Angry Planet - A History of the Iranian Nuclear Program

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Sometimes it’s good to back up and ask the basic questions: How do we know Iran was even developing nuclear weapons?On this episode of the show, the Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis walks us through the history of the Iranian nuclear (weapons and energy) program. It’s got it all: diplomacy, assassinations, cowardly politicians, and uranium fever.Lewis is a professor at the Middlebury Institute, member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and former member of the State Department's International Security Advisory Board. He knows the tale well and he’s here to tell it straight.Damning the strikes with faint praise.“The hard part of a nuclear weapon is not the explodey part.”Making a nuclear weapon is a solved problem.The Iran-Iraq war and the origins of Iran’s nuclear weapons programThe ladders of Natanz, how they cascade downEnergy programs are always bigger than weapons programs.Unmasking the International Atomic Energy AgencyIsrael’s war on the programHow to enrich uraniumThe “torturous” process behind the Iran dealCongressional cowards“A new generation of suckers”The French movie goodbyeThe DealSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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$9 a month. You get early access to all the mainline episodes and they're commercial free. There's one up right now. That's another nuclear episode, kind of a companion piece to this. It really details the state of the nuclear buildup in the world right now. It's a little terrifying. So if you want to listen to that early, angry planetpod.com. And here is the show.

Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. Jason Fields lost a filling 10 minutes before we were jumping on the call, so you're going to have to live without him for another episode. But that's okay because I've got Jeffrey Lewis here, the arms control wonk himself, a professor at the Middlebury Institute, a member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and a former member of the State Department's International Security Advisory Board. And we're going to talk about Iran's nuclear program. Jeffrey, how are you doing today?

I'm doing okay. Iran's nuclear program smaller than it was two weeks ago. So you're taking the, I guess this is my opening question then is the strikes did do something. something because it's been, what, a couple weeks now, we probably have a little bit more information. We know a little bit more about what's going on. So I guess, can I get your reaction to what happened? Yeah, I mean, the strikes did something. There are an awful lot of buildings that were there that aren't. And obviously, there are some underground facilities that seem to have been struck.

The more complicated question is going to be whether that something was worth doing, whether that something will be, you know, something that we care about. It wasn't obliterated. But it was, you know, it was not nothing. I'm looking for the correct faintness for this praise. I like that you use the word obliterated there. It was a very specific choice. But so this episode was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend. That is, I would not say, a news addict like the rest of us, who hit me with a question, what if, isn't it possible that Iran's nuclear program is just a big nothing burger? Isn't it possible that there's nothing there?

And that kind of took me back for a second. And you've got to look on your face already, Mr. Lewis. Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by a nothing burger. I mean, we know that there is a nuclear energy program because the IAEA inspects it or did inspect it. It was under safeguards. And so you could count the centrifuges. You could, you know, count the amount of highly enriched uranium. There really was a nuclear energy program.

And if you're not a news junkie, you know, you may sort of struggle to say, like, well, how does that interact with a nuclear weapons program? And the issue is that the hard part about a nuclear weapon is not the explode part. It's making the material that explodes. And so there was always this fundamental ambiguity, which is what if Iran chose to use a nuclear energy program and energy programs are big. And they were able to divert some small portion of that to a modest-sized weapons program. So it was real, technically, but then there is this unknowable question of the human soul, you know, is that what the Iranians intended to do? And, you know, here things get complicated because Iran, like any other country, has politics. Unlike other countries, Iran's politics are really poisonous. I mean, they're internecine. And so we know, we know. We are, I think, very confident Iran had a lot of nuclear weapons program up until 2003. When that program was revealed, it seems to have triggered a huge internal debate in Iran. Like any other country, there are people who want a nuclear weapon and people who don't. And since 2003, for 21 years, the people who didn't want a nuclear weapon

seemed to have one. But that doesn't mean that they didn't always have that technical capability in that option. And so, you know, if you ask, is it a nothing? Burger. Maybe in their hearts it wasn't a nothing burger, but there was the reality of the energy program which created distrust, right? And so we had different ways of managing that. One was to have the IAEA monitor it. One was to negotiate a deal. And, you know, new plan is to just bomb it. But there is stuff to bomb. I will say that. You know, it's not like Saddam in Iraq. I mean, there really are facilities. Let's back way up, then kind of go to the beginning of this thing.

First. Ah, sure. Cyrus the Great. Anyway, so there was the Peloponnesian War. And then the Syria. Yeah, sorry. Well, let's go, like, I'll put a pit in like 1945 then. The, making a nuclear weapon is a solved problem.

Indeed. It does not require, I mean, it requires specialized knowledge, but it is not like this great secret like it was in the 50s. Countries less sophisticated than Iran have gotten pretty close, right? I have gotten even, I mean, have done it. I think North Korea less sophisticated than Iran. Pakistan in the 80s, less sophisticated than Iran. You know, hard to say what we think about China in the 60s, but what we think about China in the 60s, but wasn't exactly an industrial powerhouse.

