Theodore Postol argues Iran can now build 10–20 nuclear weapons and that diplomacy is the only viable path forward
MIT professor Theodore Postol discusses Iran's nuclear weapons capability and the case for negotiation with host Glenn Diesen.
Summary
Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT and former Pentagon adviser, presents his technical assessment of Iran's nuclear weapons capability to Glenn Diesen. Postol argues that Iran can now rapidly produce between 10 and 20 atomic bombs — significantly more than the commonly cited figure of 10 — based on his analysis of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) data showing that Iran's IR-6 centrifuges are operating at nearly four times the capacity most analysts had assumed. He contends that Iran possesses both the enriched uranium and the technical knowledge to build reliable atomic weapons without testing, and that existing long-range ballistic missiles provide a ready delivery system that Israeli missile defense — specifically the Patriot system — is essentially incapable of intercepting. Postol argues that despite this capability, Iran does not want to become a nuclear weapons state because doing so would trigger proliferation across the region, including in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, undermining Iranian security. His central policy conclusion is that a military solution is not viable and that the United States has no rational alternative to negotiation.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and framing
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT, an expert in nuclear weapons delivery systems, missiles, and missile defense, who also advised the Pentagon. Thank you as always for coming back on the program.
Theodore Postol: It's my great pleasure to be here. Today I want to discuss the nuclear capabilities of Iran, as something that is quite important to assess in order to figure out what kind of a nuclear deal would have to be made. The war against Iran has been quite disastrous in many ways, but one of the ways it's been a disaster is that it has posed an existential threat to Iran. The US and Israel might push for regime change, but given that there's no government waiting in the rear to replace the current one, the likely outcome would be the Balkanization and indeed destruction of Iran — something along the lines of Syria or Libya. I think this would be good enough for Israel and possibly the US to remove a key regional power from the board. But if you're sitting in Tehran now, you would assume that Israel and the US will not give up. They will have another go and try to defeat and destroy Iran.
The problem behind this is that Iran now has every reason in the world to develop a nuclear weapon, which is often referred to as the ultimate deterrent. I certainly hope they don't develop a nuclear weapon, but I think it's also important to be honest about how the war has created huge incentives for this. I've spoken in the past about what kind of capabilities the Iranians have, because they do have a lot of know-how and they do have the enriched uranium — the material. The challenge is real.
Iran's rational interest in avoiding nuclear weapons status
Glenn Diesen: So in this regard, you've prepared some of your research and arguments on this.
Theodore Postol: Yes. I've looked at the situation. I had done so earlier, as you know, but I've gone back and revisited it and come to a number of conclusions which I think are relevant. I don't know if there'll be anybody listening for the right reasons — we all know that problem. But I think the reasoning behind the findings I'll explain shortly is solid, and I think it argues very strongly that a diplomatic solution is possible and a military solution is not. This has to be recognized by people in positions of authority, or we are going to look at probably an explosion of nuclear proliferation in southwest Asia.
First of all, I think it's important to recognize that the Iranians do not want to build nuclear weapons. What they want is to deter enemies — in particular Israel — from striking them with nuclear weapons. Israel has shown by its actions that it is an existential threat to Iran, and probably it's fair to even say a genocidal threat to Iran. Maybe it can't execute it, but it is certainly doing so elsewhere — in particular in Gaza, and in Lebanon. Southern Lebanon is really a pretty outrageous situation, and in some ways similar to what has been going on in Gaza: essentially trying to practice ethnic cleansing against people in Lebanon to take more territory under the guise of so-called defense.
So from the point of view of Iranian leaders, they are facing two adversaries who pose in some sense a genocidal threat — and they still want to negotiate. The reason they want to negotiate is that they are really very rational in their thinking. If you look at the rationality of not only their attempts at diplomacy but also the way they've conducted the war when it broke out, they have shown tremendous discipline and thought in how they've conducted themselves. It's impressive in this regard.
