Angry Planet - Neutralizing Iran’s Nuclear Material During a War Is ‘Nearly Mission Impossible’

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

America went to war in Iran, we’re told, because the idea of the country developing nuclear weapons was intolerable. Nukes are complicated and technical weapons that require scientists and experts to build, maintain, and manage. Highly enriched uranium (HEU) is core to the design and unless all of Iran’s HEU is accounted for the threat of it becoming a nuclear power will linger.So what would it take to get rid of Iran’s stockpile HEU?François Diaz-Maurin is on Angry Planet today to answer that question. Diaz-Maurin is editor for nuclear affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists where he recently published an article outlining what it would take for US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium.How a civil engineer becomes a nuclear journalist“You can’t bomb away nuclear material.”“Technically, it’s nearly Mission Impossible.”How much highly enriched uranium (HEU) was left after last year’s strikes?Moving HEU around IranWhat we can learn from satellite photos and the International Atomic Energy AgencyWhy 60%?Managing scuba tanks full of gaseous toxins in a war zoneWhy blowing up the cylinders won’t work“Let me throw something weird at you.”Downblending versus exportingWe’re living in the third nuclear ageDeterrence works and that’s, maybe, not great?Trump may send US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium. There are no good optionsNetanyahu says Iran no longer has uranium enrichment capacityIran willing to dilute uranium stockpile as fresh protests eruptSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here today. We are going to talk to Francois D.I.Moran about Iran, about what it might look like to actually handle Iran's nuclear program. It's a pretty fascinating conversation. Let's jump in. You didn't know. You didn't know. that, right? It's my first podcast ever, and I reserved my first one for you.

Well, thank you very much. That's very big news. I mean, I read the thing and I was just like, I got to get, I got to get you on to talk to you about this because it's so fascinating. Can you introduce yourself? Yeah, sure, Matt. So I am currently the editor for Nuclear Affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And so in that capacity, I think, accuse, you know, I help experts explaining nuclear risks, everything that relates to, from nuclear energy to nuclear waste and obviously nuclear weapons. So everything nuclear at the bulletin. And so I really work at the intersection between, you know, nuclear technology, global security. And apparently now also the physical realities of disarming a nation by force.

Yeah, that was what I think really struck me. when I read this is that I had not seen anyone really lay out, okay, so ostensibly the goal of this war is to make sure that Iran no longer has a nuclear capability. What do you actually have to do physically to make sure that that happens? So before we kind of get into this, I just like, because you have told me this story before, I thought it was pretty fast. fascinating when we met last year. Will you kind of give me your background and how you came to be at the bulletin? Sure.

First of all, I'm not sure it's really interesting or exciting. It's just probably unusual, right? So I am an engineer by background civil engineer, and then I already upfront transitions because I was actually hired to work in the nuclear industry, first in France and then in the US, in Boston first. And I worked on designing nuclear reactors and also a waste retreatment plant at Hanford

that is still being built over there. And then I moved to a more research capacity. I actually dropped my work, my job as an engineer in the US. and moved to Barcelona, where I am now, and I started a PhD, and that was actually just a couple of months before Fukushima happened. And my plan was already to work on, you know, the role of nuclear energy in energy transitions issues, etc.

And so, of course, with Fukushima happening, it was really kind of timely and interesting to work on that, the problem of legacy after accidents and just a waste. itself. And I moved again to the US, this time on the West Coast in Stanford University, and I worked with late Radiwing. He was a really top-notch world expert on nuclear waste, and I work with him on understanding better the nuclear materials and how we can safely, permanently dispose them in underground facilities in the future. And here we are again in Iran, underground facilities, right?

And so, yeah, and right now I'm back in Barcelona, and I'm actually working across those various experiences, working with experts, and right now, of course, very busy with Iran situation. Right. It's funny because in America, like, the obsession is over oil in the Strait of Hormuz at the moment. And kind of push to the wayside is this question of,

what do you do with the nuclear materials? What's what's actually left? Like, what's the plan here? My guess is going to be that there is no plan. I don't know how you're feeling about it, but is that your assessment at the moment as well? Yeah, it's quite critical, of course. Maybe there is a shift towards the Strait of Hormuz

