Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/26/26 Dan Vergano: Iran was Nowhere Close to a Nuclear Bomb

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

Scott interviews Dan Vergano of Scientific American about an article he wrote exposing how scientifically absurd the claim that Iran was close to even having the ability to fully weaponize the enriched Uranium they possessed was when Washington and Tel Aviv launched this war. Discussed on the show: “Iran was nowhere close to a nuclear bomb, experts say” (Scientific American) Dan Vergano is senior editor, Washington, D.C., at Scientific American. He has previously written for Grid News, BuzzFeed News, National Geographic and USA Today. He is chair of the New Horizons committee for the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a journalism award judge for both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. It's the babies I make it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not only. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. Aren't you guys introducing Dan Vergano and he is, I got his bio right here, senior editor, boy, I've better put these glasses back on for a second. A senior editor at the Scientific American, the Washington, D.C. editor. It's written for the National Geographic and USA Today and things like that.

And so here he is, oh, this is good. It's a judge for both the American Association of the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. So I guess he knows a thing about something. Or I'm old. Yeah. Yeah. So welcome the show.

How are you doing? I'm all right. How are you, man? I'm doing really good. Let me see if I can share this screen here so people can see this great article that you wrote. The article in question today, Iran was nowhere close to a nuclear bomb. Experts say, and that is, again, at the scientific. American there. And the thing of it is, I've been covering this story for 20-something years myself.

You might be able to tell my beard matches your hair. I don't have any hair at all left anymore. But I've been on the same story the whole time. And so I already know that you're right about everything. Like I can already vouch for every assertion that you make in your entire article because you're right. And so I was just wondering if you could, I'll just give you the floor and you just take us through it. What do we know about Iran's nukes and how do we know that they were not about to nuke us in our jammies in the middle of an eye in our hometowns here. Well, it turns out there's a lot more to having a nuclear bomb than just having some uranium. The physics are well known, and so for us, it was, you know, you ask the experts, they're not

really my assertions. You know, I ask the questions and they say, you know, here's what the science tells us. We're science magazines. So there we go. And it turns out that Iran has about 440-kilogram. grams of uranium that's enriched to 60% uranium 235. Uranium 235 is stuff you need to make a bomb. You know all this, Scott.

So this is for the folks. Go ahead, good. It's great. It's a lot of people are going to be learning it for the first time here. Right. Okay, so it's, it's, so what we said is, you know, scientific American, I'm not speaking for the magazine. I can say that at the outset.

This is it, this is my view. This is the magazines. But, you know, the 1950s, we've been writing about nuclear proliferation. We actually got busted by the FBI in the 50s for supposedly violating nuclear secrets. So, you know, this is our thing. And the simple thing was we need to explain to people, how do you make uranium into a bomb? And what does that mean for what we've just heard from the president and from the administration? And the answer is, you know, you dig this stuff up. You treat it with fluorine. You throw it into centrifuges. This is Manhattan Project level science.

the Iranians are very good at it or were very good at until we bombed the hell out of their facilities in June, last June last year. And you get out the U-235. And they vary deliberately for the last, you know, since 2018, they're about enriched it to this 60% level, which is 60% U-235, which as opposed to U-238, the heavier from uranium, is the stuff you need for a bomb. At about 90% enrichment, you can make a standard bomb, as thought. It looks like, you know, 15 kilograms of that 90% enriched uranium 235 is what you need to make a conventional nuclear bomb. So the arenas didn't have that.

They very deliberately stopped at this 60% level. They had these 440 kilograms of it. Israel and the U.S. bomb their facilities. And so they're out of the enrichment business where you need to get to 90%. This is according to the president. This is according to intelligence assessments and so forth. Okay. So they've stopped there. Now, just before the, before and after the war that we've just launched, claims from the special envoy, Whitkoff, that they were very close to having 11 bombs.

