The Rest Is Classified - 147. Will Trump Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Programme? (Ep 2)

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

How do you actually destroy a nuclear programme? What would a US boots-on-the-ground raid inside Iran look like? And do David and Gordon think Trump will take Operation Epic Fury to the next level? Listen as David and Gordon imagine what it would take to destroy Iran's nuclear programme. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editors: Imogen Marriott, Bruno Di Castri and Adam Thornton Social Producer: Emma Jackson Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com. Where is Iran's nuclear material after it's being targeted in operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury? And what would it take to get hold of it and end Iran's nuclear program for good? Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Correed. And I'm David McCloskey. And David, we're in the second of these two episodes looking at the issue of Iran's nuclear

program, how to deal with it, what to do about Iran's highly enriched uranium. Last time, I guess we set up a little bit about the nuclear program and some of the early options to deal with it, particularly with the historical lens of how Israel in particular had targeted Iraq and Syria's nuclear program, which was different, though, wasn't it? And we talked a bit about that and how they were more discrete programs, basically two reactors, which could be taken out, which could be dealt with by a single bombing run effectively. And spoiler alert, the answer for what to do now about Iran's nuclear capabilities is not going to be a single bombing run. And so we'd also talked last time about this very complicated and high stakes rescue mission to go and rescue it down to U.S. airmen in Iran that took place.

last week, and we should say again, we're recording this second episode on April the 9th. And that rescue was this complicated mission to bring a bunch of kind of special mission unit operators from the seal teams and Delta Force into this airstrip, fly out in helicopters to go and bring this airmen back and get them out. That is going to be kind of some of the context that will also bring to the story about what an operation, to go after some of Iran's key nuclear capabilities might look like. But I think before we get there, Gordon, it's makes sense to kind of start at the beginning of Trump 2.0, 2025, because as we said last time, we have this problem, which is that the Iranians are continuing to enrich uranium. And this is one of the major issues that confronts the second Trump administration as it's taking

office. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence work, it's rarely the obvious problem that causes failure. It's the overlooked detail or the flaw nobody quite solved. The kind of vulnerability, intelligence services look for. And running a business is the same, especially when you're building or growing a team. It's the risks you can't see or don't understand. HP designs technology, so devices, collaboration tools and security work together. as a single system, helping teams keep everything running smoothly at home, in the office, and out in the field. The protection is built in, hardware-level security working quietly in the background,

helping reduce risk without creating more work. With a team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes, find technology that fits their needs and budget. To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit HP.com forward slash classified. The rest is classified listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with code T-R-I-C-10. And as we talked about a bit last time, it's not so much that the Iranians are racing for a bomb, and we'll come back to that. But what they're trying to do is bring down what's called the breakout time, which is the time between making a political decision to go for a bomb and actually being able to have one and to kind of reduce that time.

And at one point, it had been talked about in years and then it was in months. But you get to the point where a couple of years ago, you know, 2023, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs were staying, it was down to days to have enough fissile material for one bomb. That is different from actually having a kind of full-out nuclear capability. And it's different from actually being able to have an actual nuclear weapon. This is worth dwelling on because I think there is a bit of confusion about this, isn't there? And I think people can talk about this breakout time and they can talk about, well, you know, the breakout time to have enough nuclear material for a bomb is days or they've got enough nuclear material for a bomb.

But that isn't the same as actually having a bomb, is it? It's not. And, you know, in preparing for these episodes, I was struck Gordon at how even having done a significant amount of very deep reading on the topic, how it can get very confusing and technical very, very quickly. Yeah. And so I think it's important to kind of break out, well, what constitutes a nuclear weapons program? And there are basically three legs to this piece of furniture. One of them is the production of the fissile material. That is what most of the Iranian conversation, the public conversation is about. It is how much highly enriched uranium at what enrichment level do the Iranians have. So it's the production of the fissile material. Yeah. The second component is weaponization. I mean, I'm tempted, Gordon, to have you give us another science lesson about... Yeah, go back to our Klaus Fuchs episodes, if you want those. Go back to our Klaus Fuchs episodes. But you can't just take a big square of highly into its uranium and like toss it out of an airplane, right? I mean... No, you have to turn it into a bomb. Yeah. It might hit someone on the head. If it fell in the water, it might get somebody sick.