So, yeah. Like Libya, I think, would be the one that I would point to. Got, had like a pretty decent program before it gave it up, right? Yeah, though the Libyans did suck. So there is some question of whether they would have been able to sort of get there in the end. But yeah, it was a rudimentary program, but they were on the road and probably could have done it. Well, and I think if you're just kind of tuning in, historically speaking, the answer for the Libyans is they were able to port lots of stuff. So there's, you know, global manufacturing is distributed today in a way it

wasn't in 1945. And so, you know, starting with Pakistan, you know, the question is, how does Pakistan make a nuclear weapon when they can't make bicycles? As AQCon, their early nuclear weapon year sort of said. And the answer is, well, they make all that stuff in Europe and you just need to, you know, show up with a suitcase full of money. What are the origins of Iran's nuclear weapons program? We don't really know. Okay. I mean, we know that the Shah had a kind of interest in nuclear weapons, but doesn't seem to have pursued it very seriously. Sort of the typical authoritarian, those seem cool.

We should do that. But not with the kind of diligence would be required to really get it done. The program seems to have shut down after the Islamic. revolution and then at some point in the 90s perks back up. So if I'm guessing, and I really am guessing, I think it's probably part and parcel of the same program that led to Iran's large missile program, which is the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war. And I think it probably did not help matters that after the 1991,

war with Iraq, it was revealed that Iraq had had a nuclear weapons program. Now, we spent the 90s saying they still did when they didn't. Saddam very much wanted the Iranians to think he did. In fact, that's one of the justifications for why we got so badly fooled in 2003 is Saddam was trying to fool the Iranians and succeeded and fooling us. But my guess is the Iranians probably in the 90s thought they were in a region where nuclear weapons were likely to be a thing with their immediate neighbors to say nothing of the nuclear weapons that Israel has. And I'm guessing that that's the period in which they really started this thing in earnest. That is a really good point that I don't think. In the U.S., and Trump certainly helps with this, we tend to have this very like American-centric

view of the world. It's really hard for us to see outside of ourselves. And Iran in American popular culture for so long has been this kind of enemy on the horizon, almost in a way that that Russia was for a long time. I mean, go back and watch back to the future part two, and there's Ayatollah jokes in it. You're right. But it is important to remember that Iran and Iraq fought a very brutal war, a horrifying war, that both countries remember very deeply. And if one side in that war is saying, hey, I'm trying to signal to the rest of the world, I'm building a nuclear weapon, then I would be damn sure, you know, if I'm Iran, that I would be building one too. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, again, I'm just inferring, but we do have a very clear

timeline for the missile program. You know, the Iranians did not have long-range missiles, had something that the Shah had wanted to buy from Israel, but obviously Israel was not going to sell them to the Islamic Republic. The Iraqi started hitting Iran, and Iran was desperate to acquire missiles. So they got some from Libya, but the Libyans were not super willing to, like, turn them over. And that ultimately leads to the Iranians having this deal with North Koreans. And so, you know, to me, you have a whole generation of people who are responsible for the creation of Iran's security apparatus, who basically, made their bones in the Iran-Iraq war. So I think they look at the world in a pretty

violent way. And, you know, I mean, if you want to make this sort of all about us, I mean, in the U.S., we were only too happy to let the Iraqis and the Iranians, neither of whom we particularly liked, you know, murder each other in truly impressive quantities. So what happens in 2003? So that fall, the Iranian opposition, I don't, can I put scare quotes on audio? I think you just did. Yeah, I'll try to do it with intonation. The National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is essentially a front for the MECA, which is a not actually all that effective opposition group,

they laundered some intelligence from the Israelis that suggested Iran had built a large underground enrichment facility, which turns out to be the one at Natanz. And they don't really know what they're talking about. They're just kind of repeating what they heard. But the Institute for Science and International Security, and particularly at the time, a young research, I don't know if she's an assistant or an associate, Corey Hindersstein, finds this place and it becomes kind of a big public deal. And like a lot of things, once it becomes a public issue, more revelations start to come out.

And what we what we see is the Supreme Leader reorganizes Iran's bureaucracy in order to deal with the diplomatic fallout from this. And so we didn't know it at the time. And we thought it may be true. What we could see in real time, those of us who were working, is that the Iranians sort of immediately admitted, like, yes, they had these facilities. No, they were not for weapons. Yes, they were going to put them under the IAEA. They had always planned to do it. They claimed, which may or may not be true. But we saw them shift to diplomatic mode. And what we later learned, owing to some memoirs of people who were involved, but then also a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence estimate, which was publicized, is that this provoked a pretty big argument inside the Iranian leadership. And the Supreme Leader chose to, the estimate said halt the program. I don't like halt.

I like pause or suspend. This is one of like the, by the way, the all-time great DC things. people hear halt and they think that means like a guard saying stop you may not go further right because like you know we deal with cops in real life well that's not what they meant because these were former military people and they're like halt is like a march you can halt and then you can resume and I'm like no no no I deal with like cops and like I don't know like tape decks pause pause is the word you're looking for anyway so we we think they suspended the program 2003. And it's basically been in suspension until the bombing. And I will say, the U.S.

intelligence community testified before Congress as late as May that they believe the program remained, the nuclear weapons program, not the energy program, but the weapons program remained, suspended, paused, halted, pick your word. Can you tell me, can you tell, and I know you've done this at length in a long form podcast, but can you tell us briefly how Corey discovers this facility? Because I think that's, I think that's key to like this whole thing is like, this is not just based, us knowing about these facilities, this is not just based on us talking to people or reading memoirs.

