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(00:07): Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies.

(00:12): Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This episode is presented by Matt Fulton and produced by Chris Carr.

Matt (00:38): Hi everyone, and welcome back to Secrets and Spies. My guest today is Joe Cirincione, one of the leading experts on arms control and nuclear non-proliferation. He was most recently president of the Plowshares Fund and taught at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. With uncertain eyes on Iran, this conversation takes a more focused look at the damage done to its nuclear program, what it would actually take for the regime to build a bomb now, and what this moment means for the future of nonproliferation.

(01:02): Here's our conversation. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Take care.

Announcer (01:08): The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

Matt (01:34): Joe, thanks so much for being here. It's so great to have you on Secrets and Spies.

Joe (01:38): My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matt.

Matt (01:41): Sure. So you've spent your career at the center of nuclear policy and arms control -- on Capitol Hill, at the Carnegie Endowment and Plowshares Fund, and as the author of several books on the subject, including Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It's Too Late and Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons. So this moment after, a joint US-Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, lands squarely in your wheelhouse. And I'd like to get a bit technical today, if that's all right?

Joe (02:10): Sure.

Matt (02:11): Okay. So before we go into that, I want to start with you. You've spent much of your career warning against and trying to prevent exactly this crisis that we've seen. As you watch this moment unfold, what's hitting you most? What stands out to you, either professionally or personally, about where we've landed?

Joe (02:28): Yeah. Well, a couple of things. First of all, it's nuclear deja vu. We went through a similar episode back in 2002, 2003, when then we had an administration, urged on by the Prime Minister of Israel, manipulate intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Straight out lied to the American people about the necessity for invading Iraq in order to get rid of a nuclear threat. And the resulting invasion was a complete disaster for US policy. I mean, it succeeded in ousting Saddam Hussein, but it cost us $6 trillion, thousands of American lives, maybe a million people killed over the years and threw the Middle East into an extended period of dysfunction and instability that we're still living with. So we're seeing the same playbook used again. Again, Benjamin Netanyahu citing an imminent threat. Only military action will help us, and dragging the US into another unnecessary war. So there's the dejavu, there's the tragedy of it all. None of this had to happen. We had a diplomatic solution to this. We passed a deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015, that solved the problem. I mean, it blocked all of Iran's pathways to a bomb. It prevented a new war. I remember Rachel Maddow called it the diplomatic achievement of a generation, and it's true. We can go more into that if you want, but it worked.

(03:59): And then Trump pulls out of it in 2018 promising a bigger, better deal, promising his toughness, his maximum pressure campaign would get a better deal. Nothing happened, never got a deal. The thing drifted along, Biden blows his chance, doesn't do anything over four years, never gets back to the deal either, and will result in Iran getting closer and closer to the ability to make a weapon. Enter Israel again, enter Israel comes in and now it sees its chance. He sees its chance. He uses the nuclear threat as an excuse to do something he's wanted to do all along, which is have a regime change military operation. That's what Netanyahu was trying to do with the strikes. The president sees how this is playing on Fox News, likes the press, thinks he wants to pee a piece of this. He goes in and conducts a two-day war. I mean, very, very strange. A limited bombing campaign. Very impressive tactically, both Israel and the US. Very impressive military execution of the mission that these pilots were given, but then stops and pulls out, I don't know what to call it. "War interruptus?" It just ends. And here we are basically back where we were before the bombing campaigns.

(05:22): Brilliant, brilliant tactical military actions, but strategically ineffective. Iran can still build a bomb. We can go into that if you want. It didn't solve the problem. The regime did not topple. This is another the illusion of military force as the answer to your problems. We're seeing that act out again. It's a long running debate in proliferation. How do you deal with another country's nuclear program? Been going on since the Soviets detonated their bomb 75 years ago. All of this is going through my head as we're watching this, the events of the last three weeks.

Matt (06:02): Yeah, thank you for that. Could you maybe briefly explain how the JCPOA constrained Iran's nuclear program and what shifted once Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018?