because, you know, the reality of the nuclear inventory and stockpile is already, a physical wall that actually, you know, the U.S. administration is just facing. So they shifted probably because maybe the strait of our moves is, you know, oil-related, so easier to get others involved. And we can talk about that later. But, yeah, the central thesis, you know, of this idea of neutralizing Iran's highly enriched uranium is basically that it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it's a,

physical reality, a war basically, on the path of that operation, epic fury. And the US military, you know, can bomb tunnel entrances. It can bomb and decapacitate, decapitate, you know, scientists and eliminate scientists, etc. But it can't really bomb the material away. and we are going back to the material issue because it was always there. The thing is that when you bomb a facility, you can later on claim with satellite imagery

that you did the job and you actually obliterated it, which is what President Trump said back in June. And that doesn't mean that you eliminate a nuclear program if there is one, active one, right? And we also can talk about the difference between having options and actually having an intention to develop a nuclear weapon. Those are different things. So in a nutshell, you know, neutralizing Iran's stockpile would require much more than B2 bombers. It would require really a high-stakes ground operation, which is not the intention.

That really would open the Pandera box with recent history of U.S. interventions in the region. And I'm not sure the U.S. military is really keen into transitioning from air superiority, and you can brag about being really flying freely over Tehran every day. and a tactical nightmare that such a ground operation would be for the administration and even the military itself, right? Technically is kind of, it's nearly a mission impossible. So that's a reality that the Trump administration has a problem to recon with. And how do you claim victory with that stockpile is, so we can, yeah, we can talk about that. Let's dig into what we know about what remains of the Iranian nuclear program.

When I say nuclear program, I am not just talking about, like, we say that I think a lot of people think of nuclear weapons, but it is bigger and broader than that. It is, you know, nuclear power as well was very important to Iran. So obviously Trump said last year with the bombs that it was, that it was over. Do we have any idea how much was actually destroyed and what's left? Yeah. So, you know, the June 235 strikes were the first strikes that the U.S. were involved in directly against Iran's nuclear facilities and also against, you know, scientists. Well, the Israelis did the scientists part, I think because they have better intelligence and also the Israelis. would have done everything themselves

if they had the military capability to actually destroy underground facilities. So they could not. This is why they asked the Trump administration to get involved, and they did, surely, against Natanz and Fordo mainly. So those are, you know, underground enrichment were underground enrichment facilities.

and the US used, you know, 14 of their most powerful bunker-busters bombs, you know, the famous G.B.U. 57. And those were able to really penetrate into theirs and make damage to those underground facilities. They are underground, but relatively shallow, I would say. And so it is really that most of the, you know, centrifuges were, destroyed either directly by the explosion or really so shaken that they can't be either accessed to or reused. But, you know, centrifugees to enrich uranium are not the most difficult equipment to actually build. And Iran reportedly was actually actively rebuilding and reproducing some that the Israelis alleged reportedly, you know, struck new such facilities.

What's most difficult and what is the key here is the material itself, you know, the uranium stockpile and it comes in various forms and various levels of enrichment. So the last comprehensive report from the IAA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, was in May 2025 just before the strikes and they were reporting that Iran would probably have at least around

441 kilograms of uranium enriched at 60% uranium U235 which is a fissile uranium isotopes that you need to actually build a bomb.

And of this material, right now, after the June strikes, we believe that at least part of it was under the rubble at Natanz and Fordow. And maybe some other parts

had either previously or after the strikes been moved elsewhere. And even before the June 22 strikes by the US, you know, one Iranian official said on the same day or a couple of days before that the uranium, highly enriched uranium had been safely stored away to secure locations. So we don't know, we don't know if that's true. And I think the last estimate I've seen from Rafael Grossi, so the director general of the IAA, he said that they believe there is about 200 kilograms at his farm, because his farm is a big, huge nuclear research complex, but it has also a portion that is underground.

So you have an underground complex there of tunnels. and those are really much deeper underneath granites, so they can't be reached by those highly penetrating conventional bombs. And Grossie said that there could be about 200 kilograms there stored. So I assume intact. So as far as we know, about half of the highly enriched uranium remains and is now in a place so deep underground that they don't make bunker busts, strong enough to get under there.

Yeah, it's essentially a fortress, really. You know, it's buried under tens of meters of, as I said, of granite and reinforced concrete. So unlike at Fordow, which is deep but narrow, his phone is a massive complex. It's a network of tunnels, as far as I know. And, you know, the satellite imagery, so the most recent ones from February were showing activity around the tunnel entrances of that complex.