But it's not, you've got to turn it into a bomb. And that is work on high explosives, electronics, advanced metallurgy, material science, all of these very specialized kind of areas of study and machining and fabrication to actually create the warhead. And then the third component of a weapons program is the delivery mechanism because that warhead has to be fitted onto something that can then be delivered to your target, and in this case, it's almost certainly a ballistic missile. So it's not one site, and it's not just the production of the fissile material, which again is where we focus so much of our time and energy publicly. Yeah, that's right. And so you're talking about a big program with lots of people and lots of facilities, which also makes this issue of targeting

it once it becomes big and dispersed, as the Iranian one has been, because it's been there for for decades, harder. So you've got particularly, I guess you've got three sites that are well known, Natanz, Fordot and Isbahan. Nantz, we talked about last time, is the primary enrichment facility, about 220 kilometres south of Tehran, with these underground halls built a little bit below ground, 40 to 50 metres, so they're pretty well protected by reinforced concrete. Then, Fordot, you have a second site which is built into a mountain, and the Iranians kept secret for many years, but was discovered by Western intelligence in 2009. And that is even more protected from any potential attack.

Again, here, this is Iran learning the lessons of what they saw happen in Iraq and Syria with other programs. And then there's Isfahan, which is home to a facility which converts the gas, which is fed into the centrifuges, and which also, and this is also important for our story, has got underground storage tunnels. and these are going to be an important part of whether the US could get hold of the material now. So that is the, I guess that's the infrastructure of the sites as we understand them. But if we kind of maybe quickly look at the process and how far Iran had moved on this process, whether it's, you know, weaponisation. Because we know about the enriched material and we know that they put together this 400 kilograms,

something like that of pretty highly enriched uranium, which is one of the issues. But some of the other areas of weaponization and delivery, it's a little bit different, isn't it? Yeah, I think the focus on the production of the fissile material makes some sense, because the biggest most well-known sites are all, I mean, the ones you just read out, Natanz, Fordo, Isfahan, are all involved in the production of the fissile material, the production of the highly enriched uranium. that would be necessary to include in a bomb. But the weaponization piece, the delivery mechanism piece, they're much harder intelligence questions to answer, I think,

and they're easier to hide from the outside. I think what we do know is that Iran had not assembled a complete nuclear weapon before Operation Midnight Hammer last summer. Yep. On weaponization in particular, it gets confusing. quickly, doesn't it? Because Iran, and there were very, you know, famous, declassified or leaked U.S. intelligence assessments that came out that said that Iran had stopped most of the weaponization work back in 2003. Yeah.

Recently, it seems that the CIA assessments have shifted a little bit from kind of Iran as not doing weaponization work to something that's a bit more, more hedged. But what is, what is certain is that Iran had preserved the institutional knowledge and retain the personnel, at least the personnel that haven't been killed by the Israelis. Yeah. And maintain the facilities to kind of weaponize on a compressed timeline if, and this is the crucial point, if a political decision was made to do that final sprint to actually having the bomb. And it's worth saying as you go through what it has got, that that is a difficult target as

well, isn't it? If you're talking about destruction, this is not like destroying one big domed reactor like in Iraq, you're talking about relatively small research sites, which can be used to do some of the studies in metallurgy to make the components for a bomb, and you're talking about people. So you're talking about a lot of different sites, and that is a harder target set, isn't it? It's much harder. And we're talking when you spread this out and think about, yeah, the facilities where you're doing the, you know, geofeited. physics testing, the high explosive testing, the detonator development, places where you do the component manufacturing, you're talking about dozens of facilities, and you're talking about a lot of

people. I mean, the other angle to this that's difficult to deal with is that a lot of the capability winds up becoming over time, because now this is a very old-ish program at this point. It's been around for a while. 25 years, maybe, yeah. is that, you know, it's in people's brains. Yeah. Which again, hence the need for these assassinations as seen from the Israeli perspective because you destroy the facilities, but you also have to destroy the people who are critical to,

in particular, the weaponization, right? And we've talked about some of those assassinations on the program. But when you broaden the scope and you look at, you know, there's probably 25,000 people in the broader program and hundreds to maybe low thousands involved in weaponization. So when you see numbers of Israeli people, you know, the assassinations of like, okay, they kill 15 or 20 Iranian nuclear scientists or engineers at the outset of the 12-day war last summer. Yes, that is doing damage to the program, but there are a lot of other people who are involved or could be involved, you know,