There is other evidence. Right. And it's a kind of great story. It's a great story because it's very much rooted in the technology of the era. Like, I'm pretty sure that my kids are going to, you know, look at the, like, 2002 technology and the way that maybe we look at, like, steampunk. So she goes to this briefing by NCRI, and they're talking about how Iran has this giant nuclear program. And again, it's not really all that clear what the hell they're talking about. So the,

Guy giving the briefing mentions this nuclear facility near this place called Natanz that's filled with ladders. He says ladders. And she was like, what are ladders? Like changing light bulbs? Like ladders? And then it eventually dawns on her. And I'll be honest, I don't remember if it dawns on her before she gets the satellite image or after. But it dawns on her that what ladders means is steps. It means kids. It means kids. cascades. It's a technical term for a set of centrifuges. And so she's like, oh, oh, this is a centrifuge facility. Okay, I got it. They, along with her boss, David Albright, they buy a satellite image. And this is kind of wild because in the 2000s, like there aren't that many commercial satellites that taken pictures. And so they have to, she has to like go to the Library of Congress, like get a map, figure out where Natanz is. There are actually a couple of Natanzes. But when she goes and looks in the catalog for the commercial satellite company, someone has been buying pictures of one Natanz. This is totally the U.S. government, right,

which is, or maybe the Israelis, but probably the U.S. government, which just wants extra pictures of this thing. So she's like, oh, that's probably it. She gets the picture. And, you know, lo and behold, the Iranians are, in fact, digging these two huge, very shallow, underground facilities. And so, you know, I think the Iranians eventually admit to it. Now, they say, again, it's just for an energy program. But, you know, this is, I think, so central to the way this story has played out where we have what the Iranians say, we have what the U.S. intelligence community or the Israelis say. We have what the dissident groups say. And, you know, for those of us on the outside, our job is to collect all that data and then bring extra data to bear to see who's

telling the truth. So sometimes, you know, people will say, well, this is a nuclear facility and you'll go look at it. And like, the answer is it's not. Right. So that same group later said that Iran had a secret underground plant at another location. And we found out it was a facility that basically made passports. And we actually found a German who had helped install the machines there that serialized the passports, made sure the numbers were securely placed in sequence. And he had actually been inside. And so we interviewed him.

And he was like, yeah, no, it's like, that is not a nuclear facility. That's a passport facility. So sometimes it turns out it's not true. But then other times it turns out it is true. So there was another facility where we think the Iranians did. did plan to enrich uranium for a weapon. And when it got revealed, the Iranians bulldozed it. And they didn't want any evidence.

And then they turned it over to the municipality of Tehran. And they put down blacktop and basketball courts. And I think now it's a park. Right. And they just wanted to seal any evidence. So, yeah, we do a lot of trying to figure out, like, what's true and what's not. And it's a, everyone has an incentive to, uh, occlude every single. Oh my gosh. Yes. I mean, people are just, it's complicated. Some people are just liars. Some people aren't experts. So they just

repeat what they heard. You know, they're not lying to you, but like, they don't know. Um, and so they're actually maybe trying to tell you the truth, but they, they, they, you know, are, are limited by the quality of their sources. Um, some people, because it can be so technical, just garble the details. You know, and I teach classes on doing open source research, and oftentimes students are, like, very dismissive of people. And so I give them exercises. I'm like, okay, well, you go to school here.

Why don't you draw a map of campus, right? Let's pretend you're a defector. No, I want you to put a map with every building. You know, and they can't do it because it's hard, right? Like, you've gotten directions before. Good Lord. Any more, too. I rely on so many pieces of technology. I don't know if I could draw a map at all. Yeah. So sometimes it's, sometimes a liar is more reliable than someone trying to tell you the truth because, you know, the liar has got like a really nice coherent story that I can fact check. You know, and like like a truthful person who's just like a little confused, it's a freaking mess, you know.

Well, and also a lie may point you to what you should be looking at. totally. I make this point all the time. Like, why do we read propaganda? And the answer is, if you find out someone is lying to you about something, that alone tells you how important this is. Which, by the way, we know with like little kids. You know, if a little kid walks up to you and it's like, you know, I didn't break the glass. Nobody broke the glass. You didn't say anybody broke the glass. You're like, wait, what, the glass is broken? Like, like, you, you can tell. So, yeah, it's a, it's a difficult thing. But it's kind of fun. I mean, it's like most of my day is solving puzzles. Can we talk about, all right, what is Iran's uranium stores look like? Is it a very rich country in this respect? Not a lot of plutonium, right? Well, so plutonium doesn't occur in nature.

You got to make it. Right. So you got to start with uranium. Uranium's in the ground. again, energy programs are bigger than weapons programs. And I think people always say the opposite. There's a famous example where Henry Kissinger and I think George Schultz wrote something. And they're like, we should limit Iran's nuclear program to the size appropriate for an energy program, not a weapons program.

And it was like, oh, guys, no, no, it's the other way around. Right. like so Iran has small uranium deposits that are enough to sustain a weapons program. They are not enough to sustain a large nuclear energy program if Iran started building lots of nuclear reactors. So they do have uranium. It's enough for a weapons program. Uranium is normally not safeguarded.