Basically, the Iranian leadership understands that if it builds nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will almost certainly become a nuclear weapons state in response, and can potentially become one very rapidly. Saudi Arabia was funding the effort to build atomic bombs in Pakistan, and there was an understanding that if Saudi Arabia needed nuclear weapons at some future time, Pakistan would give them. That seems to be a generally accepted situation, and Saudi Arabia has made it very clear that it will not tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons without getting them itself. The Iranians understand that this would have a major negative impact on Iran's national security.
Of course, there is Turkey, which could readily move forward to build nuclear weapons if Iran and Saudi Arabia had them — and possibly Egypt. We don't yet know what some of the Persian Gulf states might be capable of, partly because their industrial bases are more limited, but they do have substantial amounts of money and we don't know how that could play out.
So we have a situation where we're dealing with a rational actor — which seems to be rare these days — who wants to negotiate something. Now, on the other side of the coin: what happens if the irrational behavior of the United States in particular and the West in general drives the Iranians into a corner where they reach the conclusion that they have no choice but to have nuclear weapons? It could be more complex than that. Someone like you would be much better at spinning out scenarios, but certainly we know for sure that there are highly rational people in the leadership in Iran, and we also know that there are people who disagree with that leadership and believe it's a good idea to build nuclear weapons immediately. Domestic debates are complicated, totally unpredictable, and it's hard to know when and if the people who would like to proceed to build nuclear weapons will prevail in the internal debate. It could happen any time. We just don't know.
But the point of importance is to ask ourselves what the alternative world would look like if we don't take the effort to reach a negotiated understanding with the Iranians — who, I want to underscore again, want to do this.
Technical assessment: how many bombs Iran can build
Theodore Postol: The first point I'd like to make — can you see that slide?
Glenn Diesen: Yes, it's up now.
Theodore Postol: Okay. There are a couple of basic points that I've already touched on but are worth emphasizing. The first is that Iran can produce really 10 or 20 atomic weapons. This is a different statement than is commonly said today. The general wisdom is that Iran can rapidly produce — and we're talking about rapidly — from the 440 kg of uranium hexafluoride that is 60% enriched, the common wisdom is 10 nuclear weapons. But there's an underlying assumption in those estimates: that the atomic weapons Iran would produce would take 25 kg of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium. They don't need 25 kg of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium to build an atomic bomb. They only need 14 or 15. It has to do with the design of the weapon.
When you look at the situation from a technical point of view, it seems almost certain that if you were Iranian and contemplating rapidly producing nuclear weapons, you would not produce a weapon of the kind that's being talked about. You would produce a weapon with a surrounding hollow sphere of uranium-238 surrounding the 15-kilogram core of weapons-grade uranium. The reason you would do this is that this external sphere of uranium-238 has two beneficial effects from the point of view of a weapon.
First, it reflects neutrons back into the core of the weapon, which allows you to use a smaller amount of uranium-235 to build a weapon — a smaller critical mass. If you have a smaller critical mass, that means you have more uranium-235 to build weapons with.
The other point is that the uranium reflector is very massive — quite heavy. Because it's so massive, when an atomic bomb built in this way is undergoing rapid energy release as it goes supercritical, if you can delay the expansion of the weapon by several hundredths of a millionth of a second — slow up the expansion by a very small amount of time — you can get a considerably higher yield, because more of the critical mass will undergo fission before the weapons-grade uranium disassembles. So you get two benefits. The cost is higher weight, but the higher weight is such that you could easily fly this weapon on an existing, tested, long-range missile that has typically been used to deliver conventional explosives to Israel.
So you not only have the weapon if you choose to move forward, but you have a delivery system that could deliver this warhead by ballistic missile. The only question would be the reliability of the ballistic missiles — and they seem highly reliable, because the ballistic missile defense in Israel is near useless. There's another talk I should be giving perhaps in a week or two that shows that the Patriot system has been absolutely unable to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles — near-zero capability. So it's a very reliable delivery system in terms of a ballistic missile attack. I have data to show this. I want to underscore: this is data I've collected.