to replace the people who were killed. Yeah. And so I think what you can say is that things like the assassination program degrade the program because you take out some of the best brains, but they don't destroy it, you know, and I think that is one of the lessons for that. So that's weaponization. The delivery system, I think, is interesting, isn't it? Because this is also one of the big topics of the recent or the ongoing war wherever we are in it, which is this issue of Iran's ballistic missile capabilities, because it has been developing ballistic missiles, and it had these medium-range ballistic missiles, the Shahab 3, which have got ranges of, you know, one to two thousand kilometers, which can reach targets in the Middle East. Now, there was this

very interesting moment a few weeks back where they did fire a missile at Diego Garcia, this UK, base, quite controversial, military base in some ways, didn't hit and one got intercepted, raised questions about whether they actually have a longer range missile capability, but some people think what had actually happened was that they'd actually just taken out some of the payload so that the missile would go further. But it's led to at least some debate about what the extent of Iran's range might be in terms of striking targets. Could it hit European targets?

But I think it's worth saying that they certainly are developing those kind of missiles, but that is different from actually having worked out how to build a nuclear warhead and put a nuclear warhead on a missile. So they are not at that stage, despite the fact they've certainly got a pretty extensive missile program, which also poses a pretty big challenge if you're trying to destroy the capability to deliver something. Well, and you see the problem now in Operation Epic Fury where the Iranians are still firing ballistic missiles. I mean, despite all of the assaults on the launchers, on the missile stockpiles, on these underground missile cities, at the kind of upstream manufacturing and production capabilities, like the Iranians are firing them at a severely reduced pace, but they're still firing them. Still doing it, yeah. You know, you have an issue of just there's a huge amount of stuff that you would need to destroy. And in this case, I mean, on the missile program, I mean, you're talking about. dozens and dozens of facilities that are involved, right? In every kind of, you know, piece of the, of the production pipeline all the way up to the, up to launch, not counting

all these dispersed launch positions or support installations and a bunch of stuff that we don't know about. And I mean, I think this is part of why the U.S. Israeli campaign hit thousands of targets in the opening days of Epic Fury because there's just so much, there's so much to hit. And, you know, if you put all of that together, the production of fissile material, the weaponization, and the delivery, I think it's helpful to kind of marry all of this and say, where were we on the eve of Midnight Hammer? Which was the last year's operation, last summer's operation. That's right. Now, the best analysis of kind of the IAEA verification and monitoring reports suggest that by June of 2025, so we're right before the 12-day war, right before Midnight Hammer, Iran had 440 kilograms, 970 pounds

of uranium enriched up to 60%. Now, Gordon, I resisted doing this in the first episode of this series. But can you explain for us? What we say 60%? 60% means what? So there's two different types of uranium, 235, 238. You want the more fissile material. So you need to, enrich it to increase the amount of the fissile material, which naturally is at only 0.7%. You get it to 3 to 5%. This is, I remember all this from previous episodes. You've got enough for fuel. But once you get above that, you can claim it's for research.

Well, it's research for a bomb. Yeah, it's research for a bob. But you need to get up to 90% really for a weapon. As we said, I think last time, the hard work is at the early stages. And the more, if you like, of the highly enriched uranium you've got, the easier is to remove the less highly enriched and to enrich it further. So it gets easier the higher you go up the scale. So 440 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium is technically enough for, I think, 9 to 10 nuclear weapons, maybe, something like that. So it's a significant amount. You know, we're going to be coming back to that 440 kilograms because it isn't the entirety of the Iranian nuclear program. But it feels like that's where the political debate has centered is on that material. And we're going to be coming back to that material. And what has happened to that material. And we know about that from the last time it was inspected from the IEA, which was actually quite a few years ago, I think 22, 22, 23. This isn't new, this isn't like new information, right? No. It's years old, yeah.

It's years old, but that's what we, that's the last time it was kind of independently checked. And that's what Iran is thought to have had. So that's, you know, that is a key aspect of the program that we're looking at. But actually, what, When it comes to delivery systems and weaponization, we've talked about that, that they're not necessarily there yet. But it does mean that the gap between how long it would take Iran to become a nuclear state has been shrinking if it took that decision. And that gap has been shrinking, particularly since the joint nuclear deal was pulled out of,

by the Americans, to a shorter period which then increased the pressure to do something which led to those strikes June 2025, which of course, as we know, David, obliterated the program. Totally, totally obliterated it, which is why Pete Hankseth is saying, well, actually, you know, you need to hand over all this other stuff where we'll come get it. I have to say, Gordon, you know, I don't like being in a position of having to give you compliments. It's a very uncomfortable position for me, but I should say, I should tell listeners, And I'm man enough to do this, that I put Gordon Carrera on the spot here with that little science explanation.