Joe (06:14): Well, as you say, I've been studying and doing non-proliferation for four decades here in Washington. I've never seen a deal as good as the JCPOA. I mean, it forced Iran to rip out two thirds of its centrifuges, more three quarters of its centrifuges. It forced them to export tons of enriched uranium gas that they had. They were left with a token amount that they could not do much of anything with. It imposed -- or, not imposed -- it implemented the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated. We had cameras and inspectors and high-tech seals everywhere. We basically shrunk Iran's program, put it in an iron box under lock and camera. We blocked all of Iran's pathways to a bomb. They couldn't make plutonium, they couldn't make enriched uranium. They were severely limited in everything. And it lasted for a good 25 years. Some of the limitations came off after 10 years, some after 15 years, but the core limitations stayed on for 25 years plus a permanent ban on ever building a nuclear weapon, plus the inspections were permanent.

(07:24): So this deal worked and the hope was you could build on it, add to it, get other agreements that would affect other areas of Iran's activities that concern us like missiles and its relationship with Israel, that maybe you can make the deal permanent, keep those limits on forever. There was a pathway to completely solving this problem, and then Trump pulled out of it for no good reason and did not have an alternative scenario. So now we're basically in the situation where we were before the bombing campaigns began with Trump saying he wants to negotiate with the Iranians. The Iranians haven't said they're willing to negotiate yet. And we're basically back at the same possibility of maybe we can get something like the JCPOA again. So it makes you wonder what was all this about? Was this trip necessary?

Matt (08:22): Yeah. Taking into account -- well, I should also note, I believe this morning as we're recording, the Iranians announced they're going to stop cooperating with the IAEA, so that's another wrinkle into all this -- but taking into account what we now know or reasonably suspect about the full extent of damage inflicted on the program, how far back do you believe that they've been set?

Joe (08:44): Oh, there's no question that they've been set back. I mean, the facility -- lemme ask you, the IAEA originally said months and some estimates think years. The original assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency said six months, and that's one of our intelligence agencies known as the most conservative intelligence agency, relied on data and information from the Central Command. Our soldiers in the region who monitor and are closest to this Iran site, they said six months. I think that makes sense. Some of the things that we hit, the facility at Isfahan, that's the uranium conversion facility. I've been to that facility. I've been inside that facility. One of the few Americans to go there. You take that out and that really hits a key link in the uranium enrichment process. That's where they turn the ore, the refined ore, the yellow cake, into a gas combining it with fluorine to make uranium hexafluoride.

(09:52): So when we talk about enriched uranium gas, that's what we're talking about. That's the plant that makes it, you knock that out, you basically have stopped their ability to make it. But here's the problem. You damage that facility. You damage the aboveground facilities. Maybe there's some underground damage at Fordo, the underground enrichment facility or Natanz, but apparently we did not get the almost 9,000 kilograms -- that's about 20,000 pounds of uranium gas. And so as long as you have that stock, you can put it back into centrifuges and enrich that gas to bomb-grade, about 400 kilograms, which is about 880 pounds. But 400 kilograms of that is already enriched to 60%, which is very close to bomb-grade, and it would take them a matter of five or ten days to make a bomb. So while you damaged some of the capability, you left a lot of their core capability intact. There's no doubt that they still have thousands of centrifuges, perhaps very advanced centrifuges.

(11:01): And more importantly, you may have supplied Iran with the one thing they didn't have before the bombing attack, which is in addition to the capability they may now have the intent to build a bomb. US intelligence was very clear, as recently as March of this year, US intelligence assessed that Iran was not building a weapon. They were not doing it. So they had the capability. They weren't doing it. And that's been consistent for years now. And so now that Iran has been bombed, I mean those factions in the government that all along have wanted Iran to sprint to a bomb, probably have the upper hand, they may now have the intent to build the one weapon they think can protect them from future US and Israeli strikes. I mean, wouldn't you do that?

Matt (11:48): Yeah, I mean, I've said in a lot of our discussion on this podcast between my co-host and I and with other guests and everything that, I mean just -- I've looked at for my own work, at Iran and its proxies and their strategic situation for years -- and just looking at the end of last year and the sort of collapse of Hezbollah and Assad, just objectively looking at it, that to me would be the obvious thing that they would then look for at that point.