You know, like it's a commodity like Kazakhstan's got a bunch, Canada's got a bunch, Australia's got a bunch. The Iran nuclear deal did actually impose monitoring on Iran's uranium mines, but obviously that deal's gone and Iran is no longer cooperating with the IAEA. So they have access to uranium if they want to enrich it. If it is trying to build an energy program, and it sounds like it is, where else is it getting the uranium from? Well, so they haven't built that program yet is part of the issue.

They really just have the one operating reactor that the Russian supply fuel for. If they were to build many of their own reactors, they would have to import it from the market like everyone else. So, you know, they would go to the same market that the U.S. goes to and, you know, you'd try to buy it from Canada or Kazakhstan or Australia. Most of which, by the way, most countries are not going to sell uranium to a country that is in violation of its safeguard. agreement. Even, even Kazakhstan? I mean, they're not supposed to. I have been in this business long enough to understand that not supposed to does not necessarily mean won't. On the other hand, Kazakhstan is a big exporter of uranium and money talks. And so they might not be willing to damage their larger commercial enterprises, you know, on behalf of a,

irritating neighbor. Australia went through this with India, where India was outside of the NPT, and Australia had to engage in some incredibly creative lawyering to be able to sell uranium to India. So another misconception I think people have is about the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and how regulated and inspected internationally nuclear energy is. So can you talk about the IAEA and its role kind of in

how it regulates nuclear energy and how it, like, what it was doing in Iran up until, you know, a couple months ago? Yeah, I mean, let me start by saying, I love the IAEA. I mean, as an international institution, the IAEA is amazing. People get very frustrated with it

because they often don't understand what it does or how it goes about its work. And so, you know, there's a movie where Ethan Hawk plays an Interpol agent and he shows up with, like, a helicopter and a gun. And it's, you know, it's like, that's not how Interpol works, you know, you know. And like, and if Interpol worked like that, no one would let them in, you know. So, like, Interpol is good. It is not our cinematic idea of Interpol. The IAEA is amazing. It is not our cinematic idea of the IAEA.

The IAEA has two missions. People often say these things are in tension, and I'm not sure I agree with that. But the IAEA is there to make, is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, to make sure that every country in the world gets the benefits that come from having nuclear energy. The other part of that deal is if you get the benefit, you're not supposed to misuse it. So the IAEA is also there to help build confidence that you are enjoying the benefits in a responsible way.

These things are in some tension like any interesting thing in life. Again, I don't think this is like a fundamental problem. I just think this is like tradeoffs in life. You want the IAEA there inspecting your business. On the other hand, you don't want the IAEA in the way. and when you have a very large facility that handles huge amounts of nuclear material, it's not practical or even wise to ask the IAEA to count every atom. So what the IAEA has done is, I think, develop a really good system of safeguards,

and these safeguards have gotten progressively stronger over time without, I think, becoming more onerous, which is quite an achievement. And what they really focus on is trying to make sure that material at declared facilities is not diverted. And in the old days, that meant if you built a secret facility and you didn't tell the IAEA about it, there's probably very little they can do, but that's okay because you can't solve every problem. In recent years, the IAEA has gotten much better about the problem of secret facilities because they look at a wider range of activities. because they are able to do things like look at satellite imagery and because they have adopted a kind of what they call the state level concept,

which is they kind of vibe check the whole country. You know, so if you have like pretty easy access and you can talk to anybody and you can go anywhere and, you know, it's not such a big deal, you kind of know, the country's not really hiding anything, right? But if you face lots of arbitrary restrictions, then the IAEA doesn't say, oh, you must be secretly building a bomb. But they say, like, look, you're the kind of country that we can't really give a clean bill of health to. Right.

I think that they're, you know, that's pretty impressive. What Iran and the IA have kind of lived through is the IAEA, I think, has been very good. The IAEA has been very good about holding Iran's feet to the fire about its safeguards violations. And the Iranians don't like that to the point where they treat the IAEA like it's some kind of, you know, malign Western puppet. And they, you know, some Iranian officials have even talked, have kind of implied that they might kill the IAEA Director General. And the funny thing that is, usually the IAEA Director General is no more popular in Washington. because they tend to be extremely lawyerly and legalistic and focused on like, this is what this country agreed to do, and they are either doing it or they are not doing it. And like, you may not trust them.

The IAEA doesn't really do trust, right? They do like factual auditing, accounting, and inspection. They're all verification. Yes. So the Iran nuclear deal basically gave the IAEA extraordinary access in Iran. much more access in Iran than it has in, I think, any other country or had in any other country. And that's why people like me supported it. On the other hand, you know, a lot of people who don't like international organizations don't trust international organizations.

It's weird. They're filled with foreigners. And I think those people are less impressed. But I'm a big fan. I've got an IAEA hoodie, for God's sakes. A couple things I want to underline. If something goes wrong with a nuclear facility, it is not just the country who screwed up's problem often.

Chernobyl being the classic example, the worst case possibly example. And these are things that are, these facilities are very difficult to hide. They put things off. There are ways to tell, not just the satellite imagery, but like they, you know, if you put a finger to the wind with the right kind of equipment, you can see things emanating, right? Yeah, I think it does depend on the type of facility. Some are harder to find than others. And you do need to, like anything, if you don't know to look, you might not find.