Because it's not in any notes. I had to do that. I had to do that from here. He nailed it. He did that. That's right. That is the, Gordon Carrera is the official science explainer of the rest is classified. The rest is science.

The rest is science. Vsauce and had a fries step back. I don't think so. You're going to be in Vsauce's chair before you know it, explaining these kind of things. Yeah, I don't think so. So, shoot of 2025, Israel or the U.S. have decided on a military option to deal with Iran's nuclear program. Although different from Epic Fury, the Israelis hit Iran first, and then we kind of pile on the back end and hit the nuclear facility. So the Israelis started with Operation Rising Lion, killed dozens of senior officials in the opening cell, including 14 nuclear scientists.

Nine of them are simultaneously killed in something called Operation Neckon. Narnia. Really? When you peel it back, it's murdering nine people in their homes while they sleep. Can I just say C.S. Lewis would not, the author of the Narnia books would not have approved, I think. You don't think he would approve. I don't think he would have approved.

Oh, he would definitely not have approved of that. And also, rising line, it's a bit like Aslan from the Narnia stories. Anyway, it's a, yeah, it's a Israeli operation, which does kill a lot of scientists. Well, they're involved in the weaponization program. To be, to be fair. Like, they're not, you know, they're involved in work to give the Iranians a nuclear bomb. Capability, but yes. A option.

You keep, hold on now, hold on, okay, so you have. Here we get. I feel that the gap from, and I think we're both in agreement, that the Iranians did not have a nuclear bomb prior to, they don't have one now, we don't think. Yeah. And they didn't have one prior to Operation Middied Hammer and the 12-day War. The gap from where they were to a bomb was shortening. Was shortening. And I think when you look at the kind of the analysis of the IAEA inspection and verification reports

and the IAEA's view on how advanced the weaponization effort was, which admittedly is like They have gaps, right? The Gerundians aren't being forthcoming about the weaponization aspects of their nuclear capabilities. We're not talking about a significant amount of additional kind of engineering work. Like, it's a very tight timeline. They were very close in 2003. And it's been, it's been 23 years. So presumably, you know, presumably that gap has been closed a bit in the inner

intervening quarter century. I always just think. So this is also, and we'll come back to this when we do Iraq, WMD, is I'm slightly scarred by the number of times I've heard officials talk about how close a country is to a bomb by using how much of which uranium they might have or how much material they might have or how long theoretically they might have to get it, because it is often used deliberately as a means to kind of justify action or to try and persuade the public. And I just think it's always worth a little bit of caution when people

tell you how close they were to a bomb or that this was enough material for this many bombs, because it is very different to have some enriched uranium to being able to, and you know, we've talked about this, to being able to have a bomb, to then even being able to have a deliverable bomb, to testing a bomb without getting attacked while you do that, to having a deterrent capability with a bomb. There's a distance there. And I just think it's always worth keeping that in mind. But anyway, I think we do agree. Yeah. And I guess the issue with that, which I think you would agree with is on the, you're right, like, it's oversimplifying things to say, oh, well, if you have, you know, 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, that's roughly the equivalent

or the amount you would need for nine or ten bombs. That's a true statement. But it doesn't mean that you in two weeks can have nine or ten bombs. Yeah. Yeah. But the problem with the weaponization and the delivery side of things is that those are the aspects of the program. where you are by definition going to have the biggest intelligence gaps. Because the quote-unquote verification at the IAEA or the monitoring that would be doing, they're not doing any of that on the weaponization side. I agree with you that, you know, political officials, military, even intelligence officials, can get over their skis pretty quickly in kind of rigging the bell and saying,

oh, well, the Iranians are at the doorstep of a nuclear bomb because they've got this much highly enriched uranium. Like, that's overblown. But the reality is you probably won't see that final push, whether it's six months of work, nine months of work, whatever. You probably won't spot that. You have to assume you won't spot that. And you kind of have to use, in some ways, the fissile material as crude of a strategic warning or proxy as you have to use the fissile material as the indicator of how close you are. Which is where we've got to actually now, because that is, in a way, where the debate is focused on.