But, okay, for that to have happened, they would have restarted the centrifuges that bombed to hell and back. This is what the experts are saying, which they haven't done according to the observance. there, the IA, EA, and other folks, according to our own people, according to the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. So that's one roadblock. Once you do that, it's not enough. You don't like you have a bunch of uranium. Oh, boy, now we have a bomb, right? Even if you get the 90% of 15 kilograms of it, you have to machine that into these spheres of uranium metal. You have to make a working nuclear device. So you have to make a bomb. You have to miniaturize it to put it on a missile, if you're going to threaten the U.S. with it, you have to develop a missile

that will survive reentry and go off where you want it to go off. The National Threat Intelligence Assessment that came out recently said that Iran, if they decided to do that now, they haven't. It's going to be 2035 when they have that capability. So it's not imminent. So the whole thing, the notion that they were a few weeks away from being able to threaten the U.S. with nukes, which is what we're really talking about here, just doesn't add up for people who do this for a living. You know, we talk to nuclear policy experts, former national labs people, the assessment from IAEA, the other people have published.

And it just doesn't add up. Explain or here's how you take uranium and make it into a top. We got to the end of it and it was like, we weren't anywhere close to this. And I made it easy to slap that headline on the piece and saying, Like, it just, there's just no for this being the case. And, you know, the thing that's always hanging out there is this notion that there's some secret intelligence report that, you know, this is all wrong. And they have some, you know, ability that only the, the Illuminati know about. But, you know, we all know that's nonsense.

You know, if there was that, you know, finding, they would have leaked it because that's what they do. You know, in the Iraq War, they're in the UNAW. UN showing photos of, you know, things that were classified. That's how they do it. They didn't do it. I mean, I used, I've been covering the story for that long, too. And hell, when I was a kid, I worked at the Pentagon, you know, like, you know, before I was a reporter, this is not how it works. You know, like there's, there's no real secrets, you know, there's things that are classified, like, you know, exactly how do you go from one centrifuge to another when you're enriching these things? And that's properly classified. But like the idea that, you know, they would

have this capability that the Israelis wouldn't be leaking like hell to hell and back if that was the case is, you know, nonsense. The Israelis, by the way, say that they have a very good notion of where this stuff is the enriched uranium of 140 kilograms is located. And so we have a pretty good idea, you know, what's going on with that stuff right now? And all the indications are it wasn't about to be made into a bomb. So anyways, that might be longer than you wanted to hear, Scott, but that's maybe my summary. No, not at all.

Yeah, no, that's great. All right, this episode of Scott Horton show brought to you by. by the books I wrote. You can see them behind me there. Enough already. Pools errant and then enough already and provoked. And then of course, one might have fallen down there, but I got Ron Paul, the great Ron Paul, Scott Horton Show interviews and hotter than the sun.

See that one back there over there that way? Hotted than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. That's all interviews I did all about nukes and really great stuff. And I've blessed my ass on these things. And you know, I've gotten a really great reception on all of them. They all have been endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg endorsed two of the three I wrote. He would have endorsed the third one I know, but he died too soon, unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that provoked is the definitive account.

In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Matey said about it too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. So maybe check that up. So there's so many points to go over there in terms of, you know, the actual engineering questions and all that. And then the politics, the war and all that. I mean, part of what we're talking about now in the media is what we think we know where they have their stored uranium, whether it's still in gaseous form or whether it's already

been, you know, converted back to metal or what. And that they may have to send in some, yeah, some incredible Hollywood movie worth of special operations team somehow in there. with what parachute bulldozers in and things, massive land, you know, earth-moving equipment to somehow dig up these canisters, some kind of thing. They've been proposing this.

I don't know if they're really that crazy. They're talking a lot about trying to reopen Hormuz and these other things too. But, you know, Trump said about two weeks before the war that, and I don't know the reality of this, it's hard to judge the reality of what the guy says, but it seems like he must have been referring to something. he said that, you know, they started digging.

And he may have been referring to Pickax Mountain there, which I believe is sort of adjacent to the Isfahan facility. And he's saying, they started to dig to try to create a new facility somewhere, but I called them and I said, and I don't know, I'm pretty sure he said it first person like that, but I think the implication was he had Marco call or something, right? And I told them, don't you do it?