Centrifuge capacity: the IAEA data
Theodore Postol: In addition, it turns out that information released by the International Atomic Energy Agency, when analyzed properly, leads to the conclusion that the efficiency of the IR-6 centrifuge is two or three times higher than what people have been generally assuming — including me, because I have not analyzed it. It's a very complex job analyzing exactly how much one of these centrifuges can produce in the way of enrichment. But it's a very important conclusion, because it means, for example, that Iran could quite easily produce one or two atomic bombs or more per year from natural uranium after they weaponize — let's say 17, 18, or 19 weapons rapidly with the 60%-enriched uranium. So we're looking at a major nuclear weapon state if something cannot be done to encourage them not to do this.
This situation should not be alarming if you're reasonable, because as I've already explained, the Iranians want to negotiate. They don't want to put themselves in a position where they're surrounded by potentially hostile nuclear-armed states. It's not only Israel that's their concern. You have a situation where they're extremely interested in negotiating — they've demonstrated by joining the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 that they will take very severe restrictions on their enrichment program and work within them. So we have all of the ingredients for a solution here.
My policy point is very simple: you have no choice but to negotiate. If you don't negotiate, you're going to have a very powerful nuclear weapon state at some point. That's your choice. Try anything more military, keep up the military pressure — you're eventually going to drive the Iranians to a point where they make a decision to build nuclear weapons, and they have the capacity to build a boatload of these things and continue to increase their arsenal. This is not a difficult choice if you're being in any way rational.
So what has changed in my assessment? Why am I even more negative than the last time I gave this assessment? The fact is that the gas centrifuges — which are key to the technology that Iran needs to build atomic weapons — are likely to be more numerous and more capable than people have been believing.
Here is a table from the Institute for Science and International Security. They have outlined the number of centrifuges produced over a few months at a time, up until the June 22 midnight hammer attack which did significant damage to the Iranian program — not fatal damage, but significant damage. Up until that time, the Iranians were producing 450 centrifuges per month. A 174-centrifuge cascade is the baseline the Iranians are using. They can couple these centrifuges together and build a combined cascade of 348 centrifuges, and they have demonstrated the capability to do this. The IAEA reported this — I discovered it quite by accident when I was reviewing one of their reports. Perhaps if I were smarter I would have seen it earlier. But the point is this is not speculation. This is a capability clearly demonstrated by the production reported by the IAEA, and I'll explain that shortly.
Weapon design and critical mass requirements
Theodore Postol: The amount of uranium you need to build a bomb — you can see the cursor, right?
Glenn Diesen: Yes.
Theodore Postol: Good. The amount of uranium to build a bomb might be as much as 55 kilograms. That's if you just have nuclear material and you put together a ball of uranium metal that's 90% enriched — in a bare sphere of uranium metal, you would need about 55 kilograms to build a weapon. Incidentally, if you had 83.7% enriched — I'll explain what that means — you would maybe need 60 or 65 kg. Traces of uranium enriched to 83.6% or 83.7% were found in the Fordow facility. Very small traces, but it certainly indicates the demonstrated capacity to come very close to weapons grade without having demonstrated 90%, which people usually assume.
If you go down to what's called a 10 cm reflector of uranium, you're down to maybe 20 kilograms. You can do better with a 10 cm beryllium sphere, but you have to be able to work with beryllium. There's good evidence that the Iranians do know how to work with beryllium and that they have beryllium. But I'll focus on these two possibilities: 20.5 kg of 90%-enriched, or 14.1 kg.
If we just look at how you would go about doing this — well, you would take these materials and put together a bomb. This is a diagram from the Encyclopedia Americana. You're not trying to compress this material. If you have a spherical explosion to compress the material, you could use less uranium metal to build a bomb. But the implosion mechanism is complex, and even with all the modern technology available, you would want to test this weapon. In the case of using a weapon design that uses more uranium but you still have enough — what's called gun assembly — you have a uranium sphere with a bore hole in it, and you have two sections of cores of weapons-grade uranium. You just explosively put them together. This would be a working weapon, and assembling it would not be a complicated task. The timing of the explosives is not demanding, unlike the case with the spherical explosion, and none of the technologies would be ones you didn't already have in hand if you're Iranian. This is as straightforward as it gets.