So, you know, it's a difficult thing to characterize. If you know, if you have reason to suspect a facility is nuclear, it's probably not too hard to get a good answer. Because if a country has a safeguards agreement, the IAEA can say, we'd like to go see this place. And if they say, no, you can't, well, that's pretty helpful. And if they say, yes, you can and you can take environmental samples, the North Koreans and the Iranians both found that IAEA environmental sampling is incredibly capable. Actually, the North Koreans found it also for the U.S. where at one point the North Koreans said they didn't have an enrichment program and they turned over some documents. The documents, the U.S. found enriched uranium particles on them. So, you know, that kind of speaks to what I'm saying, though.

It's like this stuff leaves behind physical traces that are very difficult to completely suppress. That's right. But you have to have some level of access and you have to have some idea where to look. And so, you know, that's why I say it's hard to characterize because it's not so easy that if you don't have any access and you're completely cut off, you know, something will just look like a building and you don't really know what's going on there. But if you get the right kind of access, then I think those safeguards can be incredibly powerful. Okay. So getting back into the history of it, we kind of left off at 2003. So then we have this period between 2003 and the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal.

Right. Where the goal of, I would say, Israeli intelligence is to make sure that Iran doesn't enrily rich its uranium up into an area where it could be used on a weapon, right? And it takes some pretty extraordinary measures to make sure that that doesn't happen. Yes. I mean, there is so much that happens in this period. Yeah, it's complicated. But I think at a simple, yes, at a simple level.

And, you know, enrichment, you know, it's a terrible word. Is it? Tell me why. Well, if I enrich something, it sounds like I'm adding something, right? Yeah. Would you say refinement is a better word? Separation. Separation. What you're trying to do is separate the atoms of uranium that aren't fissle that won't make a, you know, reactor fuel or a bomb.

You're trying to get rid of them. So, you know, it sounds like if you go from zero to five percent, which is, you know, of U-235, the fissol isotope of uranium. If you go from 0 to 5%, that sounds like a lot less than going from 5 to 60%, right? But that's not true. Because if you think about it, you start with a thousand atoms. Seven of those are going to be the fissile type. So that's less than 1%.

That's natural uranium in the ground. If you want to get to 5%, right, you're going to need, you know, seven out of, of what, like 140 is 5%. So what that means is you've got 860 atoms you have to move and get rid of. Going from 5 to 60% means you only have to like drop down to about 15 atoms. So it's now you're getting rid of like slightly more than 100. It's harder to get rid of the 800 than it is the 100. I don't know if that makes any sense at all.

It does. I'm following. So once you've started the, once you've started the process, it's a lot easier to get it concentrated. That's right. So, so what, what, what is happening in this period? Like, why do I go on this horrific digression? The problem is the Iranians are building lots of centrifuges, which they say are to enrich to less than 5% to make fuel for reactors. And I, you know, the people who are alarmed by this are sort of not wrong. in the sense that once you have this huge infrastructure that can take a bunch of material from zero to five percent, it can take that much smaller amount of material and go to 90 percent without too much additional work.

And so that becomes the tug of war in this period, right? Where the Iranians are like, the Iranians are like, we have a right to make fuel for nuclear reactors. And the United States and other countries are like a fraction of, of that capability would make for a really great weapons program. Right. And so those two views are kind of unresolvable because the technical, there's no clean technical division. They either have it or they don't. And there's no fundamentally answer the question of do you trust them? And so we spend that, basically that whole period, the U.S.

position is zero enrichment. And the Iranians just keep building centrifuges. And ultimately, that gets resolved with the JCPOA, where what we decide is the solution is some limits on the number of centrifuges, some limits on the amount of material they have, but most importantly, it's lots and lots and lots of monitoring. That's how that shakes out. And, you know, not everybody likes that. But I honestly, I think that's the only sensible outcome because really a, again, an energy program a modestized energy program is always going to be a big weapons program. Right. And you're going to have to, unless, and it seems to be the case that this is what we've decided,

unless you're going to say that Iran can't have nuclear energy at all, then there has to be some sort of deal with monitoring, which is what we had. Right. And we have no legal basis to say that, you know, like we can say like, we don't like them and like, okay, fair enough, I don't like them. But that argument is not going to cut it worldwide because there are a lot of countries that like, well, you don't really like us that much. You don't really trust us. Like, you don't, we don't get to just announce what rights countries have. Now, we have a pretty good argument like, hey, look, your rights were conditioned on certain

responsibilities and you violated your safeguards agreement. It's maybe a little complicated, whether they really violated it or not. But it wasn't really. great what they did. And so, yeah, you know, you're not going to get global buy-in for, you have to do what we say. And so, yeah, I think in the end, you know, it's much better off to figure out, like, who in Iran doesn't want a nuclear weapon and how do we empower those people with the right mix of monitoring to deter cheating and benefits to induce compliance? so that, you know, Iran stays where it is, which is, you know, not quite at a bomb. Tell me about this internecine Iranian political fight.

