For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm a couple minutes late here, but it's time to talk to Mohamed Sahimi.
You can find what he writes at Antiwar.com.
He's a professor at USC, and we won't hold that against him.
Sorry, Mohamed, I'm a born and raised Bruin, so I gotta hold it against you a little bit.
But there's nothing too wrong with being a professor at USC, I guess.
Anyway, welcome to the show.
How are you?
Thank you very much.
It's good to be in your program again, Scott.
And let me say, USC, where I am, is a right-wing school, if that's what you meant.
It's a very conservative school, but there are some antiwar activists in the campus, such as myself.
And it's a good thing, too.
We need you, and especially on the issue of Iran.
I don't think there's really a subject anywhere in the world lied about more than the Iranian nuclear program.
I mean, other than people's personal relationships and stuff.
Let's see, your most recent article is about years worth of scaremongering about Iran's nuclear program.
How long has it been that the American War Party has claimed that the Iranians were on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons?
Well, the first claim was made in 1984.
That means 26 years ago.
Every time the claim was made, it was said that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by such and such year.
Originally, the first claim when it was made, it was said that Iran will have its first nuclear weapon within two years.
That means 1986, which means 24 years ago.
Then it continued on and on and on, and not just by American officials, but also by European officials, and particularly by Israeli officials.
This has been going on for the past 26 years, but the Iran nuclear bomb is nowhere to be found.
And in fact, according to the latest report of the International Atomic Energy Agency that has monitored Iran's nuclear program, there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapon program, and there is no evidence that Iran has diverted any of its nuclear materials, the enriched uranium, to non-peaceful purposes.
So this is warmongering and scaremongering, as you pointed out, that has been going on for nearly three decades.
Now, one of the points that I was trying to make in the article was that there was a time that Iran actually did say that it wanted to have nuclear weapons.
And that was in the 1970s, when the Shah of Iran, who had been put in power after the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected government of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, he said in 1974-1975 that Iran will have a nuclear weapon sooner than many people think it can.
And the Christian Silence Monitor, as I pointed out in my article, actually quoted him as saying that.
But at that time, there was no reaction, at least no public reaction, coming from the US or Western Europe or Israel, because the Shah of Iran was an ally of the United States and Israel, and therefore it was okay with them if Iran did have nuclear weapons.
Which goes to show that all the propaganda about if Iran becomes a nuclear power, it will start a nuclear race in the Middle East, is just nonsense.
Because if that were true, then how come the Shah of Iran saying that we are going to have nuclear weapons very soon, that didn't generate any anxiety or any concern in the US and Israel over Iran having nuclear weapons.
The whole issue about Iran's nuclear program is the question of who has it, who should have it, who can have it, and who doesn't have it or who shouldn't have it.
All evidence suggests that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon program.
All evidence suggests that Iran has not tried to make a nuclear weapon.
And the IAEA tells us that there is no evidence of any diversion.
And yet, we hear every day the propaganda about Iran being close to having a nuclear weapon capability, which only feeds the propaganda by war mongers who are after starting a war with Iran.
So basically, if I sat here and accused you of trying to make nuclear weapons down there at USC for 25 years, people would eventually just believe me that it's time to invade USC and prevent you from wiping Israel off the face of the earth.
Of course.
I mean, if you repeat a lie again and again and again, then the lie takes life of its own, then people start believing it.
You know, the German propaganda chief, Goebbels, said that the bigger the lie, the easier to believe it.
So if you make a very outlandish lie, then people would start saying, well, even if 5% of what they say is true, then we are in danger.
So there must be something to this, that they are all talking about it all the time.
So if all the propaganda about Iran having a nuclear weapon program is repeated again and again and again, after some time, at least some people would start having second thoughts, well, maybe there is something to this.
And then when you have a guy like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian president, who makes statements regarding the Holocaust, for example, and then that also feeds the frenzy and what the neocons want, American people and American public belief, then you get a situation in which people say, well, look, even if a small fraction of what they say is true, and if this guy who is Iran's president makes all these belligerent statements, well, maybe there is something to this.