Joe (12:14): Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Matt (12:16): Yeah. So my next question was going to be on the Isfahan facility. I guess this sort of technical bottleneck that people say that that represents is, okay, so you could not convert uranium gas into metal that you would then need to...

Joe (12:32): Oh, yes. There's another part of it. So in addition to the conversion where you actually make the gas, they had this metal conversion part. So after you enrich it to bomb-grade, which is about 90% pure, you then have to take that gas and turn it into a metal. Well, that's very difficult and there's no real civilian purpose to making uranium into metal. So when we see Iran experimenting with that or developing facilities for that, we're obviously suspicious about their intent. And the main uranium metal facility was at Isfahan, and they apparently destroyed that. But it's not that hard to make this. And this is the other thing. The bombing didn't destroy, it didn't destroy the knowledge of how to in enrich uranium the knowledge of how to weaponize that into a bomb. And as long as you have the knowledge, you can recreate the capability. So, fully rebuild what was destroyed? That could take years. Rebuild enough to build a bomb? That could take months, and that includes the facilities to make uranium into a metal. It doesn't require a factory, you could do it in a very large room.

Matt (13:46): Given the current state of Iran's program, and I know the full picture there is still developing -- we don't know, especially outside of the intelligence community, we civvies -- what would be the fastest or most plausible route to a working nuclear weapon? Are we talking about repurposing known infrastructure, going covert, or trying to just race toward a test shot in plain sight?

Joe (14:08): Yeah, well almost certainly covert. I mean, you're not going to do this where people can see you doing it. And there are substantial underground facilities that were not hit at all. We know that. I mean, just right before the bombing campaign began, Iran had announced it had another underground enrichment site. It was going to begin installing centrifuges in, but then it called off those inspections with the IAEA before the bombing campaign. So we know they have other facilities intact. It wouldn't take many centrifuges. A couple of hundred, a cascade of 174 would do it. And again, that could take the 60% gas, run it through those centrifuges, five to ten days to make the material for the bomb. How long to turn it into a metal? Unknown. Weeks, perhaps. Maybe longer. Unknown. We don't know what the capabilities are. And then what do you do with it?

(15:09): Well, there's two route you can take. One is you can try to do the implosion device. And if you saw Oppenheimer, that was the Trinity test, eighty years ago this month we tested at Trinity, and that was a complicated design. You have the core, you surround it by explosive lenses that forced the explosive charge all inward. That collapses the core. Some people compare it to collapsing a basketball into a baseball by explosives. Once you do that, you get super criticality. The thing explodes. Well, you do that if you want to have a small device. In the US case, one we could carry on a bomber, but for Iran, one you could put in the nose cone of a missile.

(15:52): Well, that's sophisticated. That would take some time. That would take some testing. That's why the intelligence agencies estimated it would take a year from the point that they had the enriched uranium to a weapon, would take about a year. Could they cut that down? Yes, probably. But you could also go the other route. Instead of trying to have an implosion device, you could have what's called a gun assembly device. That's the bomb we dropped at Hiroshima. We were so confident it would work, we didn't bother testing it. You take one subcritical amount of uranium and put it at the end of a tube, another subcritical amount, the other end of a tube, and you just blow them together with conventional explosives. That goes super critical. That's Hiroshima. That's 15,000 tons of explosive force. And we estimate it would take about 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. That's the IAEA estimate of a critical mass, about 25 kilograms to do that. You could do that in months, a few months, depending on their capabilities. You couldn't put that on a missile, but you could put it on a plane. You could put it on a truck. You could put it on the belly of a cargo ship and you could move it around to a port anywhere in the region and perhaps into Europe, maybe even the United States. Or you could just do a test. That's the easiest thing. And you just detonate it in Iran's deserts and you say, we have, "This is a test of our weapon. We have six more hidden, don't come near us."

Matt (17:22): Yeah. I'm really interested in, specific to the nature of those covert production facilities -- I guess for conversation's sake, if we're talking, I dunno, enrichment cascades, or even, I haven't heard much about this, but the plutonium-based route, heavy water production -- what would it take to keep them hidden from detection? Technically speaking, are there known methods of masking heat, waste, or infrastructure signals?