Because I think this is an interesting part of the problem, too, is that there are people in the country who are in leadership that don't want this, that don't want a weapon, right? Yeah. I mean, we don't, we don't really know. I mean, what we do know is that there are people in Iran who thrive from Iran's isolation. You know, like, I'm guessing that there are a bunch of companies in Iran that probably wouldn't survive in a global marketplace. And I'm guessing that some non-trivial number of these companies are owned by people we would think of as hardliners. you know and like the last thing they want is sanctions to come off i mean maybe they want to take their kids to paris or something with their ill-gotten wealth but like they definitely don't want to

compete globally and moreover like there are a lot of hardliners who i think like this sense of crisis and that's also true in other countries like it's i think there are a lot of people who are powerful because they get to exploit the sense of crisis and danger and threat and isolation. And then at the same time, there are people who would like sanctions off. You know, when the Iran nuclear deal was signed and people thought there was going to be sanctions relief, there were jubilant crowds in the streets of Tehran, right? So there are people who don't like living under sanctions who don't care about nuclear weapons, right? Who genuinely feel like this nuclear stuff just causes hardship for them. And so, you know, it's not, I think, so simple as to

just divided into like hawks and reformists, but there are people who are willing to run different levels of risk. And so the nuclear scientists were particularly interested in this because, or particularly interesting, because on the one hand, they want the ability to do research, they want money, they want funding, they want the prestige of working, they don't want to be subject to restraints that other people aren't subject to. But at the same time, like, they would like if the Israelis stopped killing them. they would like to be able to go to international conferences.

You know, many of them studied abroad and would like to be able to do that again or have their children do that again. And so we don't really know, but we think, we think that the nuclear industry, for the most part, was interested in dealmaking.

And that's what makes this so interesting. Because you have hawks saying, like, we want a bomb. the people who are opposed to them are opposed to a bomb, but they are not opposed to a nuclear energy program. In fact, they are for a nuclear energy program. And if you hold on to zero, you take these enemies and you make them allies. And my worry, just to jump, you know, I don't want to jump to a head, but the reason I like to the deal is I like those two people being enemies. I like the nuclear energy bureaucracy thinking that it's better off without a bomb instead of.

the other way around. You mentioned something that I also want to highlight again here, too, is that Israel has assassinated nuclear scientists in Iran and also Stuxnet. Like, there was a virus attack on Iranian centrifuges. Like, there's so their nuclear approach and drone attacks. and drone attacks. So Iran has been on the front lines of a lot of assaults on this nuclear weapons program. And it would incentivize it.

And as you said, like, Iranian nuclear scientists would prefer not to be targets of assassination, would prefer to be able to work and not be, you know, not have to worry about viruses running through their centrifuges. And so along comes a, uh, a deal. deal. How does this, how does the JCPOA happen? What year is it and like, how does it get talked out? Yeah. So I guess what? It gets signed in 2015. It feels like forever ago. It was forever ago. I'm old. This is true. You know, so what happens is, it's very funny, by the way, is a story of like policy advocacy. So pretty much from the beginning, I and a lot of people are like, look, you are not going to get a deal in which the Iranians give everything up, go to

zero and say that they're very, very sorry. Like, I mean, that's a great fantasy. I, you know, you can write that movie, but in the real world, they have power and agency and it may be not as much power as we have and maybe not as much agency as we have, but almost no negotiation ends in total victory. And so for years, we criticized our colleagues in the Obama administration for pursuing zero as the only acceptable number. And they criticized us back for being naive, unrealistic, giving away the store. And what we didn't know is they were secretly doing just that,

that they had in fact concluded that. They weren't willing to pay the political cost of saying it out loud, but they actually knew that that was the answer. So that's always one of those kind of fun things to keep in mind is sometimes you tell an official the right course of action, and they savage you publicly, but you know, but what you later learned that they're privately like, well, that was a pretty good point. You know, you don't get a Christmas guard or a thank you note, but, you know, whatever. It emerges in the course of a back channel negotiation that happens in Oman, where the U.S. begins talking to the Iranians and begins sketching out a deal. And, you know, the U.S. this entire time has been talking about how it has

to do it in, you know, collaboration with its allies. And let me tell you, the French are pissed when they realize that the U.S. has gone behind their back and basically worked out the outlines of this deal. And it happens in phases. So there's something called the joint plan of action, which is eventually they get the European allies on board. And then they have to work out the joint comprehensive plan of action, which is where you get the JCPOA, which I think is, not great branding. It's why it ends up as the Iran deal. And I kind of don't like deal because deal feels like you're buying a Persian rug or something.

Well, it's also got negative associations just right now, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, it was a plan and it was signed in Vienna. So weiner plan works. But I don't know. The Obama people didn't like that one. So I don't know.

But that, you know, that deal, which requires pretty high. level intervention. You know, there's a point at which Ernie Moniz, who at the time is the U.S. Secretary of Energy and a former professor at MIT is talking to Ali Salehi, who is the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and is a former grad student at MIT. You know, and that's pretty senior representation, just doing the technical stuff. And like they're, they're like, you know, in a weird way, they're like acting as technical staffers for the Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign minister of Iran. I mean, they are really getting into the nitty-gritty of like coming up with innovative technical solutions to what are essentially political problems where both sides need to be able to say they won. So it takes a while.