Maybe there is some threat, maybe there is some danger here.
So maybe we should support some stronger action.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine before the Iraq war, where he said, you know, it's weird, they give so many different reasons for the Iraq war, none of them by themselves, if true, would justify it.
Well, he's tied to terrorists, but that's not quite good enough of a reason to invade a whole country.
Or, well, he might have some mustard gas left over.
Or, well, he did use mustard gas when he was Ronald Reagan's friend, you know, and murdered 100,000 Kurds back in the 1980s.
Or, you know, whatever like that.
Now, if you take all of these things, none of them, if you assign them, you know, a one, if they're a good enough reason for a war, and a zero if they're not, all of them are zeros.
And you end up with zero times zero times zero ten times, and what do you still get?
Zero.
And it's the same sort of thing here, where, and in fact, of course, where we go back and look at Iraq, all of those could have been ones, none of them were even true.
And it's the same sort of thing here, where even if all the different things that they say about Iran were true, none of them are good enough to have a war, it's still zero times ten equals zero, and it's still a bunch of accusations that don't hold up to scrutiny, just like with the war with Iraq.
I totally agree, and in fact, a lot of things that they said about Iraq, a lot of reasons that they presented to the public about Iraq, a lot of them were mutually exclusive, but people really didn't think about them.
For example, they say Saddam Hussein is in bed with the Al-Qaeda.
Well, Saddam Hussein was a totally secular person.
Why should he, and he was an enemy of Islamic fundamentalists, both Shiite and Sunni type, so why should he be an ally of a totally extremist Islamic fundamentalist like Al-Qaeda?
But people didn't know, people didn't think about these things.
The same thing is true about what they say about Iran.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has a nuclear weapon program.
Mohamed ElBaradei, who was director general of IAEA up until early December of last year, said in an interview that in the whole history of International Atomic Energy Agency, no country's nuclear program has been inspected, checked, and monitored more than Iran.
He said that we have carried out the most intrusive, the most extensive inspection of Iran's nuclear program, and yet the IAEA, even under its new leader, has not been able to find any evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapon program, because simply at this point Iranians are not interested in having a nuclear weapon.
And yet we keep hearing that yes, Iran is very close to having a nuclear weapon, and every day, every month, every year we hear all these dire predictions that by such and such time Iran will have a nuclear weapon or nuclear weapon capability.
As I pointed out in my article, in 2007 the head of Israeli military intelligence said that within six months, which means middle of 2007, Iran will be able to carry out its first nuclear test.
Well, that didn't happen.
Three years later, nothing has happened.
My favorite Mohammed was Bloomberg News in the spring of 2006, maybe March or April 2006.
I remember because we were cutting demo material at the time, and I thought, wow, this would be great for my demo.
Bloomberg News, Iran 16 days away from a nuclear bomb.
And then, of course, the joke was, yeah, well, I asked Dr. Prather about that, and he said, sure, 10 years from now they could be 16 days away from a nuclear bomb.
Yes, in fact, I remember that, and I must confess that I forgot to include that in my article that was posted a couple of days ago.
Yes, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, Iran may be 16 days away from making a nuclear weapon, if at all.
You see, there is no question.
I mean, if we want to be honest about this, there is no question that if a country has a uranium enrichment program and facility and technology, that enables that country to enrich uranium to high level in theory, and therefore use it in a nuclear weapon.
However, first of all, Iran does not have any expertise on enriching uranium above the very low level of 3.5% that it's producing right now.
Secondly, even the rudimentary enrichment program that Iran has in its hands has run into many difficulties.
Iran has installed 8,000 centrifuges to work, but about at least a quarter of them are not working because Iran has encountered a lot of difficulty.
Iran has not been able to produce fuel for its research reactor, which is a small reactor that produces medical isotopes for 850,000 Iranian patients who need these medical isotopes.
And therefore, Iran has pleaded for help to import the fuel, which is at about 19.75% for Tehran reactor.