Joe (17:49): Huh. Very interesting. Well, plutonium production, so that's the other path to a bomb. So you remember in Oppenheimer, the Hiroshima bomb was uranium gun assembly. The Nagasaki bomb was plutonium. That's what they tested, this implosion device, because it takes less plutonium. It's this small device --

Matt (18:11): At Trinity in New Mexico.

Joe (18:12): Right at Los Alamos, there was the so-called Trinity test in Los Alamos. So countries usually choose which way they want to go. Iran was pursuing both paths. The enrichment process was going through the centrifuges. That's the uranium gas. The plutonium process requires a reactor. So Israel, for example, with US help, built the Dimona reactor, which they swore was just for research. But in the process of burning up uranium fuel rods, some of that uranium is converted into plutonium. You can then take the fuel rods out, put it in an acid bath, and you can distill out the plutonium. Well, that's what we did up at Hanford, us, in 1945. That's how we got our plutonium. That Dimona was where the Israelis got their plutonium. There was a reactor called the Arak reactor -- not Iraq, but A-R-A-K-A, Arak reactor. And that was a research reactor, but it was going to produce plutonium. Part of the JCPOA was that Iran was forced to pull out the core of that reactor, drill it full of holes, and fill it full of cement, bang, end of the plutonium path to a bomb. As they started to pull out, as they started to exceed the limits of the JCPOA, Iran had begun reconstruction of the Arak reactor. That's one of the sites that Israel hit in this war. So if, without a reactor you can't make plutonium, period, there is no way to hide that. You can't hide it. A reactor is a big thing. Anybody building it, you will find that reactor. Just ask Syria, the reactor that Israel bombed, Syria foolishly tried to hide a reactor. Just ridiculous. That's why I doubt it. Anyway--

Matt (19:59): This was in 2007, the Israelis struck that facility. I forget off the top of my head what it was called. I should know it.

Joe (20:04): Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you take that out. So it is highly unlikely you could have a secret plutonium path to a bomb just because of the visible construction necessary. Other signatures to it? I mean, there are other things that go on. I mean, underground facilities do have to emit heat, and if they're conducting radiological experiments, there might be some radiation. The radiation would be hard to detect if you don't have inspectors on site without ground stations of some kind. The heat, you probably could get some thermal imaging of sites that would indicate that something was going on underground. But I don't know if you get anything definitive. That's why the uranium enrichment could go on covertly. It would, in a small, underground, deeply buried -- and some of these maybe a half a mile underground, yeah, you could do a lot of work and nobody would know you were doing it without human intelligence or signal interceptions. If you had somebody, and the Israelis seem to have people deeply inside the Iranian military and perhaps nuclear programs, that could give you a heads up. Signal intercepts could give you a heads up. That's what you'd have to rely on.

Matt (21:19): So we've seen past examples of military action against WMD programs in Iraq in 1981 -- that was their Osirak facility -- Syria in 2007, that you just mentioned. There's Libya's, voluntary disarmament. It's often attributed to a combination of diplomacy and US action in Iraq. The demonstrative effect of seeing that happen. In your view, have these operations truly prevented rogue regimes from getting WMDs or was some other non-kinetic action actually responsible?

Joe (21:47): No, and I'm glad you asked that question because this has been a long-running debate in national security since the Soviets detonated their bomb in 1949. And at that time, some US officials, mostly military officials, said, "Let me at 'em. Let me go bomb the sites. We'll bomb away that program." And US officials wisely decided that was not a prudent cause of action. And this comes up repeatedly. In 1964, when China was preparing to test its device, there was a big debate in the Lyndon Johnson administration about going after those sites, too. Or 1994 with North Korea. All these debates always happen. Iran is the most famous, but it's not the only one. And no US president has ever decided to try military action because of the risks involved that you're not going to get it, that you're simply going to set back the program. You can't eliminate the program, right?