It's orchrous. And, you know, the resulting plan is like 100 pages long, which is very long for an international agreement. But it carves out a path for Iran to have an energy program and for the international community to monitor it, which seems like that should have been kind of the status. Like that should have been not the end of it, but at least everyone kind of gets something. Well, I think it was the end of it, except there are always politics. And the way that I would describe the end of this deal is, you know, like, I have. hate Congress. Like, I just, what a bunch of cowards. You're not alone. I just, just, just cowards. I mean, this is why I'm never going to be a senior U.S. official, because I can't, like, pretend that

senators have gravitas. Like, they're clowns, right? So the, and in particular, the Democratic leadership in Congress wanted the deal to go through, and they knew it was a good deal, but they didn't want to vote for it. So, uh, so Ben, Ben Cardin and And Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez, Democrats, along with Bob Corker, Republican from Tennessee, who knew this was a good deal and wanted it to pass, set up this asinine approval mechanism, which was unnecessary, right, where they wanted to be able to vote on the deal, but they wanted to be able to vote on it in a way where they could all vote against it, but it would still pass.

Right. So they set it up so they had to do like a resolution of disapproval. Like it's the classic like, we'll allow this to happen legally, but Barry has to pick up the bill politically. He has to be the one who catches all the arrows. And, you know, what really made me mad is one thing they did was as a humiliation, they made the president, I think it was every six months, certify that Iran was complying with the deal in writing, which meant every six months, the president had to, you know, basically write, I love Iran. which was fine. Obama was willing to do that because he was the bigger person. Donald Trump was not willing to do that.

And so you had this situation where Donald Trump becomes president, and he hates certifying this deal every six months. And his staff is telling him, like, look, I know we said this was a bad deal on the campaign trail, but it's a great deal. This is actually the context in which Rex Tillerson, can I swear? Yeah, of course.

Rex Tillerson calls Trump a fucking moron to his face. And that is the context in which this is happening where Trump does not want to keep certifying the deal because politically it's so embarrassing. And then, by the way, in that moment when Trump, there was no withdrawal procedure. We couldn't legally withdraw, but he just suspended. He stopped complying with it. Then all the people who voted against the deal, like Cardin and Schumer, are talking about how what a mistake it is to abandon the deal they voted against. You know, and so it just, the deal, I think, basically collapses because Iran is unpopular in the United States and no one other than Barack Obama, I think, who, you know, I generally don't think of as, like, a huge profile and courage. But on this issue, he was relatively courageous. He was willing to pay the political cost of sustaining support for the deal. Everybody else wanted it on the cheap. So, Trump suspense. How does Iran react? Pretty chill. You know, they don't really do anything for about a year. And then, um,

in 2019, I think, they announced they're going to begin gradually reducing their compliance. And like, people in the U.S. freak out. But, like, this is, to me, bizarre. I think, like, the fundamental principle of my life is if we have a deal and you back out, I'm not going to hold up. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not holding up my bargain.

Like, fuck you. Like, no. So the Iranians, now, the Iranians miscalculate, I think, because they don't understand. that this is going to trigger a cycle of hostility, right? So the Iranians gradually reduce their compliance, and that means that they stop abiding by the deal. They begin enriching the higher and higher levels. They start stonewalling the IAEA, you know, like they have this idea that they're just

going to keep, they're going to, you know, keep getting inching closer and closer and closer to what will look like a weapon in the expectation that the U.S. will come to its senses and give them the deal again. And like, I get it, but like they're just, they're wrong about it. Instead, it feeds this whole other dynamic where it becomes very easy for Iran's opponents, who, by the way, I think don't really care about nuclear weapons. I think they just don't like the Islamic Republic, which like, you know. I think 100%. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like, I don't particularly like the Islamic Republic. I don't want to move there. But it's not my job to tell people who should rule them. I just worry about it. I don't want to build a nuclear weapon. But they don't realize that they're generating, I think, this backlash. And they're making it increasingly possible.

And, you know, like, one of the things that happens, at the very end is the IAEA says, look, they're not cooperating. They're not answering our questions. They answers they're giving are not persuasive. They are not providing us the access that they're supposed to provide us. We can't do our job. And the IAEA is not trying to justify an attack on Iran. They are faithfully reporting their access level. But that's so useful. for the people who want to do the attack. Right? Oh, even the IAEA says they might be building a bomb.

That's not what the IAEA said, but that's how it gets, you know, reported. So you get this cycle where the Iranians comply less and they try to create leverage by doing irritating things. And, you know, it's like scratching a wound or something. It just just makes it worse. So it seems now that we're in this position where everyone, not everyone, some people are talking about trying to come back and do another deal. Yeah. However, we just bombed them.

America just bombed them. Not exactly the, not exactly a way to bring people back to the negotiating table, I don't think. You killed the last deal that we were a part of that was torturous and took forever to set up. And involved, by the way, like a personal relationship that, thank God existed. And instead, so what you're just going to use bunker busters every six months to a year? Yeah, it's called mowing the grass. That's what it's saying. They're going to mow the grass.

They're just going to keep mowing the grass. They've actually said that like outlaw, like, I mean, it wouldn't shock me. I just haven't seen it. Yeah, I know. I know people who've said it to my face. Gotcha. Fair. You know, there's a certain honesty to that.