I see what you're doing with my satellites here, and I'll bomb you. Don't even try it. And then he said, they quit. They quit trying because he called them out and said, I can see what you're doing, so don't do it. And that was even just a couple of weeks before the war. So in his own words, he was saying,

whatever they were doing, he was acknowledging the reality, as you said, that as he stated last gin, that he did obliterate their nuclear program. The DIA really kind of played that down, but he took Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan completely offline, which was taking Iran down nine pegs on a 10 stair ladder, right? And that they hadn't restarted their enrichment is things officials in the Trump administration had said at different times.

I mean, what you're talking about is it makes it very confusing the report, like, because they say all kinds of things. You know, one day they're about to have 11 bombs, and the next day, no, no, we obliterated them, and they haven't restarted their enrichment. A different person says different things. it's kind of wild, you know, having covered this, because usually administrations are very sensitive

about talking of anything having to do with nukes, and they make sure they're singing all off the same page. And, you know, while you can't believe what they say, you can at least go off of that thing that they say as their position. But like, this is an administration that, like, who knows what Tulsi Gabbard saying today, and who knows what Wilcoff is saying today, and who Trump and Rubio is saying that are all kind of at odds with each other.

It makes it really hard for the experts, you know, that we talked to to say exactly what the U.S. position even. So it's, you know, that's why we're kind of like, well, the physics doesn't change. This is how nuclear fission takes place and so let's just start there. And then if you just work with that kind of timeline and or you work with the science

of intercontinental ballistic missiles, it takes, it took the North Koreans with all the will in the world in three years more to come up with what they've done. Like, that's just how it works, folks. You know, that's just chemistry and physics, you know. So that's where we're at. So now to rewind on the history of the thing, as you explained, you know,

what they do have and don't and all of that. I believe it's agreed, or at least the dissenters don't bring this up because they've got nothing to say about it. So it remains mostly unspoken, but it's agreed by all the experts who are shooting straight about this. They have no plutonium root to a bomb whatsoever, right? Because they poured concrete into their Iraq heavy water reactor back in 2015. And then the Boucher reactor is a light water reactor. So the plutonium that it produces is too polluted with other isotopes and things to be used.

And plus they don't have a reprocessing facility for any of that waste. It just goes to Russia and the Russians keep it at least under the old deal. So that part and forget, correct, but nobody's even saying that they were ever trying to make plutonium up. Nobody is talking about a plutonium round. We're talking uranium here. There's that other factor of the research reactor that's enriched uranium. to some extent that also seemed to have played a role in Trump's thinking. So it's, but it's not clear what he's talking about if when he's talking about that research

reactor, which has 20% enriched uranium and it versus this larger stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, you know, that's just thought, as you say, to be buried under Isfahan. And may still be in gaseous form and then they've already lost their conversion facility there for their ability to turn it back into a metal. So it's basically frozen at this point. way, right? It might be in the safest place it could be buried there, you know. When you mentioned this commando radio, I mean, one mayor is like, what it doesn't work? And we've, you know, unearth this stuff. And then some militia runs off with some of it, you know, runs off with a beer

keg full of this stuff. And then all of a sudden we have a dirty bomb fear that we've created by, you know, trying to somehow do an Operation Market Garden in the middle of Iran, which everybody I talked to say would be Mission Impossible. The example we pointed to in our story was Operation Sapphire in Kazakhstan. Even with the best will in the world, the Kazakh's helping us to remove about 600 kilograms, I think it was, it was Russian nuclear subfuel. Even with the best will in the world, it still took a month, you know, to get this stuff out of there. you know, a month of having drones

and people shooting, firing cannons at onto a work site with, you know, how do you, you air drop a bulldoze in there? How many, you know, this isn't a G.I. Joe episode, you know, this is just what you're talking about is very dangerous according to the people who do this sort of thing who've spoken to us. So, and, you know, it's, it sounds like an episode of fallout.