If you're under threat, all these arguments people make about implosion weapons and things of that type — this is silly. You're under threat. You have this resource. Best is the enemy of good enough. What you're going to build is a simple weapon.
Some of these statements from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — which is the big organization for misinformation on this — they may just put out a little thing saying, "Oh, they can't build a weapon." I don't know where they got this from. It's hard to believe how this organization continues to publish misinformation the way it does. It is a club — a social club. They have really almost no expertise in this organization. I had a long discussion with the CEO and president, and she showed no interest in understanding what I was talking about. None at all. It was really quite amazing.
Weapon dimensions and delivery
Theodore Postol: Let me just give you a sense of the dimensions and weights. These are obviously conceptual drawings, but if you wanted to build a uranium weapon — here's the 55-kilogram core, maybe 25 or 30 cm in diameter. If the core gets somewhat smaller, it goes down to 20.5 kilograms rather than 55. The surrounding uranium-238 weighs quite a bit — it's like 350 kg if it's a 10 cm reflector.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, because the overall weight of components is under 350 kg. If you needed another 100 kilograms of equipment — fusing devices, electronics, packages to hold things in place — you could easily build a weapon that weighed 450 kg, which is well within the range of any of your long-range missiles to carry. This has the advantage that if you know how to work with uranium metal — which you have to be able to do already if you're making uranium cores — then you know how to work with uranium-238. U-238 is the same as U-235 from the point of view of mechanical properties and handling. So you have all of the technology in hand. There's nothing exotic about these technologies.
If you want instead to go to a lighter weapon with a 10 cm or more beryllium reflector, you could do that. But you have to work with beryllium — which incidentally does not mean it's not a capability the Iranians already have. They could well have this capability. The advantage would be a much lighter weapon, because the reflector is not this fantastically heavy material. But why do you need all this lightweight? If you're going to put it on a ballistic missile and you can carry it, why not go the way of uranium? At least this is my speculation, because the uranium is a massive material that delays the expansion of the critical mass when it goes supercritical, and you'll get more yield on the weapon.
Anyway, if you want to see an example of a nuclear weapon, I found this diagram. I should say that it is almost certainly secret restricted data. According to the US Atomic Energy Act, somebody copied this classified design — I don't know who they were, but it's out in the open. This is the W33 artillery shell, which has a yield between 1 and 40 kilotons depending on what you choose.
How does it work? It has a little gas bottle in it. This is not something the Iranians could do at this time because the gas bottle would contain deuterium and tritium gas mixture, and obtaining the tritium is a big industrial effort and the quantities needed are almost certainly not available to Iran. I could be wrong on that — if that's the case, then you're in worse trouble. What you do is control the burst of neutrons that go into the assembled critical mass by putting different amounts of deuterium and tritium gas into this bottle. If I want a low yield, I don't put any deuterium and tritium gas in there. If I want a very high yield, I put in a lot.
When the artillery shell is fired, there's a ring of uranium metal — weapons-grade metal — and there's an annular slug of weapons-grade material that, by the deceleration — remember, this is an artillery shell, it undergoes a very large acceleration initially and then a very large deceleration from aerodynamic drag — these fall into place creating a critical mass that's just short of what's needed to get a nuclear yield. But then you have this slug that, when the time is right, an explosive charge drives into this cavity. As it goes into the cavity, it crushes up this container of deuterium and tritium gas. The temperature rises very rapidly as the critical mass gives off neutrons. Eventually the temperature reaches tens of millions of degrees Kelvin. The deuterium plus tritium gas ignites in a thermonuclear reaction, and deuterium and tritium fuse into helium-4. When they fuse into helium-4, they give off neutrons — very energetic neutrons. A typical neutron given off from a uranium nucleus is maybe one million electron volts. These neutrons are 14 million electron volts. When these enter the critical mass of uranium around them, they just smash uranium atoms — they don't just undergo fission, they get splashed — and you get a tremendous growth in the number of neutrons, which of course tremendously increases the yield. This design is capable of 40 kilotons, which is quite a good yield.
