.
And the IAEA says that it certifies, once again, that there has been no diversion of nuclear material from peaceful to non-peaceful.
But even here, when it certifies that, it first of all makes unsubstantiated claims and also makes unreasonable demands.
First of all, the report, since Yukio Amano became director general of IAEA, always refers to Iran's undeclared nuclear material.
If Iran does have undeclared nuclear material, which there is no evidence for it whatsoever, and even the report does not offer a shred of it, it would be a major violation of Iran's obligation towards its safeguard agreements.
But the fact of the matter is the IAEA just refers to such materials without presenting a shred of evidence why it thinks that Iran might have undeclared nuclear material.
So that's one part.
The other part is when it refers to heavy water plant in Iraq and says that Iran does not allow us to visit the heavy water plant.
First of all, IAEA has visited that plant in the past and has taken samples.
And secondly, and most importantly, something that most people don't know is that a heavy water plant is not included and covered by Iran's safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
In fact, heavy water is not considered a nuclear material unless there is a heavy water reactor that uses that heavy water.
And Iran doesn't have a heavy water reactor.
Iran is building one, but most experts believe that this plant will not come online at least by 2014 or 2015, if not later.
So in that context, Iran has no obligation whatsoever to allow IAEA to visit the plant, even though it has done so in the past.
So that's the first part.
Then the second part discusses the possible military dimension of Iran's nuclear program.
It is here that it makes many allegations.
Most of them don't hold any water.
First of all, all the allegations, without a report acknowledging it, are based on the laptop that allegedly was stolen in Iran in 2004, taken to Turkey, and given to a Western intelligence agency.
Every one of them is based on that.
And then in February of 2008, when Ali Heinonen, who was at that time the Pirs Director General for Safeguards, made a presentation to the Board of Governors, just two days after Mohammed al-Baradei reported that all the outstanding issues between Iran and IAEA had been resolved to the IAEA satisfaction, in which Heinonen used the laptop documents, supposedly, to draw a very dark image or picture of what's going on in Iran, and made all sorts of allegations.
Now, if you compare the latest IAEA report with what Ali Heinonen said at that time, we find that they are exactly the same.
Heinonen talked about Project 5, Project 110, Project 111, and Project Q3.5.
And the present report also talks about the same thing, which is in the attachment one at the end of the report.
And here, the IAEA makes several allegations.
First of all, it makes allegations that a foreign scientist helped Iran between 1996 and early 2000.
And now we know that that scientist was a Russian or Ukrainian scientist, and all the allegations have collapsed, basically, simply because the guy is not a nuclear physicist or a nuclear engineer.
He worked in an institute where work on nuclear weapons was done, but his work was not related to it.
Since 1960, he has worked on production of nanodiamonds that have applications in medicine and material science and other things.
Supposedly, the only thing, the only connection that may establish some sort of relation between production of nanodiamonds and a nuclear weapon program is that in both of them, you need to use explosion in order to do what you want to do.
But the explosion that one uses in production of nanodiamonds is nowhere close to the explosion that one has in triggering a nuclear reaction in a nuclear warhead.
So that's basically the gist of it.
And as you know, and by now everybody who follows this knows, Garrett Porters and Moon in Alabama and other sources and people have basically torn this allegation apart.
Although I must say that yesterday, David Albright's Institute for Science and International Security issued a statement, again, defending what it had claimed, because Albright was the main person who propagated this idea that the Russian or Ukrainian guy was, could be or could have Iran's nuclear program, even though the guy himself was interviewed by a Russian newspaper.
And he told the Russian newspaper that I didn't do any nuclear work for Iran, and I'm not a father of Iran's nuclear program.
So that was one main allegation that he'd made.
The IAEA also made allegations about high explosives.
Again, this goes back several years.
In 2005 and 2006, the IAEA made some allegations about Iran experimenting with high explosives at a facility called Parchin in southeast Tehran.
Now, Parchin is a facility that Iran has used since 1950s to produce ammunition for its, you know, conventional arms.
The allegation was that Iran was using the facility to experiment with high explosives that are not only used in conventional warheads and conventional weapons, but also for triggering a nuclear reaction.