We're going to go into this buried mine and find these canisters, these beer kegs full of corrosive gas that's radioactive and might cause a criticality accident if we screw up and put them next to each other too close. I mean, that itself is kind of wild, but things have happened, and this is radioactive material. You know, like, what are you talking about? All right, so now on the 60%, you get a lot of this from the war party. They'd say things like, oh, yeah, well, what do you need 60% for?

Or even one of my favorites was I think it was Rubio, the Secretary of State, who said, well, the only countries that have 60% enriched uranium have nuclear weapons, which is sort of a weird way to construct a sentence. And so, I mean, I don't want to spoil, like, sit here and pretend and play dumb and ask you questions. I already know the answer to. They started doing this as a bargaining chip after the Israelis assassinated their chief scientist in 2020, and then sabotage the Natanz electricity facility in 2021. And they were only enriching up to 60% as a bargaining chip to trade away.

However, critics have pointed out that technically it is theoretically possible to make a uranium gun type nuke with 60% uranium if you had a big enough thing. But then at that point, now you're talking about you'd need an airliner to deliver it to Israel or something like that. If some covert mean, and, yeah, or as you say, fly it on a 747, yeah. They can blow it up in their own desert as a demonstration, right? But not really do anything with it. They're signaling devices for force projection. So, you know, the notion that they would detonate one and invite a nuclear reply from the U.S. or Israel, you know,

in terms of mutual assured, you know, destruction kind of theory is problematic. You build these things like the North Koreans did to signal back off and give you space for your own military operations of your own sphere of influence. And the Iranians hadn't decided to do that, you know, and it was quite deliberate, as you say, that according to the people observe this sort of nuclear policy thing, they tell us that they were doing this, yeah, as a bargaining chip, as a thing to have. And there's still discussions in the news today about them discussing this. demanding in his 15-point war discussion that, you know, we get there enriched uranium,

which of course is great, but it's not like the knowledge of how to enrich uranium goes away. I mean, even if they give us every ounce of it, they still know how to do it. They still know how to build centrifuges. It's nuclear chemistry that's been known since 1945. Hey, guys, Scott here. You know, you've probably noticed when I'm interviewing somebody or somebody's interviewing me that I've got this great bust of Dr. Ron Paul in the background on my bookshelf here. Well, you can get one like that, too.

They're available again from the great artist Rick Casali. Just go to my website, Scott Horton.org, and look in the right hand margin. Click the link through there and use promo code Horton. You'll save 25 bucks and get free shipping, at least in the lower 48 states. And he does custom work as well. So, I mean, it seems like really the only question here is political, right? It's not about the technology or about, you know, any mystery of anything unknown by inspectors or anything like that. is just where does the current president decide to draw the red line?

Where W. Bush and Obama and sort of previous Trump, I don't know, maybe not. But certainly W. Bush and Obama essentially accepted Iranian uranium enrichment. Just keep it below weapons great. And Obama and W. Bush have both vowed that they would start a war if the Iranians did break out toward a nuke. But it was just that they didn't. And that was the standoff was, if you make a nuke, we'll attack you. And then they said, well, don't attack us. We won't make a new.

But then Trump called their bluff. But in doing so, he also severely crippled their program. So now they're way more likely to make one. They killed the Ayatollah that said that God said that you're not allowed to. And yet, their actual capacity to manufacture a nuclear weapon has been severely degraded. I don't know if they're even bothering attacking their nuclear facilities now. because they just already have. And all that's left is this light water reactor.

And, you know, again, the medical research reactor in Tehran that are both harmless as far as any weapons capabilities concerned. So, which they already do. There's some concern that they could damage the material and then spread, you know, radiologic material across the landscape, which they don't want to, nobody wants to do that. Yeah, maybe in Tel Aviv they do. I mean, I, I, this I don't know. as you say, though, it's a political question, but that's how it is with nukes. The science feeds into it.

You know, we've been through this movie, right? The Iraq war, right? You know, the threat was, oh, the next thing we're going to see is a mushroom cloud. And, I mean, it's sort of a weird, I don't know, it rhymes at least, you know, it echoes with that kind of argument. And so you have to know the science to ground truth, the political arguments, because there's a lot of people who don't know what the hell they're talking about here who have political power and are saying ridiculous things to the public.