If you just want to see the dimensions of the uranium weapon I described, you can see it's about 30 cm. This is not an unmanageably large device. It's not hard to see how you could put this onto a ballistic missile. Anyone who's telling you that the Iranians can't do this — and who knows anything about the technology they've already demonstrated — is smoking banana peels. I don't know where they get this idea from. This country has the ability to build nuclear weapons, and those nuclear weapons would be very reliable, and they don't necessarily need to test them. This is what you ought to be thinking about when you're talking about driving them into a mindset where they feel they have no choice but to proceed.
Just to give you a little bit more sense of size — this is the nuclear package that would go into the shell. Through the magic of graphics, I've pulled out that package and shown you how neatly it fits into the artillery shell. None of this is magic from the point of view of — I mean, it's magic if you want to do this in your garage. That's true. But if you're a nation-state with the tremendous capability that Iran has, this is straightforward. That's the point.
Centrifuge production data and the IAEA report
Theodore Postol: The gas centrifuges are the other critical technology here. We know they have gas centrifuges, and what the IAEA reported in an extremely interesting report — let me just show you the report. This report is from 2025, looks like it's August 2025, on the verification and monitoring of the Islamic Republic, released in March 2025.
Here's what they're talking about: a 174-centrifuge cascade that the Iranians have demonstrated they've been working with at the Fordow plant. A simple rule is that each of the separative work units produced by each of these centrifuges adds linearly with the number of centrifuges. That's one of the reasons why the separative work unit is used — it's an elegant way to characterize enrichment capability. So if you have 174 of these and the centrifuges produce one separative work unit per centrifuge, then the cascade — assuming the efficiency is well put together, which is a big complicated task done through experimentation and adjustments — at the theoretical limit, you should be able to get 174 separative work units. If you can get 10 separative work units per centrifuge, then you should get 1,740. Five, of course, you get half of that.
What the Iranians were experimenting with was using two of these cascades together. They take one unit, take the enriched uranium, put it into the feed of another centrifuge, and come out with a product. The experiment they were doing was feeding 20%-enriched uranium in one end and producing 60%-enriched in the other end. The IAEA was watching them. Incidentally, they also demonstrated three cascades together.
So what does this mean? Here is what they reported — the Iranian production. This is not theoretical. This is not a guess. The guess currently circulating — including the guess I was using — was that the current Iranian IR-6 centrifuges are producing between three and a half and seven separative work units per centrifuge. There's a lot of play in there because people have been trying to analyze this mechanical device without real experimental data.
Here's what the Iranians showed the IAEA: they took 20%-enriched uranium into this double cascade and produced 34 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride per month at 60%. What does that mean? If we look at the number of centrifuges — it takes 400 separative work units to get 37 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium from 112 kg of 20%-enriched uranium. Just to put it in perspective, if you start with natural uranium, you need 5,500 separative work units. So a lot of work has already been done. You need about 400 separative work units to take 112 kg of 20%-enriched uranium and produce 37 kg of 60%-enriched.
So we divide 34 by 37, because we're really talking about 369 separative work units to produce 34 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium. There are 348 centrifuges. If we adjust this monthly amount — multiply by 12 months — that tells us what these two cascades together can produce in separative work units per year: 4,440 separative work units. That's a lot. That's almost a nuclear weapon. And the centrifuges are producing 12.75 separative work units per centrifuge. That is much bigger than what people were thinking — almost four times the capacity of the lowest estimates. We're talking about a tremendous capacity on the part of the Iranians to produce nuclear weapons if they choose to.