And apparently Iranians had preemptively backfilled and buried with soil and dirt, all the tunnel entrances at the his found the ground complex. And so, you know, that can create a cushion to. absorb, you know, the shock waves of conventional bombs. And it could also, you know, prepare for a possible siege of the complex. And we don't know what they did between June of last year and this February, which means it could be, you know, reorganizing materials across various volts and tunnels if they are not all connected.

or they could get in new materials. But, you know, if they take care about closing the entrance of many tunnels, doing this kind of work, they must be protecting something. When was the last time the IAEA was there? Was it right before the June strikes? Yeah, exactly. And then they have been kicked out. So now we are relying, you know, on U.S. and Israeli intelligence,

basically. So it's kind of difficult because the U.S. military and Israelis can use the IAA assessments to make decisions. And the IAA assessment is actually depending on primary information that is mainly coming from intelligence. So there is a chicken and egg issue here in terms of being able to have independent information. And if you add to that recent, you know, a decision by Planet Lab and the problem of limiting delaying satellite imagery because of

the war in Iran but that affects also how experts can monitor all the activity around nuclear facilities and so which makes it even more difficult to both know what Iranians

are doing and also the US military in that respect is what's in the other two sites recoverable, do you think? Well, if it is under rubble, it can be both ways, right? It can be destroyed or just temporarily not accessible, which exactly. The Iranians will always be there. So no matter if you have a ground force and troops coming in and digging some

materials out, if it is at his farm or elsewhere, there. there are if some of them is actually stored elsewhere or in a secret vault or whatever that the US can't access to each it means that in the future they could always dig it out and do something with it and of course now with the regime being so you know pushed into its limits they might want to rush for the bomb as a as a detainable deterrent to restore deterrence because they actually lose lost all, you know, their air missile defenses, their credibility and also their regional proxies have been really diminished. And so that could be seen as a last result to restore deterrence, which is a problem for proliferation, of course.

Right. You mentioned earlier in the conversation that they had options. And we've talked about this on the show before, but I really want to hammer it home that like 60% is a very specific number for the amount that these were enriched. Like what is the significance of 60%? And it is like, can you kind of talk about Iran's, I guess I would call it in the American Parliament's strategic ambiguity regarding its nuclear weapons program? Yeah. So, you know, before 2003, there was actually a nuclear weapon program, but after that, they dismantled it. And since then, there have been evidence of an intention to actually build a nuclear weapon from the part of the Iranian regime. Of course, they kept some activity secret and condestine, which...

brings the problem of suspicion. But the indication was, all the understanding by experts was that they were mainly keeping options open, which doesn't mean intention, right? Right. To use that stockpire as a bargaining ship to get the sanction relief, which is really what they needed. And so I think the failure on the part of the Iranian regime, and that was our first piece that we published after the February strikes,

is the issue that Iranians probably misunderstood as far as one can understand, you know, the intention of the U.S. administration. that is the U.S. administration did not understand what Iran was doing and Iran was probably trying to communicate its intention, but it was not clear what they wanted to do with their stockpite. And this is where you need expertise, right? Experts would be able to actually advise better the, you know, the officials and the presidents on what is at stake with Iran, having even enough material

for 10 weapons worth, doesn't mean that Iran is anywhere near to get a nuclear bomb. If one wants to build a nuclear bomb with 60% enriched uranium, that would really, each one of them would need really a container size. So you can't really have that. You can't physically have that on a missile. So that would not be a direct threat. You would need to move it around and still first you would need to test it and to check whether it works.

Assuming that it works and you have the physics correct, you need to smuggle it somewhere and then what? We are not talking about an arsenal either. So it's not a deterrence fault. That would be a one shot for, you know, to make a case for this, but it's not an arsenal. But it's true that it has a lot of value. You know, that stockpile of 60%.

the percentage in terms of is atopic proportion right is probably misleading because what is important is actually you know the enrichment effort that you put into that so when you have 60% you are not at 90% and 90% enrichment so the concentration in uranium 235 is actually what is considered a weapon grade and with this you can actually have reliable, fiscite material for a nuclear weapon. But between 60% and 90%, you only need a couple of extra percentage of effort of centrifuges, of enriching effort. At 60% you've done 90, 95% of the effort in terms of enrichment. And as I said earlier, having centrifuges is not a big deal.