And so if you don't start with that sort of is your ground truth for like how this works, then I think you're condemned and not under follow the political argument. That's at least our case for writing about this. Sure. Yeah, I mean, aside from the personal and professional frustration of telling the truth about this for 20 years and then that not mattering at all. And the war starting just on the most kind of preposterous sort of grab bag of half excuses, like the sort of barest parody of 2003, really,

when you look at the amount of effort put in to even telling these lies. Although it's very frustrating. I mean, at least they do have a nuclear program of some behind, where they knew Saddam had absolutely nothing like that going on at all. Yeah, still. It's very frustrating. The point is, as you're saying, when the policy is based on foundation for defensive democracy talking points

and not the truth, then they're going to be doing the wrong thing, right? If they don't even know what the actual stakes are, if they refuse, I mean, in other words, it'd be nice to think that the politicians go, okay, here's what we know, but here's what we're going to tell them. But when the politicians have really just only kind of the propaganda for their own frame of understanding the thing, then we're all in deep trouble, I think, Dan.

It's a real concern where they drink their own Kool-Aid, you know, and if what they're seeing is a talking head on the cable channel saying something ridiculous, and that motivates actions, I mean, it's gotten people killed, you know, and, you know, we bombed a girl school based on our intelligence, you know, how much confidence can we feel in that, you know? And I said in the news, as you say, it's really frustrating. I mean, the only news team that really got to rock right was like the Knight Ritter team, right, back in 2002.

And what was their reward? They got bought out and they all got set on the streets. You know, and the guys who are still pushing this stuff, you know, on all sides are like still in business, you know. So it's really not to complain too much, you know, But it is frustrating to see a lot of the discussion be polluted by sort of a non-technical fairy tales of how this all works. Yeah. And no, importantly, just as you say, retailed by the very same people who are never held accountable for doing this before.

So, like, I got to suffer Eli Lake retweeting Michael Rubin talking about why this is so necessary when, you know, this is the guy from the New York Sun and the guy from the office of special plans who up live. us into war last time, both of them. Yeah, well, I mean, that's why it's important that I think that you're making this case, because I hate to put more weight on your shoulder, but you are the mainstream media now. Shows like yours, like the newsrooms that I worked in when I was at USA Today's their science reporter, that's all gone. You know, there's not very many technically informed science reporters who can publish in what is we call, I guess, the legacy media now.

I guess I'm legacy media. And so it's outlets like yours, actually, that are people getting their news from. So it's important that there's people, you are, like I say, you are the mainstream media. Like we're not. And so it's important that people hear from, you know, how lots like this one, like how this all works. So anyways, hats off to you. So yeah. Well, thanks. And, and thanks for your time on the show to help us with this. Are you willing, like if there are other podcasters watching who want to talk to you and have your expert, uh, understanding explained to their audiences as would you be willing to do that?

Of course. Like I say, I'm not speaking for Scientific American or its publisher. Is it just me an old reporter guy, an old science reporter who covers Nukes talking? And I'm not a political person. You know, I should be up front with you that I'm just, I have the para ideology of the news business, which is people should get the news. But if people can live with that, I'm happy to talk to anybody. Yeah, yeah, that's great. And so, yeah, partisanship really shouldn't have anything to do with it

when it comes to just what the facts are. Again, at Scientific American, Iran was nowhere close to a nuclear bomb, experts say by Dan Vergano. I hope I'm saying that, right, Dan. Close enough, man. In Italy, they think, you know, they're ashamed to me no matter what. All right. Well, thank you very much, Kamas, Joe.

Really appreciate it. All right, good talking to you. Take care. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy. of foreign policy and freedom, Roberts & Roberts Brokridge, Inc., moondos artisan coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fool's errand, enough already, and my latest, Provoked,

how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music, intro and outro videos by dissident media, audio mastering by Potsworth Media. See you all next time.