Final calculations and policy conclusion
Theodore Postol: The bottom line is very simple. Even a top-level American policymaker should be able to understand this. Iran has the technology and expertise to build between 10 and 20 atomic bombs quickly. I'm talking quickly — weeks, maybe months because some of the equipment has to be brought together. We don't know. But we're not talking years by any means.
This statement out of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is complete nonsense, and it's reckless of them to suggest this is a non-problem. I want to be clear about why I'm underscoring this, Glenn: if I tell you — if you're a decision maker and I tell you this is not a problem, I'm your technical adviser, then you say, "Okay, I don't have to worry about this." This is not a minor error on the part of the Bulletin. This is major. They go around telling people they're experts, they propagate false information, they misrepresent themselves as experts, they don't do any work, and they irresponsibly present an incorrect picture to the public and to many people in Washington who make the mistake of thinking these guys know what they're talking about.
So the upside is that the Iranians don't want to become a weapons state. They know it would undermine their national security. You've got two things that are important points that lead to the same conclusion. One: they have the technology. Two: they don't want to use the technology if you give them a way out. It's simple enough. You can take a kindergarten child and go through the choices together and they will always make the right choice. So what's wrong with these geniuses in Washington?
You need to use diplomacy to help the Iranians do what is in everyone's common interest. It's in everyone's interest. If they eventually decide to go ahead and build nuclear weapons, this will be a security nightmare for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, the Gulf States, Israel, and the United States. And these arguments that the Iranians are likely to use nuclear weapons against Israel are also ridiculous, because the Iranians understand — and we see they're rational — that if they use a nuclear weapon on Israel, it's the end of Iran. They understand there would be nuclear retaliation. So they're not going to do it.
So let them stay a non-nuclear-weapon state. It's not the best outcome, but it might actually be the best outcome, because the Israelis have a government that's totally crazy. I don't know what this Israeli government is willing or able or capable of doing. Part of the reason I've given talks showing what Iran could do to Tel Aviv if they attack Tel Aviv is because I want Israelis to understand that you don't get away free if you do that. It's going to be the end of Israel too. So let's everybody calm down, start thinking rationally, and step away from the precipice, because this is a really bad situation.
That's pretty much the points I want to make.
Glenn Diesen: No — you have convinced me.
Theodore Postol: Oh, good.
Glenn Diesen: But I think the scale of their capacity is considerably higher than I had appreciated.
Theodore Postol: One nuclear weapon is enough. If you have one nuclear weapon, I'm going to be very careful dealing with you. If you have two, I'm going to be much more careful. The argument that Colin Powell made with the North Koreans — that it doesn't matter, one or two — that's not correct from my point of view. Two is a big difference from one, because these things are unbelievably devastating. But when you're talking about 20 versus 10, and the potential capacity as this standoff goes on to produce a couple more every year while the standoff is going — if you make the decision to move ahead, that's what you're potentially looking at. You're looking at an extremely well-armed state, surrounded by states that are going to be well-armed too. And for what? Who is better off in the end? What kind of environment — if you're Israeli or Saudi Arabian or Iranian — is this for the future security of that region? It's a no-brainer. You have to be devoid of intellect to not see that this is the only solution.
It's not like you can't imagine — if you show me a military solution, then we can talk about it. I'm not one of these people who's opposed to military solutions when there's no other choice. Military should be the last thing you do, but if you need a military intervention, I'm not one of these people who's going to say no if I really think it's serious enough. St. Augustine convinced me — there are situations where things could be bad enough that the immorality of war is justified because what is happening is so immoral. The problem with the St. Augustine criteria is that you don't know that the military intervention you're going to try to stop this greater evil will not get out of control and cause yet a greater evil in the end. You're hoping that you can stop an evil with a lesser evil, and you can't predict that. That's very difficult to do in war. But I'm not philosophically or fundamentally opposed to military force. I think it should be only the last resort. But here it's no option. It's just that simple.