So if you have some cascade, you can actually keep enriching that material further. So I would say right now probably that's the most strategic, 400 kilograms of any kind of materials inside Iran. So as far as we, if there were a test, there's no guarantee that we would know. But there are things that are monitored pretty heavily by the IAEA and by other agencies that everyone's kind of always on the lookout for, radiation and certain kinds of

earthquakes, etc., etc. We would have a pretty decent idea, right? Yeah, well, and you know that this situation is very different from, say, North Korea. North Korea, they wanted to build

a nuclear arsenal, and surely they did. But if Iran right now would have the capacity to test a nuclear weapon, I guess they would do it really as visibly as possible to actually restore deterrence. So the intention would be very different

and because it would probably mean that we would not know that whether they have actually other installs of course it will demonstrate a capacity to actually detonate one which is scary enough

yes that the situation is very different unless they have other enriched uranium somewhere else and you know it's sure that they have you know at least six tons of 5% enriched uranium

of course as I said you would need to enrich it further and that would require a significant time and energy and actually a substantive enrichment facility to actually be able to reach again 60% with that material

and even 90% would be even more work to do but still so we focus all on the highly enriched uranium, but you know now Iran has a capacity to do that. And in between, in between that, so the enriched uranium is understood to be in the form of gas. And of course, to get the fissile material into a working nuclear device, explosive device, you need to actually condense that into a metal.

And for this, you need laboratories, and it's not an easy task to do. Very few people know how to do that efficiently, and actually to then mold it into something that can be used, you know, as a core in a nuclear weapon. And so this would take time anyway. And I'm not sure that Iran has the, operational capacity to do that right now.

They're a little distracted at the moment. Yeah, probably. You can't really rush that. I mean, of course, a laboratory of that type is probably easier to hide than, you know, enrichment facilities. But still, the problem here would be the knowledge in terms of chemistry. I mean, the engineering. knowledge of miniaturizing and, you know, building, assembling a nuclear weapon itself,

more or less is known right now. Not for the most efficient weapons, but that would not be the objective of Iran anyway. But the chemistry is probably the bottleneck here. So where are the six tons? Do we know where the six tons are? No, I don't know myself, but they are spread. across various locations for sure. All right, so let's say hypothetically

that America decides that it is going to send in a ground invasion to neutralize this highly enriched uranium. What do you imagine, like, what would that take? What does that look like? Yeah, so, you know, you would, I think you would, encounter a tactical nightmare because it's not like a Hollywood movie where you come in,

stay a couple of hours, occupy the site and leave. It's not the way it would be. The reason is, well, assuming that we are shooting for the 400 kilograms first, and they are in the same facility, which apparently is not the case. So whatever I am going to say

would have to be duplicated into other facilities and the access would be different, et cetera. But let's focus on his phone and let's assume that there is 200 kilograms relatively safely stored in cylinders

of more or less of scuba diving size, you know, and you can actually transport them. Even if you do that, you need the expertise to be able to separate those at all times those containers because you don't want to have a critical mass of fissile materials

because the uranium 235 inside self-desintegrates regularly, right? You have fission reactions happening naturally. And if you have too many of them close by, you have neutrons that are emitted. And if too many neutrons are emitted, when they are emitted, they are fast and they can actually provoke a second fission reaction. And if you have more and more of that, the rate of fission reactions increase,

and you could have a criticality event in which you actually have. Over-exceeding this and creating explosive power. So you could have a natural explosion happening. And basically, you destroy everything in that vicinity. and the material itself. So handling this, even in a piece, full time,

is very difficult and tricky and requires expertise. So whatever special forces would be actually, you know, dropped there on site to secure the facility, they would need to bring scientists and engineers with them to, so that they know how to handle this kind of matters. And then assume,

that, so knowing that you need to keep separated those cylinders, that would mean a large convoy of, you know, helicopters. I don't even think that they would truck that out because you would need really a corridor

up to the border of several hundred kilometers. And so you drop and you arrive in a situation in which it would require probably several days. First, they need to assess, right, what's the inventory, what's the status and state of the containers? Because, you know, if a cylinder is in contact with the vapor and there is always vapor in the air, that would create a problem because that, you know,