If Iran cannot enrich its uranium to 19.75% to use in its research reactor and produce medical isotopes, how can Iran produce 90% enrichment, which is necessary for making a nuclear weapon?
Even if Iran could do that, even if Iran could enrich it to 90%, that's just one element out of many other elements of being able to make a nuclear weapon and have the necessary missiles to deliver it.
And there is no evidence that Iran has the technology or the knowledge or the design for such delivery systems.
Well, now let me stop you right there, because even aside from the missile, we can, in fact, here, let me write down a warhead note to get back to that about the missile, the delivery system and all that.
But let's just talk about the nuke.
Now, I'm not a scientist like you are, but I do know Dr. Gordon Prather, and that counts for a hell of a lot.
And my understanding is that if you want to make a nuclear bomb out of uranium, your choices are either making a bomb that weighs about a few tons anyway, that would be a Hiroshima-type, gun-type nuke that you would have to, there's no missile anywhere, I don't think, that could carry one of those, or maybe America's biggest rockets could.
But basically, they'd have to convert an airliner into some kind of long-range bomber if they wanted to take a Hiroshima-sized bomb anywhere.
It's not the kind of thing you can throw at somebody, it's humongous.
And then the only way to get around that would be to make an implosion bomb, which is a much more complicated endeavor.
You could do it with much less weapons-grade uranium, but in order to have the ability to make an implosion bomb work, according to Dr. Prather, you've got to run, I don't know, a year worth of tests with non-fissile, usually uranium-238, and you need to do high-speed film of X-ray pictures of the implosion test, and then you have to do it over and over and over and over again to get all those different charges timed to the microsecond to make that implosion work.
And we're talking about technology that the Iranians just don't have.
Exactly, and that was my point.
I mean, there are many, many steps in getting a country to the stage where it can actually produce a nuclear weapon, a deliverable nuclear weapon.
Which, as you pointed out, and Dr. Prather, who I am a fan of, unfortunately I think he has to stop writing, but as he has pointed out and you pointed out, it involves a lot of complicated technology.
For example, for that X-ray thing that you mentioned, Iran must have very high-speed cameras that can take pictures of what's going on.
In addition, for the implosion that you mentioned, Iran must have very high explosive, conventional high explosive material, which there is no evidence that Iran has.
A few years ago, David Albright and his Institute for Science and International Security made a big deal about how Iran was hiding a lot of high explosive material at a facility named Parchin in south of Tehran, and urged the International Atomic Energy Agency to go there and inspect it.
Iran first resisted and said this is conventional armament industry, and then eventually IAEA went in and looked at everything, and they found nothing.
So, as you pointed out, there are many, many elements of this that there is no evidence that Iran has them.
The IAEA has not been able to discover or to detect any evidence that Iran, even on paper, even in theory, has this technology or science or know-how.
I don't know what they are talking about.
Making a nuclear weapon is like making a pyramid.
You have to build the basis of it, which is nuclear enrichment, uranium enrichment.
Then you have to have all these technologies that you mentioned until you reach basically to the top of that pyramid.
And then the last stage is carrying out a nuclear explosion to actually test to see whether the nuclear weapon that you have prepared and you have manufactured actually works.
But there is no evidence for this.
Iran does not even have enough low-enriched uranium to enrich it to a much higher level in order to use it in a nuclear weapon.
Right.
Well, I mean, and that's really the thing right there.
They don't have the quantity of uranium if they got enough for maybe one bomb.
And then, like you say, they got to test that one.
Exactly.
And once you test that one, then you're done with all the materials that you have.
Then you have to start again.
Iran is not in any position to produce that much highly enriched uranium for several nuclear weapons.
As I said, Iran is already experiencing a lot of difficulties with basically a low-technology uranium enrichment facility that it has in Natanz.
I say low-technology because it uses the most elementary centrifuge, which is called P-1, which is an old European type that Abdul Qadir Khan of Pakistan stole in the 1970s and took it to Pakistan.