Find a military officer who knows what they're talking about. You talk to a responsible military officer, they're going to tell you — if someone says, "Let's do it, I think we can do it," get one of these guys — show me. It's like when people — I was involved in doing nuclear war planning. I know where the ground zeros were. I was there. I was in the computer programs where we laid these weapons down. I'm not some high-policy guy who just saw the chart with a big red color "major attack option." I saw what was going on in detail. When somebody tells me we should have more nuclear weapons, my first question is: how are we going to use them? Show me how we're going to use them. I know how to use them. I've been in the planning. Show me where we're going to lay these weapons, how it is going to increase our military capability in a way that could in any way meaningfully increase our national security. If you can show me that, I'm interested.
I don't think it's a good thing to have nuclear weapons. I generally think we'd all be better off without them. But all right, they exist. These people make these arguments and they don't know anything. They haven't thought about it. So General Kellogg — explain it to me. I'm just a poor guy, a silly guy who was an adviser to the chief of naval operations and knew where the ground zeros were. Explain it to me.
The case against military action and the rationality of deterrence
Glenn Diesen: That's a great point, because even if we're all on board for some reason that it's reasonable to attack Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons — let's say the intelligence did show they're trying to get nuclear weapons, which it doesn't, and let's say they're quite irrational with the weapons, which also shows no indication — but let's just say this is the objective. I would, as you say, like to see the plan. Exactly how is this going to work? Because the Iranians have the know-how, they have the material. The only way you can prevent them from developing nuclear weapons seems to be the complete destruction of Iran, and if that's not achievable, then any attack on Iran will only increase their need to develop a nuclear weapon. This is why I think diplomacy is even more important now than before the war, because the US and Israel have created even greater incentive for Iran to develop this nuclear deterrent.
Theodore Postol: Yeah, it's just — a kindergarten child, if you laid out the choice in this way to them, would always make the right choice. You don't have the ability to do it this way. You do have the ability to do it that way. Which do you choose?
Glenn Diesen: But every time they go to war, you get a piece of candy — a moral argument for why the other side is bad, a description of the character of the government. But again, what is feasible? Because I saw 20 years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. We saw the knocking out of Iraq, which only aligned the country towards Iran instead of balancing it. We saw the destruction of Libya, which is now a horrible mess and a security problem for Europe. Syria, which used to have some stability — now we have an ISIS leader we are aligned with. None of these things have been successful. So I would like to know, given that we're attacking a country which can develop nuclear weapons, I would want to see a certain plan — exactly how is this going to work?
Theodore Postol: I'm not a social scientist, so feel free to pull me up short, but this has always struck me: American nuclear debate — a lot of American debate over nuclear weapons and their potential use — has an underlying racist character. Les Aspin was the secretary of defense when we had this disaster in Africa, the Blackhawk Down incident, and he started this outrageously racist debate that was carried on in the American Congress for years. The debate was about: are other countries rational enough to be deterred? Are they rational like we are? What are you talking about? You mean the people who are brown and yellow — they somehow don't understand? You have a female cow with a calf, and you go near that calf, you'll understand what deterrence is — and that's a cow. So how stupid can you be? How much of a narrow ethnocentric perspective can you have to think that other people are not rational?
Maybe you're not the one that's rational — that you think you're so ignorant of the intellect of human beings in other countries and their cultures and their ability to understand what's important, that you think they don't understand what's in their national interest, that it's not in their interest to attack the United States with nuclear weapons. All this discussion — Trump is saying, "Well, the Iranians could attack us with nuclear weapons." What? They won't attack the Israelis with nuclear weapons. I can assure you, because they understand the consequences. Attack the United States with nuclear weapons? You're talking about bringing hell to earth. This country is not a nuclear threat to the United States. People say, "Well, maybe they'll smuggle something on a ship." Right. And when the forensics shows it came from Iran, you see a green glass parking lot where Iran used to stand. It's just so ridiculous — this debate that is supposed to be among people who claim to be experts in national security policy.