(22:47): You can't bomb the knowledge. They can always rebuild and you've probably intensified their intent. So those three factors basically argue against it, and plus it's risky. Are you really going to get it? You don't know. And is there an alternative? And in almost every case, there is an alternative. Once a country has a bomb, it's very hard to talk them out of it. Only a couple of countries have ever given up the bomb. South Africa, for example. Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine had Soviet weapons. They gave them up by negotiations. But you can limit these programs, you can stop them. You can bring them into a framework as we did with the Soviets and with the Chinese and with the French and the British when we formed the NPT, and that was Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon's solution. Let's have international frameworks to limit the ability of any country to get these weapons diplomatically, legally. And that worked. You have to understand this. At the beginning of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy warned that we might have 15, 20, 25 countries getting nuclear weapons. And of the 16 that the intelligence agencies estimated were pursuing bomb programs, 12 of them were our allies. So this is not just an adversary issue, this is our allies. We can come back to that because once again, our allies are thinking of getting nuclear weapons and how do you bomb them?

Matt (24:09): I do have a question about that somewhat.

Joe (24:12): So we decided that we had to do an international legal diplomatic framework, and that's the Non-Proliferation Treaty and it's associated treaties and security assurances, and almost all the countries in the world have signed that treaty. All the non-nuclear countries promised never to get nuclear weapons. Those with nuclear weapons promised to reduce their stockpiles. And overall, this has worked. Not perfectly, but as good as or better than any military solution. So here comes Netanyahu and Trump and they're trying the military solution again, and I would say that this is a clear demonstration. Sometimes you can do tests on national security policy. If we can do A or B, let's do A, let's see how it works. I would say this proves the point. Military action cannot stop another country's nuclear program. The jury's still out, but I'm betting that this is going to show that military action is not sufficient to stop a program and that the only solution is negotiations.

(25:14): Just think about this. One of the things you want in order to stop a program is inspections to make sure that a country isn't building a bomb. Well, you can't force a country to have inspections. Only negotiations can do that. Iran has to agree to allow inspectors back in. As you say, now they're kicking them out. Only an agreement can bring them back in. That's why I think the only way this story ends is with some kind of negotiations between the United States and Iran. In other words, we're back to the beginning and the bombing has caused us problems. It did not provide a solution.

Matt (25:53): Right. So you would say, historically speaking, and this may also prove it, but there's in due time, but there's no clean solution to a WMD threat. I'm sorry, there's no clean military solution to a WMD threat.

Joe (26:04): Absolutely not. Even the Osirak reactor, which is widely cited -- this is 1981, Iraq is legally, they're a member of the NPT, which entitles you to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy -- legally building a reactor which could be used to create plutonium. It's a complicated process. They would need to build a facility to, what they call reprocess the fuel rods and just get the plutonium out. They didn't have that. They just had the reactor. Menachim Begin is the prime minister of Israel, and he decides to bomb against US desires. Ronald Reagan condemns the raid. We support a UN resolution condemning it. We think this is outrageous. This is not what we want it all. And Israel says, look, we solved the problem. No more reactor. But what it did was convince Saddam Hussein that he really needed this nuclear program, if Israel was so worried about it. So what had been sort of a side project, now, with about 300 scientists involved, now becomes an obsession. 3,000 scientists get assigned to a secret underground uranium enrichment program. Centrifuges. And it goes underground. And we don't know anything about it. The Israelis don't know anything about it. The first we know about it is 10 years later, after the 1991 Iraq War, when IAEA inspectors go in and they discovered these facilities. So instead, again, that's proof that the military solution that Israel thought it had in '81 actually made the problem worse, accelerated a dedicated nuclear weapons program, didn't solve the problem.

Matt (27:45): Yeah, thank you for that. Let's take a break and we'll be right back.

(28:05): So this next question has a bit of a long runway, but there's a point here at the end, I promise.

Joe (28:10): Yeah, I've been taking too long on my answers. So you take a long time with your questions.

Matt (28:15): No, no, no, that's why you're here. So Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's former president, made a bizarre threat last week that Russia and other countries, unsubstantiated, are considering giving Iran nuclear weapons. He's since walked it back -- and his post-presidency career is basically being a Twitter troll. Of course, Russian officials and state TV personalities routinely make nuclear threats in recent years. But I've wondered if there could be something worthy of concern here. I mean, the US extends its nuclear umbrella over very close allies. France is discussing this with Germany. The US Air Force stores about a hundred B-61 nuclear gravity bombs across air bases in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. They can't be armed without US-held permissive action link codes. So they remain under American control, but they're forward positioned as a deterrent option. So there's precedent for great powers doing this. So if tomorrow we learned, say, that Russia planned to stage tactical nukes in Iran, how would we respond? What treaty frameworks, if any, would prevent that?