And I always feel bad because I have friends and colleagues with whom I disagree with, but have civil relations with. And I find that, you know, they say things that are very direct and maybe not what they say in public. And I don't want to, you know. But yeah. A couple of things about that. I mean, one is when you make a deal, which, by the way, was challenging in Iran. You know, it wasn't like, like, yeah, people in Iran were really happy. but the hawks were not happy with the deal.

They didn't like the deal any more than our hawks like the deal. When you then pull out of the deal and then there is this bombing campaign, you make all the people who supported the deal look like suckers. You know? And I think there are a lot of Iranian officials right now who are talking about killing Rafael Grossi and never cooperating with the IAEA, who are doing the Lindsey Graham fake tough guy.

dance, you know, and like, because you got to look tough. You got to be tougher than everybody else. And so, you know, like, I do think that the decision to withdraw from the deal and the decision to strike them, even if you are an Iranian dove and you're going to the meeting where we're going to have like the big throwdown, you're not going to be like, oh, well, we deserve to get bombed. Like that doesn't be a lousy freaking argument, you know. And you're going to be meeting with people who, by the way, are replacing people who are not at the meeting because they are dead. Right? And you're not going to be like, oh, well, your boss is dead because he's an idiot. Like, it's a delicate thing. So we don't really know why the Supreme Leader picked one side over the other.

I mean, one argument is he wanted sanctions off. One argument is he's just incredibly cautious and didn't want to get bombed, which, you know, might feel differently now. One argument is that he finds nuclear weapons morally distasteful. I don't really want to bet on that one, but, like, God, I hope that one's true, right? He did issue a fatwa, which implied that the use of these weapons was prohibited. He's also how old? That's the other thing is he, like every politician in the world has to be thinking about what comes later. and who comes later? And does whoever come later watch out for his family and the things he cares about?

So, like, yeah, I don't know how all this goes. But I do think that when you leave an agreement and you humiliate the people who made the agreement, you need some, like, new special argument for, like, why people, like, for like the new generation of suckers. you know. And I do think, by the way, I don't, these things are so easy if you, like, don't have politics and you can play it any way you want. Like, if I'm in the Iranians, I would be like, oh, yeah, I quit. And, you know, the IAEA can come and look at all the burned out rubble of all the facilities. And you can continue to inspect the burned out rubble of the facilities. And, you know, people like, well, what's going on in that mountain over there? And like, well, it's not really any of your business, but it's a sensitive defense activity involving missiles. We promise missiles. meanwhile, you can continue to inspect the rubble, and I would sign whatever deal Trump put in front of me. And meanwhile, work in the mountain. Yeah. And get and roll it out when it's ready.

Yeah. Which is, you know, like what the North Koreans did. You know, the North Koreans, like, oh, we don't want nuclear weapons. We would never build nuclear weapons. You know, meanwhile, this is sort of like furiously screwing them together. But that said, that's humiliating, right? And so the regime might not do that for internal political reasons. Right now, they seem to be seriously bent on not allowing the IAEA back in.

Yeah, but who knows? I mean, I think all of these outcomes are possible. It's possible that they continue to muddle through not building a bomb. It seems like the least likely, but it's the one I hope for. It's possible they start a secret bomb program. it's possible they become, you know, more overtly hostile. I think it just, my guess is when those dudes show up in the room to have that meeting, maybe most of them don't know how it's going to go down.

That's the kind of ambiguous, slightly downturned note that I like to end the show on. I mean, that's life. That is life. Yeah, it's a series of down endings. Life is a French movie, not an American one. What's your favorite French movie? movie? I think it counts as French, although the director is Polish. Kislovsky's trilogy, the Blue Blanc Rouge, I love. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, blue is... Yeah, I mean,

can't go wrong. I mean, is it the best one? I don't know. It's the one that made me love cinema, so. Well, people should check that out. And what else, do you have anything else to plug today, Mr. Lewis? I would love to plug as a historical. Matter, the documentary podcast that we made some years ago called The Deal, which was the story of the Iran nuclear deal. You know, we at the time thought the deal was still alive and we were trying to keep it that way. And we were real frustrated that when people defended the deal, their theory was they would

like read the lawyerly text. Like, oh, what a do you know, how about passage 74? You know, and it's like that seemed to me to be a particularly ineffective way of explaining the deal. So instead we did a series that was stories of the people who negotiated it, and we let them say what it was like and why they did it and what they valued about it. And so the deal's gone, but as a piece of oral history and a piece of art, I think it's pretty fantastic. I'm responsible to oral history, not the piece of art. I would agree.

I think it's a, if you use this podcast as a starting point, it's like a source. survey of what happened, then the deal will walk you through in detail a lot more of it with a lot more history and a lot more interviews with the people that are actually there. It's an excellent podcast. Yeah, it's like six hours with people who know what they're talking about as opposed to this hour with me. I think you know what you're talking about. Maybe.

Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. My pleasure. That is all for this episode. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. Angry PlanetPod.com, $9 a month. Get access to all of the mainline episodes, commercial free and early, get some bonus episodes, and get all the written content.

We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Stay safe until then.