The truth about Iran’s nuclear programme

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, how much of Iran's nuclear program really survived the war? And what will they do with it now?

0:20The war that we just saw between Iran, Israel and the US started on this murky pretext. The Israelis saying Iran was on the verge of a bomb. In contrast to US intelligence assessments saying it was very much not. The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003. Assessments that Donald Trump claimed, without much explanation, were wrong. Well, then my intelligence community is wrong. Who in the intelligence community said that? You're a director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

0:58She's wrong. But the end of this war, too, has been shrouded in the same ambiguity. Trump claiming US strikes in Iran totally destroyed its nuclear program. While again, an initial assessment from US intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency saying, not really, but experts on Iran's nuclear program say something really surprising. that if Iran had wanted a nuclear bomb over the past few years, it probably could have got one. So if they wanted a nuclear weapon and had made the decision to have one, they would have had one by now. So why didn't they? And after this war, will their calculations change?

1:45From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in Focus, will Iran abandon nuclear enrichment or does it race to the bomb?

1:57Patrick Winter, welcome back to Today in Focus. As The Guardian's diplomatic editor, you've been to Iran several times and you've followed Iran's nuclear program for decades, a program the status of which is currently pretty murky. Nearly two weeks ago, Donald Trump made the decision to intervene in Israel's war with Iran by dropping these incredibly powerful bunker-busting bombs on two nuclear sites. A third one was pummeled with missiles. Trump said the strikes worked, Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated, his word, that the war was over, the job was done, basically. But over the past few days, that neat story has been complicated somewhat.

2:36Tell me what's happened. Well, there was a leak to, I think, CNN and the New York Times about what was described as a low confidence intelligence assessment of the effect of this bombing, an American intelligence assessment, which said that the Iranians would be capable of restoring part of the nuclear program within a matter of months. Now, there's a million and one ways you could have interpreted that, but it certainly undermined this sort of very neat description that Trump favors, which is complete obliteration of what's had been the nuclear missile program. We have scum that's in this group, and not all of you are, you have some great reporters, but you have scum.

3:20CNN is scum. Not only did Donald Trump really in a very vicious personal way attack the reporters who I think just transmitted this leak. Now even they admit that it was hit very hard. But it wasn't hit hard. It was hit brutally. And you know I don't want to... Following that you then get other counter reports. So I think one of the problems is there is nobody on the ground who is independent, who is able to make any of these assessments. A lot of this work is based on satellite imagery. The one thing we could probably know is the person who said this is a low confidence assessment was right, because that's where we are.

3:59We're in a low confidence zone. Yeah, OK. Then over the weekend, there was another intervention in this debate. This one from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, which Iran has now suspended cooperation with. But what was their view of the state of Iran's nuclear program? Well, I think they have said that some of the larger surface nuclear installations have been very badly damaged. But the director general, who's under attack from the Iranians for separate reasons, went on to say that... The capacities they have are there. they can have in a matter of months, I would say, centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.

4:42It is clear that there has been severe damage, but it's not total damage. So what this really turns on is whether some of this highly purified uranium that was in two of the sites, whether it was moved out before the bombing occurred. and there are sort of sketchy pictures of lorries at one of the sites and whether that was a preemption and that lorries had taken away uranium to a secret site. But I think until we get people on the ground who know what they're looking at, we're in a kind of a grey zone. Okay, and Iran's uranium stockpile is said to be enriched to about 60 % purity. You need 90 % purity to make a nuclear bomb.

5:29So they're uncomfortably close to that threshold. And you're saying, Patrick, that we don't know where that uranium is right now, whether it was inside the sites bombed by the Americans or whether the Iranians had shipped it somewhere else in the days before. Yes, it's true that there were Iranian politicians before the big American attack said we've moved this highly enriched uranium. but looking at this sort of mass slaughter of their leadership sleeping in their beds you can see that the Iranians had not prepared as well as they should have done their whole civil defences was not as good as it should have been but all I can say is it's true that Iranian commanders were saying before it occurred we have moved this uranium so it was on their minds that they should do so whether they had done so is not clear and I think what we're now getting from the Iranians themselves is because they're refusing to allow the IEA into any of these sites, they're preying on the uncertainty in the West about what they have and what they might use this material to do or to make.