So given that technology and given all the problems that Iran has been experiencing, and given the fact that Iran only has 8,000 centrifuges installed, out of which only three-quarters of them are working, Iran is in no position to be able to produce enough low-enriched uranium, let alone high-enriched uranium, to make several nuclear weapons to be a credible threat to anybody.
So all of this is just propaganda and lies and fabrications by barbangers and people who are nothing but attacking Iran.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, that's the thing about it too.
I think maybe I resent being lied to in such a childish manner with lies that are so easy to dismantle with just the slightest bit of scrutiny.
I kind of resent that more even than all the premeditated murder.
Mohammed, God, I hate being lied to.
I totally agree.
And when it comes to Iran, the lie factory works full-time, overtime, whatever you call it.
They constantly turn out new lies, new twists, new fabrications, new allegations.
Last year, one of the European newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, that is a very conservative newspaper, claimed that Iran has actually transferred some of its low-enriched uranium to an unknown location because it wants to enrich it to a high level to use it in a bomb.
It got to the point that the IAEA had to issue an angry statement to deny it.
Then four years ago, Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Democrat of Michigan, released a report in which he said that Iran is producing high-enriched uranium and Iran is doing this and Iran is doing that.
Again, it got to the point that the IAEA had to send a letter to the representative and say, what you're saying is totally wrong.
You are just fabricating.
I mean, that exchange of letters between him and the IAEA is very revealing.
It shows that the warmongers, those who want to start a war with Iran, will go to any extent, will say any lie, will fabricate anything necessary just to ignite a war with Iran.
Oh yeah, and you know what they'll do?
Even more than the Telegraph, they'll go to Murdoch's London Times.
It's just amazing the kind of Google words you can put into the London Times and the things that you can find dating back to Israeli sources say that they saw Iraqi intelligence give a flask of anthrax to Mohammed Atta in Prague in the Czech Republic.
And from all the way there, and especially on the Iran war lies, all the way through, they ran something last August, Mohammed, I'm sure you remember this one, where the Iranians are going to be able to set off a miniaturized implosion uranium bomb because they have this new method where they just cut a bunch of grooves in the uranium and then lay some, I don't know, primacord, detcord kind of thing like you would use in a quarry or something.
They're going to cut all these grooves in the uranium sphere, lay all this cord in the grooves, and then that'll be an implosion bomb that they can put on a missile and shoot at us.
This is the kind of thing that makes it into the London Times.
And I remember, I wish I had secretly recorded it or something, but I still remember in my mind the sound of Dr. Gordon Prather's guffaws when he saw that one.
He just thought that was the funniest thing in the world.
Such lies are very, very common.
Just like you said, Times of London, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the Jerusalem Post in Israel, and Daily Telegraph, and so on, they constantly produce such lies.
The most amazing thing is that the lies are so outrageous or so outlandish that they force the IAEA to go out and issue a statement.
But of course, the point in putting out all these lies is to influence some people.
They probably think that even if a small group of people are influenced by what they hear, they may not hear the denial by the IAEA.
They may only hear about what we say, and that gets to the goal that they have.
So that's why they keep doing all this again and again and again to convince more and more people.
That's right, yeah.
Mark Twain said that a lie will get halfway around the world before the truth even has its boots on, and that is exactly how it works.
In fact, just think of the whole controversy with South Park a couple of weeks ago.
South Park did a thing with the Prophet Muhammad on there, and then there was all this news about this terrible threat from these terrible radical Muslims against South Park.
But it turned out that the terrible radical Muslims that had threatened the South Park guys, their leader was named Joseph Cohen.
And he was a Jewish settler on the West Bank before he became Mr. Radical Muslim.
But that doesn't matter.
The entire American people heard another case of those darn Muslims who hate free speech so much that they threatened our favorites, the South Park guys.
When it just is not true, and it would seem to me that if the radical Muslim's name is Cohen, then we all have to go ahead and assume that he doesn't believe what he's saying, that he is a secret agent pretending to be a Muslim and making threats against people like the South Park guys simply as an intelligence operation to make Muslims look bad.