But, yeah, I mean, we got to Midnight Hammer, haven't we, June 2025, in which, as you said, the Israelis start the campaign, but then the US follows through by deciding this is the moment to target these nuclear sites. And this is always what Israel had wanted and needed, because it's only the US which has the, what are called, the massive ordinance. penetrators, the GBU57 bombs, which can get into those buried, hardened nuclear facilities, which the Iranians have been protecting. The bunker busters, the massive ordinance penetrators, the MOPs, I guess the mops. It's the largest conventional bunker busting bomb in the U.S. arsenal. These things are, I mean, gigantic. They can only be carried by B2 bombers.

I mean, they're essentially designed specifically for targets in Iran and North Korea. Each one weighs about 30,000 pounds. Their GPS guided. They're 20 feet long. And they're designed to reach through about 200 feet of earth or 26 feet of reinforced concrete before they detonate, which is insane. And on June 22nd of last year, the U.S. hits Natanz, wrenchment facility, strikes the site with at least two mops in a double-tap strike, which amazingly go through the same peniton.

penetration hole. So they drop one goes in and then they drop the second one and guide it into that same hole. On Fordow, which is that site buried in a mountain near Qom, Iran, the U.S. drops 12 of these bombs on the 22nd of June. And this part is wild. They target two specific vulnerability points that have been identified from older schematics and historical satellite imagery. There is a ventilation shaft, which I, as I was researching this, pictured as that exhaust hatch on the first Death Star, Gordon. At the end of Star Wars. At the end of Star Wars episode, For a New Hope. Where Luke has to be guided in.

Yeah. That's right. So, yeah, this is where you put the proton torpedo. So there's a ventilation shaft at Fordow that connects to a central hallway and it leads to these kind of two main underground halls. And then there's a kind of a concealed service structure on the other side of the mountain ridge that's located directly above the south end of the centrifuge cascade hall. So essentially what this means is if you get into that ventilation shaft, you can have a massive impact on the facility. So 12 of these bombs are dropped there. And then Esfahan, which is this more upstream, it's involved in the production of fissile material, but it's not an actual enrichment facility.

It's hit by several rounds of Israeli strikes before Midnight Hammer, and then during Midnight Hammer, the U.S. sends Tomahawk missiles at this main uranium conversion facility, which collapses all four tunnel entrances to the underground storage complex that's north of the main site. And this is where it's believed that those highly enriched uranium stockpiles are stored and they were moved there prior to Midnight Hamer. hammer. Some people have done some kind of satellite imagery where they think they're spotting the type of canisters and will come back to them where you would keep that kind of material being taken to that site by the Iranians just ahead of the attack. So Isfahan, even though it's not one of the kind of main production facilities, is thought to be where that highly enriched uranium is now. So those, you know, stepping back, you know, those strikes last summer, certainly massively damaged Iran's centrifuges to enrich more uranium. So put a lot of

of them, question mark, all of them out of action, made it harder to, in other words, get more or enrich the uranium further, although it still leaves some unknowns. But the crucial question is that stock of 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which was thought to be in Isfahan, because that was buried there, and we'll come back to that, at the end of Midnight Hammer, and is thought to still be there. So if we then come up to February of this year, Epic fury. The nuclear program gets hit again, doesn't it? There are more strikes at Natanz and Isfahan. Israel supposedly also struck at a covert nuclear weapons development compound northeast of Tehran because they were worried that perhaps Iran was relocating some of the weapons development to that facility.

But, I mean, we've seen a very different target set this time in which, as we've all seen, You know, it's been targeting a lot of the missile program, a lot of the military leadership, administrative hubs, even bridges, we should say, and broader scientific establishments. There's been this effort to try and dismantle, I guess, the whole military infrastructure and scientific and engineering infrastructure around the regime, not just the nuclear side, but also missile production. But still, that has left unresolved this issue of the highly rich uranium. Yeah, because despite all of this destruction, the Iranians still have 440 kilograms, 970 pounds, of uranium and rich to 60%. And as we've discussed, that's enough for 10 nuclear weapons. If you finish the weaponization and, you know, pairing of a warhead with a delivery mechanism,