gas would react with the water content of the air and would create, you know, a very toxic gas and aerosol particles, that would basically be toxic for everyone around and posing a problem. And still, going with that scenario, if they take those cylinders out, they would have to ship them out by air, I am assuming, under the fire of, possibly the fire of Iranian security forces. so that even if they have the air dominance and they control the air still,

they could have the insurgency. So that creates a problem. And then the second option would be, you know, just destroying it. But even if you do that, so you destroy, you explode all the cylinders that you find, and then you do the same elsewhere. So let's assume that we disregard the environmental damage that would create because it would be a reality and a lasting toxic environmental issue. Still, you would not, first, the uranium would not disappear.

It would just be spread around and deposited around the vicinity. If you explode that inside the tunnel, it is a relatively confined environment, which means that in the future, I'm not saying that it is technically interesting. But if you have time, if you are there, maybe it's worth it to try to re-collect again uranium deposited on the debris to get probably one or two weapons worth.

It's not impossible. It's maybe not really realistic, but it's not impossible. So you will always have the fear of how much you destroyed, because you may not be doing an assessment after you destroy it. And in the future, you will always find yourself with a lot of theories around about what is the fate of that enrichment stockpile, enriched uranium stockpile. And of course, the same would happen with the lower grade uranium that could be further enriched anyway. So I don't see it as an easy mission if they're.

go get it and if they destroy it, I would say that it's probably not better. How many, do we have any idea how many scuba tanks worth 200 or so looks like? Yeah, according to some calculations of, you know, a specialist. I don't know. It would probably be between 30 and 60 of those cylinders. Okay. carrying between 10 kilos and 20 kilos each of uranium equivalent. And then that is transferred into a volume for the UF6,

the gas that is actually believed to be the form of the enriched uranium. And why is it in gas? Because of course, it's not the most stable form. But if you want to further enrich it, it's better readily enrichable if it is by gas, because the santa feces are actually just gas spinning, and by differences of mass of the isotopes, you are actually being able to collect,

separate the uranium 238, which is a natural one, from the 235, which is lighter, and the one you want as a fissile material. Let me throw something weird at you. So... I know you like weird. I do.

stories. Okay. Weird technical stories. Yes. So, all right. So we're already, we're already deep in a hypothetical. So I'm just going to make it weird. So we're imagining a world where, like, special operations forces are on the ground.

They have taken, they're taking and holding this territory, presumably, like, fending off Iranian ground troops. Would it be possible? may it be better for the transportation to turn it from a gas into a different form purely to transport it and like use the equipment that's on site to do that? Well, I guess that they would not use the equipment on site first because they might not know for sure what it's in there. It might be, you know, really rudimentary and probably not to the, standard of safety, safety standard that the US would want to in terms of you of chemistry. I mean, you're already putting special forces on the ground in Iran and going into it.

I mean, it's safety a little bit out the window at the moment. Yeah, but I mean, no, I mean, not safety for the soldiers, but safety for the scientists handling that. They don't have the same standard. They don't accept to go into that mission and. risk their life because that's not their mission unless they are attached to the military which they might.

But it's a, yeah, it's a it's a complicated thing. No, I would say that in the hypothetical case they want to do it right. They would probably bring laboratory chemical laboratories there, but that's heavy equipments

again and again, we are not talking about a red. Or even a special operation, that's a long-term thing. You know, doing it on a hostile territory that has never been done in the past. And that would take time, which makes me suspect that it's probably an option that doesn't interest the current US-Prasiddle. How would you say it would take time, like weeks, days, hour?

Yeah, weeks, okay. Yeah, you need first to do another, even you arrive there, you secure the zone, right, even before. You wait for the equipment. You need to assess the state, again, the status of the material. Then you would need to know what is inside the cylinders again, access them, transport them, open them safely, and, you know, obtain the solar. I mean, do the chemistry that you need to get that powder to be able, that is more stable, to be able to ship it away. I don't think you can do that in a matter of a couple of days. In a war zone, no less.