Joe (29:31): Wow! That's a good one. Okay, let me answer the easy one, the way you started. Can Russia give nuclear weapons to Iran? Well, not legally. They're a member of the NPT and the first couple of articles of the NPT are all about stopping that. So no country is allowed to acquire, develop, possess, et cetera, and no nuclear-armed state is allowed to give or assist another country in getting nuclear weapons. So that would be a clear violation. I mean, you don't need a jury trial to adjudicate this one. It's you are in violation, that would subject Russia to all kinds of sanctions and diplomatic probations. Could they station?

Matt (30:19): They're not giving them to the Iranians. It violates the spirit of the NPT, but perhaps not the letter.

Joe (30:25): Well, this came up -- it's still a little unclear, but Russia has stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, and there was an argument that that violates a treaty. But the Russians point to the US, the statistics you just cited. We've had forward-deployed tactical nuclear weapons since the '50s and we're down to our lowest number. We used to have thousands of these things spread all over the globe. Now we have a hundred left in Europe and we consider that legal, people have contested it, but, yes! Oh, man...

Matt (31:00): I hope they're not listening to this in Moscow, but that was just my idea.

Joe (31:03): I think they could probably get away with that. I mean, the Russians have not stepped up in the defense of Iran. It's sort of, their silence is shocking on this. Did they even condemn the raids? I don't know. They've been very quiet on this. I'm sure they must have condemned that, but they haven't done anything. They haven't rushed to supply Iran with air defense equipment, the stuff that the Israelis destroyed in their attacks. Would they go -- well, there would have to be some mighty big concessions from Iran to get Russia to do that. But yes, I would say, after discussing it with you, after working this through--

Matt (31:45): If you want to ask around and maybe get back to me, but that's--

Joe (31:49): It is probably -- they could probably get away with it. They could probably make a legal argument that the US was doing it, so we're going to do it.

Matt (31:57): I think the conversation on why haven't the Russians come to support their quote, unquote ally in their time of need -- same thing with Bashar al-Assad, apart from giving him a ride back to Moscow -- I mean, all the men and materiel that they would be able to use there are bogged down in Ukraine, but I mean -- those tactical nukes could sit in Iran. It would not affect their order of battle in Ukraine at all.

Joe (32:21): Well, just to play this out. But that's right. That's absolutely right. But it then opens up the questions of how credible is the Russian nuclear deterrent, the Russian nuclear umbrella? Would they really reply to an Israeli strike by using nuclear weapons and then subject Moscow to being hit by an Israeli missile? I don't even know if an Israeli missile can get to Moscow. I've never chartered this one out. But that would be a question.

Matt (32:55): Yeah, if you charge Mossad -- just hypothetical, and this is crazy, apocalyptic scenario here -- but if you charge Masad with getting a nuclear warhead into Moscow, I think they could probably pull it off with enough time seeing how talented they are.

Joe (33:10): That's very interesting. You mean sort of the equivalent of the Ukrainian drone attacks, smuggling hundreds of drones into Russia. Could Israel smuggle a nuclear weapon into probably Europe? You're probably right.

Matt (33:23): Yeah, we're getting way ahead of ourselves there. Yeah, I just had the thought about basing, not giving the Iranians nuclear weapons, but basing their weapons in Iran.

Joe (33:32): No, that's a possibility. Which is of course one of the other things that this war opened up. And when you look about who benefited from this war, the classic question, "Qui bono?" Who benefits? Russia benefited from this war. You're driving Iran closer into Russian hands, and Russia's the logical country for arm sales to help Iran rebuild. China benefited. You're also driving China closer to Iran and Iran closer to China. Did this help out the US? I don't think so. This plays into China's description of the United States as the chief force of instability in the world today. "We told you so. Look at these guys, they're out of control. We are the ones, China, who offer a safe alternative international system. Come ally with us." That this is perfect for China. Did Israel benefit? I think Netanyahu may have thrown away his shot. For 30 years, he's wanted to attack Iran, not because of the nuclear program, but because of the regime itself.