6:31Interesting. For them, it makes sense to keep it ambiguous. Maybe the uranium was destroyed, maybe it wasn't, and it's in some bunker somewhere. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they haven't got very many cards to play, and ambivalence about what their intentions are is one of the few cards they have. And I think they also now feel having dealt with Donald Trump and they felt they were betrayed and double-crossed in the sense they had thought they were in the middle of a negotiation and they discovered that Trump had sanctioned this bombing of their nuclear sites. They feel no moral requirement to be totally honest with the West about what they may or may not do in the future.

7:07And there is obviously a very open discussion going on in Iran, which had preceded this episode, but is now intensified about whether they should acquire a nuclear weapon.

7:25My name is Ruzbeh Parsi. I'm an adjunct senior lecturer at Lund University. I'm a historian who worked on Iran and its nuclear program and other aspects of it since 2009. So Ruzbeh, I want to try to understand from you how this war between Iran and Israel in the US might impact on Iran's nuclear enrichment program, a program that could be used either for domestic nuclear energy or to make a nuclear bomb. One thing I found interesting is that Iran's nuclear history actually goes back quite a long way. So take me back, where does it all begin? Well, in a sense, it begins already in the 1960s and 1970s when the Shah wanted to have nuclear power, both as a kind of technological achievement, but as a way of showing his independence.

8:10Back then, the French and Americans were more than happy to help out. But at some point, of course, he would bump into this then, if we will, unmentioned line, which is, do you get the fuel from them then? Or do you start enriching yourself, which would then make you totally independent, as it were, from those countries? It's a bit like, you know, they sell you a car and then they sell you the gas. Now, the question is, if you have an oil field of your own, why shouldn't you produce the gas yourself? And then once you have the car and you can reverse engineer the car, then you can both build the car and fuel it.

8:47And so why did the Shah, Iran's imperial ruler at the time, want this program? And how far was he able to get in making it fully independent of these bigger powers? Well, I think he wanted it to some degree for the same reason that the Islamic Republic wants it. Let's call it techno-nationalism. So it's an idea of Iran being an independent, sovereign country. And some of that independence comes from being able to build whatever you need yourself, rather than taking handouts or buying it from others. And so in that sense, the Shah wanted to get there, but he didn't have the time. They were building nuclear power stations, but none of them were operational by the time the revolution took place.

9:28For Khomeini, the flight from Paris to Tehran marked the end of 15 years in exile.

9:45So once the revolution does take place, once the rulers of Iran become these clerics, it becomes the Islamic Republic of Iran, what happens to the nuclear program? Well, in many ways, the nuclear program is then put in a mothball. You know, it's mothballed because no one has time for it. Barely has the revolution taken place in 1979 that Saddam Hussein's Iraq invades Iran in September 1980. The howl of another air raid siren brings Tehran to a virtual standstill. It means in just four minutes' time, an Iraqi missile will strike. In the name of God, the compassion of the merciful.

10:24So at that point, it's just about defense and survival. And also, this is, as most revolutionaries, they don't really have any friends. They're basically ticking everyone off with their new radical ideas that they want to spread. And so most of the 1980s are just spent surviving, but also, crucially, being subjected to Iraqi chemical warfare. So the notion of weapons of mass destruction is very much there and is something that the Iranians have great difficulty with. Interesting. So at what point does Iran's enrichment program emerge on the radar of countries like Israel and the US as a major problem, or as the Israelis constantly call it, an existential risk?

11:10Well, probably at some point in the 1990s, the idea popped up again in Tehran, as in what should we do with this that existed and how far do we want to go with it? So one line of it is actual nuclear power in order not to become dependent on oil and being able to sell it instead. And the other one is, can it be used to develop that technological edge, which at some point for some of them could result in a nuclear weapon as the most important deterrent that you could possibly have? You have to remember that we're talking about the 1990s. Iran is coming out of an eight-year-long war. The economy is in shatters.

11:49And more importantly, they still don't have any friends. So there is no, Hezbollah is there, but Hezbollah is definitely not a deterrent for Israel and so on. So all of that that comes that we know today didn't exist back then. It says to me that we must double our effort to work with the international community to persuade the Iranians that there is only isolation from the world if they continue working forward on such a program. And the idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon is unacceptable. So can you take me through the way that I guess the 90s give way to the 2000s and this question of Iran's nuclear enrichment program grows and grows as a major national security problem in the West and Israel?