In a war zone. But technically speaking, it is possible. When you said, there's a chance that the cloud gets out and it's toxic. when you say that like irradiating everyone in the area like no it doesn't go far it's a you know it would deposit very very it's a local spill it's very heavy right relatively yes and you also you have a part gas

so you know that those cylinders so they take is they have you know they are in the form of uranium exactly all right so you have 6. If they react, they would produce, and I never remember those names, but basically they produce two things, which is the UF, let me check here. If I find again my reaction that I had checked, I heard here. So yeah, you have the UF6 and that creates,

two things in reaction to the vapor so the water content of the air it creates you know hydrofluoric acid gas which is toxic and

your uranile fluoride which is aerosol particles so solid particles but very small so those would be deposited near the area so it's really a local

local issue. But the gas, which is very toxic, would also not go very far, but it would be very toxic. And if you are talking about cylinders, they are more, I mean, they are, you know, almost the size

of a human or half the size of a human. Basically, they are really at the same scale. So that could be breathable. Of course, I don't assume that, I assume that people handling these kind of cylinders would have the protective gears that they need.

But in a possible accident scenario, if they are fired at when they take that gas out, that could happen and be very toxic for the people around. But we are not talking about a radiological issue. That uranium is not very radioactive. It needs to be irradiated. in a reactor to actually generate, you know, fission products that themselves are more activated and actually are opposing a radiological problem.

What do you do with it if you're able to get it out? Well, that's the best option. Of course, if you are outside of Iran, then you have it. You store it safely. in one of the well maybe they would not want to have it

back to the US but maybe yeah they would put it on the ship probably and get it to one of the US lab they would use it probably you know also the radiological signature is useful

also to in the future probably if they are using the same source to actually recognize that material if it is if it happens to be on the black market because if the US could not really secure all the material and they could just again transform it into something else that would not be a big problem or a big legacy because again it's not irradiated and that actually comes back to the how we could have a avoided that situation, right, in the first place.

In February, the Iranians were actually ready, reportedly, ready to downblend that material, which means that it was enriched at 60% well, they would dilute it again and reduce that concentration of uranium 235, mixing it again with, I assume, with uranium 238, which means that lowering the ability to use it in a nuclear weapon program, that was on the table of the discussions and apparently not taken seriously by the US administration. Either, I don't know, by your lack of scientific understanding.

That is what I heard happened in the room. That was my understanding. They didn't, the Americans didn't quite, they didn't have the expertise in the room to understand what the Iranians were talking about. Yeah, those were, you know, top-level negotiations and not even direct ones. Those were facilitated by Oman, which, and we know the two U.S. representatives who were in the room,

and I don't think they have a background in chemistry. But you don't even need that. You can just bring in experts in the next room and ask them what you just heard, right? And you rely on good advice. That is what would happen in a properly functioning administration. America is not in the business of listening to eggheads at the moment, unfortunately, which is part of why we're in such deep trouble.

Okay, so you've laid out just this absolutely wild scenario. I don't know I don't know how we get to there. It seems like then that this goal of achieving a denuclearized Iran by force is wishful thinking. Exactly. Wishful thinking. It requires like this very complicated process that would need to happen at the moment

during like a hot war on the ground. Or you have to trust the Iranians when they say they've done it. send in international monitors. And it feels like we tried that for a couple of years and America didn't like the way it was going, right? I don't know if it would be fair actually to expect to be able to trust the Iranians when actually Trump twice betrayed them. First, he worked out of the GCPOA, right, which in 2008.

So that was a so-called Iran nuclear deal. in which Iran was actually respecting the deal and opening its doors of its facilities to IAA inspectors, having cameras on, and having its program under international scrutiny. Trump assumed, got the feeling probably, that he could get a better deal, which never happened. And then he was re-elected, and here we are again, and he wanted, he had negotiations underway. First off, I'm not sure whether he was actually willing to get those negotiations working or just buying time.

Or whether he was, when he met with Netanyahu, you know, earlier this year, just before the February strikes, he was already briefed on the intentions of the Israelis. And he was dragged in. Apparently, he said he was not, but we don't know. So what's true is that there is no reason for the end. So the negotiations in February, again, we're actually actively ongoing. And the statement of the Iranians working out of the last meeting was really, we are hopeful. And they often say that, but they were really hopeful to get something through.