And it doesn't matter, Muhammad, that it was in the Associated Press what this guy's real name is and where he used to live on the West Bank.
It doesn't matter, because the lie already made it all the way around the world before the truth got its boots on.
And on it goes, the same thing whether we're talking about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program or Iran's or anything else.
Yeah, exactly.
And as you said, and as I also said, when such lies are propagated, a lot of people hear it.
But then when the later stories come out, a lot of people may not hear it.
Therefore, all they hear is that, yes, a Muslim has made this threat, or yes, Iran is on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon, and so on and so forth.
So that's why they continue doing what they do.
And the goal of the articles such as the ones that I write is to try to illuminate light on what's going on, so that hopefully more people will learn about what's going on and become aware of the danger of these lies and fabrications.
Yeah, well, you do a hell of a good job.
And tell the good people where all they can read what you write, other than Antiwar.com.
Oh, I also write for Huffington Post.
I have a blog on Huffington Post.
I am also a columnist for a website, Tehran Bureau, which reports on Iran's internal affairs.
And I have also published in the print media.
I'm thankful to Antiwar.com, actually, because whenever I post an article on Antiwar.com, it quickly spreads.
I was checking this morning how many other sites have produced the article, and I could count up to, like, 60 other sites that have reproduced the article.
Wow, that's great.
Yes, so I'm very thankful to Antiwar.com, and I continue the work, hopefully.
Well, we're very thankful for you, too.
In fact, let me go ahead and ask you one more thing before I let you go here.
Could you please explain the technicality of the subsidiary agreement or subsidiary arrangement 3.1?
Is that or is that not part of the additional protocol to Iran's safeguards agreement?
Because there are some who say, yes, it's part of the additional protocol that was never ratified by the Iranian parliament, and therefore they were never in violation of it when they declared the com facility, which under 3.1 they would have had to declare as soon as they had the idea, I guess, or as soon as they took a shovel to dirt, rather than just six months before they intended to introduce nuclear material to the site, as under the rest of the safeguards agreement.
But then there are others who say that no, subsidiary agreement 3.1 was separate from the additional protocol, and it's basically unwithdrawable from or whatever.
You can't get out of 3.1 unless you get out of the safeguards agreement and the NPT altogether.
And so, therefore, the Iranians were, in fact, in violation of subsidiary arrangement 3.1 when they did not immediately notify the IAEA of the com facility.
First of all, did I summarize that correctly?
And then second of all, what's the truth of the matter there?
Okay.
Actually, I have explained this in an article on Tehran Bureau.
The original safeguard agreement that Iran signed with IAEA in 1974 had a Code 3.1.
According to that Code 3.1, Iran was obligated to inform the IAEA six months in advance before introducing any nuclear material into its facility.
Oh boy, then I am confused and I didn't summarize that right at all.
And then in February of 2003, Iran agreed to carry out the modified Code 3.1, which is not part of the additional protocol.
Neither 3.1 nor modified 3.1 have anything to do with additional protocol.
Iran agreed to 3.1 subject to the ratification of that by the Iranian parliament.
The modified one?
The modified one obligates Iran to inform the IAEA immediately after the first work is done.
But because the Iranian parliament didn't ratify it, and because the IAEA sent the Iran nuclear dossier to the United Nations Security Council, Iran said, well, since the Iranian parliament didn't ratify it, we withdraw from the modified 3.1 Code and go back to 3.1.
And that, from the international point of view, is totally acceptable, because according to all international standards, an international agreement is obligatory only after it has been ratified by the parliament of that country.
Because the Iranian parliament refused to ratify it, because Iran's nuclear dossier had been sent to the United Nations Security Council, Iran withdrew from it.
And therefore Iran was under no obligation to inform the IAEA the existence or the construction of the Purdue facility near the bomb that Iran is building.
Okay, right on.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time as always on the show today, Mohamed.
I am thankful to you for having me in your program.
Great.
Hope we can do it again soon.
Everybody, that is Mohamed Sahimi.
Find him at original.antiwar.com slash sahimi, and at the University of Southern California.