(34:45): Again, the nuclear program was just an excuse to do the regime-change operation that he's always wanted. He thought he had finally succeeded. He drags the US in, and then Trump is with him for two days and then pulls out, and Netanyahu must be going, "What's this, bro? I thought we were in this together? Sundance and Butch, and what are you doing? We haven't even gotten started yet." It takes weeks of attacks to knock out the Iranian government, if you can do it. No regime in history has ever been overthrown by a bombing campaign alone. Certainly not a 12-day campaign. So as the song in Hamilton says, "I'm not throwing away my shot." Well, I think Bibi may have thrown away his shot. I think it's going to be very difficult for him to get the United States to do this again.

Matt (35:41): Yeah. So the Iranian foreign minister said on CBS news recently that they're not currently interested in negotiating -- but of course, that doesn't mean that they will never be interested in negotiating. So supposing diplomacy is still on the table at some point in the future, what do you think a realistic new agreement would look like?

Joe (36:02): JCPOA, plus or minus. So the deal we had, the deal that was working. plus or minus. And here's the path. If you insist on zero enrichment, which has been the gambit that opponents of any negotiations with Iran have had for years. You have to understand this. Netanyahu and the hardliners in Israel and Saudi Arabia at the time and the United States were against the deal, not because it didn't work, but because there was an agreement that validated the current regime in Iran. They didn't want to do that. They wanted to undermine the regime, overthrow the regime. So they were against any agreement, and in order to make their case, they said, "Well, look, here's the problems with the agreement. It doesn't cover missiles. It doesn't cover aid to the proxy forces. It doesn't solve the repression of the Iranian people." Well, of course it didn't. It was about nuclear issues. The most important issue for the United States, and it doesn't last forever. It doesn't.

(37:00): So they have all these nitpick arguments against it. They convince people it's a bad deal, but it wasn't. It wasn't a flawed deal. It was a great deal. And one of the things they say is, you can't allow any enrichment whatsoever. Because it does allow Iran to go undertake limited enrichment for 20 years or so before they can even expand how much they can enrich, the levels of enrichment. Okay, well just take that. This Iran deal, limited uranium enrichment for a good 20 to 25 years, this bombing campaign has probably limited Iran's enrichment for six months to a couple of years. Which one is better? But put that back aside. What are your choices going forward? Going forward, if you insist on zero enrichment -- the perfect deal that you hypothesize in opposition to the deal you can actually get -- there's not a politician in Iran that could agree to zero enrichment. There's been too much invested in this program. Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran, succeeded in making this a cause of national pride. You'd have massive demonstrations. Iran's right to enrich uranium guaranteed under the Nonproliferation Treaty, a right to the peaceful uses of nuclear technology. You're discriminating against us, et cetera. All that works. It's now embedded in the Iranian psyche. Even people opposed to the regime support Iran's a right to enrichment in Iran, so that deal's a non-starter.

(38:29): You'd have to give Iran an awful lot to get them to agree to that. So there's a slim chance, but basically, no, you can't do that. Second is you go back to the JCPOA, you limit the enrichment. That you could get. Again, at this point, you'd have to give Iran a lot, but they're in a weakened position, as you said, and they're negotiating strength, chips have been reduced. And Trump is trying, man. He is out there dangling billions of dollars. Remember--

Matt (39:01): Six.

Joe (39:01): At least. And then something like 30 billion to rebuild their energy infrastructure.

Matt (39:08): The civilian program.

Joe (39:09): Including nuclear. Now, Iran, by the way, recently put outa $135 bid, basically a program request for proposals to rebuild the oil and gas infrastructure. So there's a lot of money to be made in Iran. So you got these two financial incentives going. One is Trump trying to bribe the Iranians into agreeing to a deal by offering this money. And the other is the Iranians understanding Trump's psyche, understanding that for Trump, it's not about national security, it's about Trump's security. What's in it for him? Look at the deals his family and Witkoff's family made in the Middle East before the president's trip there. Billions of dollars to the Trump organization, to the Witkoff organization in Middle East deals. Well, Iran is now saying, or was saying before the bombing, that Iran is open to US investment. They didn't say that in 2014 or 2015 or 2020, Iran is open to US investment. If you're Witkoff -- the US negotiator, Steve Witkoff -- if you're Donald Trump, huh? You could get the inside track on contracts worth billions of dollars. This is very impressive for businessmen like Witkoff and Trump, so you could get that kind of deal. The Iranians are offering economic inducements for Trump and Witkoff. Trump is offering economic inducements for the ayatollah. That's possible as long as you're willing to accept limited enrichment.