So the negotiations were seemingly progressing, at least from the Iranian perspective. And on the 28th, the US ordered, I mean, President Trump ordered those military strikes, so they failed betrayed. So where we are now is in a situation of it's nearly impossible both militarily and technically to get rid of the Iranian nuclear program. And the only solution that would be working, which is negotiations and getting inspections and getting actually cooperativeness, obtaining cooperation from Iran, has been jeopardized by this decision to actually strike them. So they feel probably even more poised to rush toward the bomb now than ever in the recent decades, basically. since the birth of their nuclear program.

And they've lost leaders that were not super interested in having the bomb, too, right? Yeah, the new supreme leader is reportedly more inclined. And also he got both of his parents basically, you know, eliminated by the United States and Israel. So we don't know how much revenge will be a factor also in the way. he will direct Iran and it's a nuclear program. So we don't really know yet, but I guess the U.S. military, the U.S. administration should be really conservative now, looking at the worst-case scenario.

But they are already using the greatest military might that they could use, conventionally, of course, against Iran right now, and it's not apparently working. That's the kind of down note I like to strike at the end of an episode of this show. I think that that's a... I mean, I won't say it's a good place to leave it, but it's an interesting place to leave it. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. Where can people read what you're working on? What do you have coming up?

well we have that's a problem we have maybe too many things the nuclear desk at the bulletin is like going crazy I think it's a very difficult moment

because of you know the arms control regime is under you know it's over stress no it's not totally over but it's under stress and under duress and it's really impacted by mainly three political leaders in China, Russia and the US.

And there is also a new debate about extended or deterrence in Europe, partly trying to compensate for a possible lower involvement of the US. NATO and so there is a reckoning also in Europe about that. Talking about the East Asia Front, you know, with Trump ordering the shift of some assets from South Korea to Iran, I mean to the Middle East, that would stretch even further the U.S. military there too. So, you know, there is no shortage of issues. and we are trying to cover it all,

but it's not an easy task. On the other hand, it's intellectually, and I would say probably that's a positive aspect. It's intellectually interesting. Yeah. Because we are already others have written about that, but it's really entering since the 2020s, more or less, since the war in Ukraine, probably.

It's a third nuclear age. Yeah. And that means that, you know, with the build-up of, China, how do you address that if you consider from the US perspective that you have now two peers, potentially. China is not here yet a peer in terms of nuclear capability, but it's nearing to. And how the US can adjust this without going into an arms race that would actually propel again more defenses or in more offenses from the other side, etc. So, everything

everything is happening at the same time and also the over-reliance on deterrence is probably not the best option either because there is no limit on that. Other approaches is relying on a credible but minimum deterrence force

which would avoid going into that direction. That's a position of the UK and France for instance. But of course, another note is that you know what is happening in Iran and what has happened with Ukraine first is basically, you know, two large nuclear powers. In the case of Iran, it's two nuclear powers attacking a non-nuclear weapon state.

So for the proliferation front, it's not sending a good message. Well, in one country that had nuclear weapons when it was part of the Soviet Union and then gave them back. Well, they had, well, they had weapons, but they could not. really, they had not the control and the command of them. It's fair. It was, yeah, they didn't, yes.

But that and also signal from Iran that would they be in this position if they had developed it 10 years ago? Maybe not. Well, no, maybe not, for sure. If you look at the, you know, the pressure that has been on North Korea,

and despite anything, but of course it's a totally close a country, and North Korea's strategy was different. They don't really have an enemy order. They don't really call for the destruction openly of their enemies, probably with South Korea, but they restraints a little bit. What they did is really total isolation.

Their regional proxies are very different than what Iran was doing. Yes, but now they are becoming, it's hard to ignore North Korea as being a nuclear power. They also are reinforcing their conventional forces a lot, so it's becoming more and more relevant to the point that they're actually having, you know, missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles that could actually land on the U.S. continental territory. So that is becoming a real threat even for the U.S.

So do they have a deterrent now? I would say so, because otherwise the U.S. would end, South Korea for long would probably have dismantled the North Korean nuclear as a nuclear arsenal of North Korea, yeah. All right, I know you need to go. I need to let you go. I could do another hour just talking about all of this stuff. Thank you so much again for coming on to the show. Thanks, Matt. You're welcome. Cheers. Cheers. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt

and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. Angry Planet Pod.com. life during Trump time. Get early access to all the mainline episodes. Get commercial free access to all the mainline episodes. Get some bonus episodes. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I predict the next episode we'll make some people deeply upset. Stay safe until then.