12:35Well, already by the late 1990s, the Israelis and the Europeans and the Americans are worried. And in 2003, officially, you can say that the world gets to know that Iran has the beginnings of an enrichment program. And so throughout the 1990s, basically, this one sole nuclear power station has been built and built on since, you know, late 1970s onwards without getting anywhere. Now it seems they have an enrichment program. And most likely, Western intelligence services already knew this. But in 2003, they make it kind of official. And this is when everyone starts to get worried about it, and the Europeans negotiate with the Iranians in order to stop it.

13:17And we have to remember a couple of things. First, Iran has a president that has tried to open up to the West, Mohammed Khatami, since 1997. So this is happening at the same time as Iran is coming out into the world, and this enrichment program becomes an issue. And then, of course, in 2003, we have the American invasion of Iraq. Iraq. So that also heightens the Iranian awareness that the Americans are probably not going to stop at Iraq. If they succeed in Iraq, they're going to continue to Iran, which is what they also say themselves. I want to ask you about these diplomatic attempts to curtail Iran's nuclear program.

13:54But before I do, let's say for argument's sake, Iran really does want a nuclear weapon. And this whole idea that it's enrichment for domestic energy is just a ruse to enable them to eventually get to a bomb. Why do you think it has taken Iran so long to get to that stage when other countries like Pakistan and India managed to get to a nuclear bomb so much more quickly? Well, this very simple answer that many people seem to kind of disregard or miss is that they haven't made the political decision. Without, you know, being chauvinistic, you can say Iranians are are as intelligent as anyone else.

14:33So they have all the engineers they need. So the only thing that has stopped them, if you will, is the fact that they had not wanted one. What they wanted was what they thought was a sweet spot, which is being a threshold state. And what is a threshold state? You're in the non-proliferation treaty. So you're abiding by the rules of the non-proliferation treaty, not going towards a nuclear weapon. But you have all the technological know-how, industrial base, and everything else you need to be able to assemble a nuclear weapon within a short time frame if need be. So that way you have the cake and you eat it.

15:08That was their calculus most likely. It didn't pan out. I mean, can you explain to me why that was such a sweet spot? To be somewhere where you could have a bomb if you wanted to, but to not have made that decision just yet. Well, I think from their point of view, they did not want to leave the MPT. They did not want to become more of a pariah than they already were. and at the same time they live in a very dangerous neighborhood. They're at odds with the most important global power in the world, the United States, and its most important ally in the region, which is militarily far superior to them in any way you can measure it, Israel.

15:42So in that sense, being able at some point to assemble a deterrent nuclear weapon would probably make sense. So can I just understand this? They want to have the leverage that being near a bomb grants you, the kind of pressure it puts on other countries to take you seriously, to take your negotiating demands seriously, without actually crossing that boundary into having a bomb and becoming a much bigger problem for the world. Yes, but there are two things here. I mean, as Iranian foreign minister, former foreign minister Jawah Zarev pointed out at some point, look, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Bahrain will probably be able to buy one.

16:19So once you trigger anything that might become an arms race, a nuclear arms race in the region, all your other advantages of being a large country, etc., are more or less made void. Interesting. So there are definitely risks with also having one. The irony of all of this is that in a way they're copying the Israeli playbook. You know, this is partly how Israel built its nuclear weapons program because Israel has between 90 to 200 nuclear weapons. is that they, up until this day, refuse to acknowledge that they have them, but everyone knows that they do. The difference between Iran and Israel is that Israel has a long list of friends.

17:01So whatever cost that ambivalence comes with is offset by all those alliances. Iran does not. So in a sense, you can say that that ambivalence in the Iranian position actually worked to their disadvantage because they have no friends to, you know, have their back, so to speak, once things get dicey. Now we are in a situation where all their deterrence has been called in this poker game by the Israelis, right? Their bluffs have been called. And now everyone understands that they are in a dire need of having a nuclear weapon because they have no other deterrent. But because they don't have one yet, they're also open for attack.

17:47In 2015, the US, Iran and several other countries pull off something quite remarkable. Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not. They managed to make a deal over Iran's nuclear program, trading sanctions relief for the Iranian economy for greater monitoring of uranium enrichment by Iran and a massive reduction in the amount of enriched uranium in the country. Because of this deal, Iran will not produce the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that form the raw materials necessary for a nuclear bomb.