Matt (40:43): Looking at the countries that succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons, despite the post-war order's efforts or preferences -- so India, Pakistan, North Korea, and even Israel -- and those who didn't, what lessons do you think future nuclear aspirants are learning from Iran's case? What messages is crisis sending?

Joe (41:03): Well, okay. Okay, this is the big one... Get a bomb.

(41:09): It's as simple as that.

Matt (41:10): And do it quick.

Joe (41:11): Yeah, and do it quick. The world is spiraling out of control. We can't depend on the United States. They're freaking crazy over there. We have to depend on our own, and it's adding to an existing crisis. We basically have a three-pronged crisis in arms control and non-proliferation. Number one, the entire non-proliferation and arms control regime built over the last 60 years by liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, is coming apart. But the US since, George W. Bush, has been starting to pull out of agreements -- the ABM treaty, the agreed framework with North Korea that stopped North Korea's program. Trump and Putin come in and accelerate it. They pull out of various agreements, including the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement. The whole thing is a Jenga tower and they're pulling out bricks. It's in danger of collapse. Number two, when Trump is reelected, the message he's sending to our European allies is that he's more interested in an alliance with Russia than he is in an alliance with the European allies.

(42:14): And you hear leading allies saying, well, if the US is closing its nuclear umbrella, it's security assurances to us against a Russian attack, maybe we have to build our own -- and people like the leaders of Germany and Poland and some of the frontline states are saying this. They could do this. It would take some time, but they could build their own nuclear weapons. And now you have this attack, which basically shows that we -- Israel and the US, nuclear powers -- are willing to attack non-nuclear countries. You add that to the example of Ukraine -- a nuclear power, Russia, attacking a non-nuclear power, and the message is just getting bigger, stronger, and stronger and stronger. Only nuclear weapons can protect us. I think that's an illusion. But we're basically been thrust back into the national security frameworks of the 1950s before we had the consolidation of US alliances around the world, before there was any non-proliferation regime, when we basically existed in a state of nuclear anarchy. Everybody out for themselves, everybody trying to acquire the weapon they believe will give them security.

Matt (43:23): As we wrap today, what should the next generation of non-proliferation specialists be learning from this?

Joe (43:31): It's the same lesson that we're learning in the United States about democracy. Don't take it for granted. This is a constant struggle. If you're not moving ahead, if you're not building the arms control and non-proliferation regime -- strengthening it, adding to it, extending it -- then it is going to collapse. You think that we live in a world where it's governed by the rule of law where nations, even adversaries can cooperate under basic international security? No, we do not. Conditions change, leadership changes. Unimaginable things, like Donald Trump becoming president of the United States twice, happen. And those people, these snake oil salesmen who are pedaling false cures, a military solution to another nation's nuclear program, a magic golden dome that could protect the United States against nuclear weapons, that kind of nonsense is spreading in the disinformation age. It's worse now than it's ever been. These are perilous times, and it's not enough just to oppose the bad actions of others. You have to be constructing the alternative solution. And right now I see a lot of destruction and not much construction.

Matt (44:43): Yeah. Well, Joe, thank you so much for joining me. Before we go, where can listeners follow your work or keep up with your latest commentary?

Joe (44:50): Well, I'm on Bluesky. I left Twitter a long time ago. I'm on Bluesky. I have a Substack called Strategy and History, so you can go to Cirincione on Substack. That's about it. I'm not really, I don't have a job anymore, I don't get paid to do this. I am the vice chair of the board of the Center for International Policy, an exciting think tank in Washington, sort of redefining what it means to do international policy in Washington. Those are the places you can go to see more of me and my colleagues.

Matt (45:21): Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time. It was great speaking with you.

Joe (45:24): Thank you, Matt.

Announcer (45:57): Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.