So the IAEA asked Iran to visit the site.
Iran resisted at the beginning because it said, and rightly so, that the Parchin facility is not a nuclear facility, and therefore is not covered by Iran's safeguard agreements.
But after some time, it allowed the IAEA inspectors to go in and look at everything.
They apparently had some satellite imagery that indicated that Iran may have built a steel container.
A steel container is used in such experiments in order to control and contain the high explosion that is caused by high explosives.
They went in there, they couldn't find anything.
Even Ali Heinonen said that they couldn't find anything.
And in fact, I just read a report in one of Iranian websites published in Iran that detailed the visit that was made in 2005 or 2006, in which he said that after they visited the site, Heinonen or one of his deputies asked the Iranian government to allow them to look at two other sites that hadn't been listed as being visited, and the Iranian government allowed them to do it.
In other words, they just did it on their spot, and they couldn't find anything.
All right, now hold it right there.
I'm sorry, Mohamed, we have to go after this break.
I said your name's in the wrong order, but you know what I mean.
Tehran Bureau, PBS Frontline, Antiwar.com, Mohamed Seymour.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Mohamed Sahimi from USC.
He's a professor of chemical engineering there, and he writes for PBS Frontline Tehran Bureau.
Just search Tehran Bureau.
It'll come right up for you.
He's also got an archive, very important one, at Antiwar.com, and we're talking about the new IAEA report, and Mohamed just did a great job, if you missed it, sorry, before the break, breaking down what all's in there, and why not to consider it so important.
If I can summarize real quick, the first part is, oh yeah, they don't have any fissile material.
The only uranium they have is at a measly 3.6%, a little bit at 20%, and it's all accounted for, and there's been no diversion, and they are verified to have not diverted any of their uranium to any military purpose.
So anything else we're talking about is just, you know, side work from there, at best.
Then, Mohamed, you said a major portion of these accusations is the same old so-called smoking laptop, which I hope we can get into the details of that a little bit more about where it came from, and how trusted it is, and even what the accusations in it are, and how well they hold up to scrutiny.
And then there's the accusations about the Ukrainian scientists helping them with their implosion program, and how there's this metal building at Parchin that must be for testing implosion systems for nuclear weapons, even though, as you say, they've been testing weapons there, conventional ones, for a long time, and even Ali Heinonen, the hawk, the former hawk from the IAEA, who's now, I think, at Harvard, told David Sanger, who went ahead and included it in his story in the New York Times, that, nah, I've been there, and, or my guys have been there, and found not one click of radiation, so don't worry about that.
And now, I'm not sure if there was an exact important point we needed to pick up on the other side of this break where we left off, or if you want to go ahead and rewind now, we can talk a little bit about the origin and the contents of this so-called smoking laptop.
Before we get to that, I would like to make one more point regarding to those high explosives.
The IAEA report says that in 2008, Iran informed the agency that it has developed a detonator for high explosives.
Now, a detonator is used, of course, for triggering high explosives.
It has civilian applications in many, many areas, it has conventional military applications, and, of course, a particular type of it can also be used for triggering a nuclear reaction.
Now, Iranian scientists had worked on it, and had published in an open journal about it, and Iran itself approached the IAEA in 2008 to let them know that they have done it, even though they were not obligated to.
And now, IAEA turns this around and makes allegations about it, and what it says is that Iran hasn't informed us what it wants to do with this.
In other words, Iran not only is supposed to let them know that they have been doing it from the IAEA point of view, but also has to explain what it wants to do with it, which, in my view, is totally nonsense.
When a country approaches IAEA and says, we've done this, and we want to do this, because it has civilian applications, and so on, then there is no point of contention, or no point of argument, and yet the latest report again makes a big argument about this.
Or, regarding even high-explosive conventional arms, the IAEA report itself acknowledges that, because Iran has a conventional missile program and produces its own missile, it is possible that if Iran did do some experiments on high explosives, for which it doesn't present any evidence, it is related to Iran's conventional missile program.