18:27Was that a good deal? And was it working in the three years that it was operational. Absolutely. I think if you look at it from a non-proliferation point of view, it was a bit of a new gold standard. You would allow someone to have enrichment if you couldn't get them to disabuse them of the idea that they needed it. But it would be so boxed in and so surveilled that you could be as certain as you possibly could that nothing was diverted. it, right? The reason why many people criticized the deal had nothing to do with the technical stipulations of it, had more to do with two other things. One, that they demanded zero enrichment in Iran, which had to do with who was enriching the Islamic Republic.

19:12And secondly, that people expected this agreement to also deal with all the other headaches that people had with Iran. So a lot of people were angry that they didn't deal with Iran's domestic repression or its behavior in the region and so on. And all of those are legitimate areas to discuss and confront Iran if you want to. But the point is that the reason why this deal was successful, as in being able to be signed at all, was that everyone who participated checked their various conflicts at the door and stuck to this one single issue. So the Russians and the Americans did not argue about Crimea or anything else while they were negotiating this stuff.

19:52They just dealt with the enrichment program in Iran, period. I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. So given that this deal was working to put guardrails around Iran's nuclear program, it wasn't perfect, but it was better than what existed before, which was a kind of anarchy over this program. Why in 2018 did Donald Trump tear it up? Well, we can only speculate about his personal reasons, and his personal reasons seem to drive a lot of what he does. And I think his primary personal reason was it was Obama who signed it. And he wanted to undo everything that Obama had done, whether it was the Affordable Care Act or if it was the nuclear deal.

20:39Then if you look at his government, his administration, you can see obviously clear traces of the neoconservatives who are still alive and well within the American political system, who did not want this deal because it wasn't doing what they wanted it to do. They want regime change. And with this kind of deal, you find a solution to the one trigger point that you could use as an excuse to end up in a war with Iran. You're not going to get the American political establishment to go to war with Iran over how it deals with the hijab or how it deals with political prisoners. But you are going to be able to get into war with Iran over its nuclear program because of its repercussions.

21:25You know, it doesn't mean the Iranians have decided to have a nuclear bomb, but it just means that we can speculate more because we have less inspections of it. The more of a black box it becomes, the more you can project whatever you want into that black box. Then, of course, you can kind of conjure up more dangerous and threatening scenarios of what the Iranians might be up to, and therefore as a precaution, etc., etc. So then the preemptive argument becomes more valid. In a post on social media, Trump said it's not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change?

22:06Or you say, well, then the only way of finally being able to say that we have killed this vampire once and for all is to affect regime change. Because then we can be sure that whoever comes after, that's at least a claim, will not be pursuing a nuclear weapon because they will be our allies or they will be too weak to try and continue the program, etc.

22:33Coming up, after this war, does Iran go for the bomb or not?

22:45Okay, so it's that tortured history that has led us to this moment where decades of diplomacy were thrown aside and the US went for a military response to this program for the first time in its history. We know that it's unclear what the current state of Iran's nuclear program is, but how do you think the Iranian government will emerge from this war in terms of the way it thinks about whether to go for the bomb or not? Well, that's a very good question. And that's the question that we're all kind of hoping to see some indications of which direction they will go. They could try and go for a bomb now, but of course that's going to be very difficult because of the Israeli willingness now to use force.

23:27So I think they are in a very difficult position where they need to strike a balance between having some kind of deterrence. Even if they want to go for nuclear bomb, it's not like they're going to have it next weekend. So it's not a stopgap solution to any of their present problems. They need to find a way to come to terms with Donald Trump and do that while the Israelis are chomping at the bits wanting to attack again. So the question is, what are they willing to give up and what kind of negotiation modalities can they aspire to? And that, of course, all of that to some degree is dependent on whether Trump wants to.

24:08And if he wants to over a period of time so they can actually reach a result rather than just this weekend and then change his mind next weekend. Can you just unpack this dilemma for me? It seems to me the Iranians are in a position now where rationally the idea of having a nuclear deterrent seems more important than ever. But at the same time, getting to that point also seems incredibly difficult when Israel has shown they can basically strike Iranian targets at will. Yes. So in that sense, Iran is in the worst of all worlds. Everyone understands they need a nuclear weapon. And also everyone knows they don't have one.