If your adversary is truly suicidal, there's nothing you can do. And there's no reason to believe that if your adversary is white and European, or black and African, or whatever, that they're irrational. The most irrational serious leader that I'm aware of who could have destroyed his country is Hitler. If he had nuclear weapons at that time and we had nuclear weapons, he probably would have used them. When Germany lost the war, he told Albert Speer, "Go out and destroy the country. Germans should not survive. They failed their test as the super race and they deserve to die." And Speer just didn't do it. He didn't follow the Führer's order. But the guy was totally deranged. Stalin would have never used nuclear weapons. Stalin was a brutal, murderous guy. Mao — no. So what are we talking about here?
The real danger: accidental nuclear war and proliferation
Theodore Postol: The big problem is mistake. That is the big problem. The more nuclear weapon states you have and the more weapons they have, the more chance something happens in some god-awful unpredictable way that leads to nuclear weapons being used — potentially at a very small level, but leading to the kindling of a massive exchange very quickly. That's the real problem.
That's why I was wasting my time talking to the president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, because they published an article that basically talked about a false alert that occurred in 1995 in Russia, and they got everything wrong. Everything. It was incomprehensible. This woman calls me up when I wrote to her about it — I had sent her materials, and she hadn't read any of the materials — and she starts asking me to explain. I went ballistic. I told her: you call me up and you don't take the trouble to read even the five-minute summary I sent you along with the hours of materials, and you want me to treat you like you deserve to be respected? She says to me, "Well, you know, I'm busy." I'm glad you're busy — you're running this journal and you're propagating false information that is critical for decision-making that could lead to an accidental nuclear war, and you don't think it's important enough.
It was a pretty amazing discussion. At one point I said to her: you realize that this exposed an instability — a particular problem with the Russian early warning system — an instability that is still there today and could, if the right circumstances or the wrong circumstances came together, lead to a catastrophic nuclear exchange. She says to me — and I'm quoting now — "Well, I'm concerned about any instability." So I say, "Well, are you concerned about this instability?" She says, "Well, I'm concerned about any instability." I say, "Can you tell me that you're concerned about this instability?" And she just repeated herself a third time. This is the level of curiosity and professionalism of the CEO and president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. If anybody here is from the board of the Bulletin, please call me, because I have a lot to say about this organization. I think it's an organization that can do good things, but right now it's doing damage. That's my view.
Glenn Diesen: Well, thank you for outlining this. It is frustrating to see some of the expert class drifting a bit. But I think this is a very important issue — dealing with the whole nuclear proliferation question — because on the rationality issue, this is one of the most dangerous things. The assumption that the Iranians are these irrational, crazy people — indeed, that's built into our language as well. We can't even refer to Iran without talking about mullahs, all these efforts to just make them sound as irrational as possible. And also the whole calculation: if we do know now that they have an incentive to acquire nuclear weapons, they don't want to develop nuclear weapons, they know this will spread across the region and diminish their security —
Theodore Postol: You know, there's a good place for a deal here. And still the goal is, "Well, let's try to bomb them a third time. Maybe this time we'll get lucky." You can't make it up. But there we are.
Glenn Diesen: Any final thoughts?
Upcoming talk on Patriot missile defense performance
Theodore Postol: Yes. I'm going to be in Warsaw giving a talk on the Patriot's performance from the Gulf War of 1991 to now. And it's not going to be positive. I have data to back up the findings. I think people ought to be thinking about the substance of this talk, and I'd like to give it again on your show at some point, because we're now talking about replenishing the depleted supply of Patriot interceptors so that the Israelis can defend themselves against the missiles that these interceptors can't engage. We're talking about an outlay of billions of dollars to replenish supplies with missiles that really can't perform against the ballistic missiles that could be used to attack them. That's something the American taxpayer ought to be aware of, and certainly the Israelis should be aware of it, because if one of those missiles coming in is carrying a nuclear weapon sometime in the future, they can't stop it. They will not be able to intercept it. Anyway, I seem to be the bearer of bad news, but someone has to be.
Glenn Diesen: Well, thanks again.
Theodore Postol: Thank you. Take care.