But, at the same time, IAEA expresses concern that this might be related to nuclear material.
It's just like saying, I express my concern about banks, because although banks are used for fully legitimate transactions, but they can also be used for money laundering.
They just don't go together.
People don't just close banks because it could be used for money laundering.
The other aspect of it is that, for example, it says that Iranian scientists work on neutron transport.
And, of course, neutron transport is relevant to nuclear weapons, but again, they have worked on models of nuclear transport, and they have published it in open journals, open-access journals.
So, if they wanted to do something related to nuclear material or nuclear weapons, and didn't want the world to know about it, why would they go out and write their paper and publish it in peer-reviewed scientific journals and let the whole world know that they are working on this type of problem?
This just doesn't satisfy any standard or criterion for credibility, as far as the report is concerned.
And then, as we said before the break, all of these, or at least most of it, are based on that laptop.
The laptop was supposedly stolen from Iran in 2004 and brought outside Iran and taken to Turkey.
Now, a lot of people have written about this.
Garrett Porter had a great report about this.
But, here is the essence of it.
A laptop supposedly existed.
Now, whether that laptop was stolen from Iran is a matter of contention.
I don't believe there was such a laptop in Iran.
It was a laptop with this document that was fabricated, most likely, by Mossad intelligence agencies.
It is known that these agents approached Iranian opposition, offered them to go public with the documents that supposedly were on the laptop.
They first approached Iranian monarchies, who live, for example, here in Southern California in large numbers, but the Iranian monarchies refused to go public with it because they thought, first of all, it's forgery, and second, even if it is true, since Iran's nuclear program was started by the United States ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, during the 1970s, the monarchies actually supported the nuclear program and they didn't want to go public with it.
Then, they approached the MEK, and the MEK, the Mujahedin Khalq Organization, got the documents and started to spread wars around it.
But, there are so many things about the documents in the laptop that are just so abnormal.
If the laptop actually exists, it just doesn't have any credibility.
For example, there are things in the document, according to information that has become available, that are supposedly very sensitive, but, for example, don't have any seal of classified, or secret, or for your eyes only, and so on.
Now, people like me, who are from Iran, know the culture of Iran, know that Iran is sort of a secretive society.
Even the most normal, the most, you know, the most ordinary things are classified by the Iranian government.
Now, why such sensitive materials were not classified, and, you know, labeled secret, or classified for your eyes only, is totally beyond me.
Now, the other thing is, why should a government that supposedly works on nuclear weapons, put all these sensitive documents, according to IAEA reports, about a thousand pages, on one laptop, and that laptop was just sitting around, and somebody just went there, and just picked it up, and could leave the building, wherever that building was.
Most likely, if this was a true case, it was somewhere in the Ministry of Defense, or the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
So, he just picked up the laptop, and left the building.
Nobody realized that.
And then, he also had enough time to actually get it out of Iran, and we know the Minister of Intelligence in Iran is a very highly efficient organization.
This is something that even his allies have acknowledged.
But the guy still had time to leave Iran, and take the laptop, and take outside Iran, and make it available.
But even aside from all of this, in an article that I published on Antiwar.com a couple of years ago, I asked a simple question.
I said, if the laptop actually exists, and was taken out of Iran, let's do a simple test.
There is a test called Digital Chain of Custody.
In other words, you can easily test a computer, and see the documents that are on that computer, when they were uploaded in that computer, and when they were inserted in that computer.
So, if that computer exists, and it contains a thousand pages of secret documents about Iran's nuclear program, why don't we just do a test like that?
But not only that test has never been done, the computer has never been made public, its documents have never been presented to Iran, even a copy of them, the only thing that has been made available to Iran is a summary of what those documents say, and then Iran has been asked to explain those documents.
This is a totally ridiculous situation, in my view.
I mean, this is not a defense of the Iranian government, but anybody that accuses any nation, or any person, should give that nation, or that person, the opportunity to confront the actual accuser, or the actual documents, but that's not the case in this case.
Hey, that's the Fifth Amendment.
All right, thank you so much.
Mohammed Sahimi, everybody.
Thank you very much.