and all that, but from a just pure, how much facile material do you need? It's enough for probably 10 weapons. And there's a fundamental problem here, which is that you can bomb facilities, you can kill scientists and engineers, but you can't destroy the already enriched fissile material if you can't get to it with a bomb. And we should say under Isfahan, there's been a whole bunch of of relatively new underground work that the Iranians have done too hard in that facility. And it doesn't seem like we can get there with the mops, right, the bunker busting bombs. And, and we'll come back to this a bit later, this target is not a facility. We are talking about almost 1,000 pounds of stuff that would comfortably fit in, like,

in a single truck. Yeah. So you can't, you can't bomb it, right? They already have this stuff. You can't bomb it. What do you do about that highly enriched uranium? And I guess the answer is, the only possibility is if you can't get the Iranians to hand it over, as Pete Hegsef and others have been calling for, you've got to go get it. And that means a ground operation. So let's take a break there. And when we come back, we will look at what a special forces operation on the ground to deal with Iran's nuclear program might really look like. See you after the break. Hi there, Alastair Campbell here from The Rest is Politics and I'm here to tell you about a really important interview that's out now on our podcast channel The Rest is Politics Leading. This week I spoke to one of the defining political figures of our time, President Vrodmere Zelenskyy of Ukraine.

It is a fascinating interview, reflects on his upbringing, reflects on his political rise, reflects on how he stayed in Kiev during Russia's invasion, redefining leadership in wartime. And he warns us very much against anyone. not least Donald Trump falling for Vladimir Putin's lies, ones that ceasefires may serve as a strategic pause rather than a sign of genuine peace. He offers a very blunt assessment of Putin, looks at his enemy's strength, strategy, and crucially, his weaknesses in a war he has convinced Russia cannot win.

And he doesn't hold back on the international response, at times, particularly from the US. If you'd like to hear more, and I hope you do, search the rest is politics leading, wherever you get your podcasts. And now, back to your show. Well, welcome back. We are going to be looking now at this question of whether the US could do a special forces ground raid. A larger version of what they did, I guess, to rescue an airman inside Iran, but this time to go after the highly enriched uranium, this 440 kilograms. 970 pounds.

Yeah, 970 pounds for those who are dealing with different forms of measurement. But we think we know where it is, but no one's totally sure. But the suggestion is it is in Ispahan, as we've talked about. But I think what's interesting is buried in Ispahan, because as we've heard, Ispahan has been hit multiple times. And so the idea is this is not stuff just sitting there in a warehouse, but it is buried probably under rock, whatever. And there's probably sharks that have lasers on there, laser beams on their forehead that are. We need James Bond. Yeah, that's right.

I do picture a kind of villain's lair that this must be sitting in. You know, if it's just in a musty room, it's going to be kind of disappointing, isn't it? But it probably is. And you're right that what has probably happened is that it was put in Isfahan prior to the strikes last June. And it's probably been buried there. It does seem that there are, you know, tunnels. I obviously tunnels that get into these, this understanding. underground complex at is Fahan that probably sealed off with Earth in February. I mean, again,

probably to further harden them from the kind of special operations raid we're going to be talking about. But U.S. officials have said that they think there's a very narrow access point through which the material could be retrieved. Now, the other piece to this, though, that I think it just is worth mentioning is it is possible that some of that highly enriched uranium could be still Natanz could be at Fordo. Yeah. There's been a lot of confidence on the part of the Trump administration that, you know, we know where this stuff is exactly where it is.

I think privately there's probably less certainty about that. There's also, we should say, over 2,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium that's been enriched to 20%. Yeah. And again, that the gap from 3% to 20% is a lot harder to do than 20% to 60%. And so even though getting that 20% up to weapons grade is now much more complicated because you destroyed a lot of the enrichment facilities, that's another piece of the problem too, right?

Because I think there's a tendency and we're going to talk about the operation in terms of going after this 970 pounds, 440 kilograms of the stuff that's enriched to 60%. But there's actually a broader and kind of hairier set of problems that I think... There might be more out there. Nobody wants to talk about. So we may not know where all of it is. it might be spread across multiple facilities. It's also, as we've said, it's been a long time since the IAEA has verified its location.

So when we talk about 440 kilograms of how the enriched uranium, what is that? That is roughly the volume, if you had it all together, of a large oil drum. So again, this is the culmination of billions of dollars of Iranian, you know, sort of R&D and industrial might has led them to create something that could fit inside a large trash can. Yeah. as the centerpiece of this program. And what, about 20 of them, 19 of them, something like that, of these tanks? Well, so it's probably stored.

It's not all together because it's like, if you were going to put that volume of stuff, it would fill up a large oil drum, but it's probably stored in steel cylinders. And the size of them, you look at the different reports, is speculation about how big they are. But it's maybe like 20-ish scuba-sized steel tanks. I mean, it's so small, isn't it? This is a small target. As we've said, it's probably buried underground at Isfahan. And again, how do you go get it?

There are plans to do this, we should say, before we get into it. The plans exist. I think there have been plans to do this for some time. It's also something that the U.S. military, in particular, some of these special mission units, has trained for. Yeah. So the J-Soc, the Joint Special Operations Command, has spent years preparing to secure or seize Pakistani nuclear weapons in a crisis as one example of just kind of a counter WMD mission.

Yeah. Squadrons from Delta Force and the SEAL teams have practiced entering these kind of deep underground shelters at a site near Las Vegas, aided in part by the U.S. Army, what they call nuclear disable nuclear disabling teams, which are trained on how you dispose of nuclear material or disable nuclear power plants and reactors. Yeah, and it's worth explaining to people why there are these contingent. plans to go after Pakistani nuclear weapons. And they really got developed, I mean, Pakistan, you know, was developed the bomb tested it in late 90s. But it was the fear that a kind of al-Qaeda-style

takeover of Pakistan in the 2000s, and then they would have control of a nuclear stockpile of the country, which Pakistan had developed to counter India's bomb. And so that's why this mission had been there, just in case of that kind of emergency scenario, that they felt they need to go after Pakistan's weapons specifically. And I think the Pakistanis know that, even if they don't like to talk about it. But yeah, that is a kind of very close parallel, isn't it, of the kind of mission you might be talking about to go in and go after in it effectively in a hostile situation and get hold of the nuclear material.

I also think there's been training done specifically for Iran well before Epit Fury. I think this problem was understood inside the U.S. military and inside J-S. And for example, I mean, it's not publicly linked to Iran, but these nuclear disablement teams, you know, have done mock raids on nuclear facilities, like with the Rangers. For example, there was a 2024 exercise that simulated a raid under fire on a decommissioned facility mocked up like an underground nuclear site. So you kind of read between the lines, I guess it could be North Korea.

but the point is these cluster of kind of fairly elite U.S. special mission units paired with some of the technical expertise in the U.S. military establishment on disposing of the stuff have trained for years on how you might get into one of these underground facilities and extract stuff. Have I ever told you about my top secret mission to extract nuclear material from a reactor? Gordon, how have we done? We've done so many nuclear-focused episodes. I have never told you this before. You've never told me this. It's true. I will put a link at it, 2010, 2010.

It was from a nuclear reactor in Serbia, which the Serbs had agreed the nuclear material from the reactor could be shipped out by the IAEA and the Americans and taken to all places, Russia, for reprocessing. Because the fear was that someone could get hold of and get a nuclear bomb. So I got taken along for the ride, and it was a wild ride. So it's my only time in a nuclear reactor. Why were you taking a long? But it was really kind of, it was crazy because we went to this reactor and it was all secret. that this was happening. So we had to not report it until it had finished its journey because the fear was the material could get hijacked on the way by terrorists who could then have a kind of

material for a dirty bomb. So we went to the reactor and they shut down the streets of Belgrade through the night so that this convoy of which we were apart could drive out to first to a kind of train station and then the nuclear material in these big kind of things got loaded on a train and then taken to a port in Slovenia and then goes on this roundabout journey around Europe. So I have actually escorted nuclear material on a top secret mission out of a nuclear reactor, which ended up in Russia, which is, if I wanted to make it sound a bit James Bond, but there wasn't any shooting and there wasn't any guns. But it was a kind of wild ride, anyway. Anyway, there was a slight digression. What did they ship the nuclear material in? It was in big, big, big containers. And the IAEA did the kind of monitoring of it. That's a technical term. Big, big containers. Okay, I could tell you, because I'm looking at it up, there were these big blue bomb-proof fireproof containers, which I think are the similar ones that we were seen moving stuff

to Isfahan. So just to give you a reference point on that Serbian route, there was only 13 kilograms of highly enriched uranium on it. Wow. So a lot less, actually, was being taken on that journey. So it was enough to fit basically on one truck compared to what we're talking about, the 440 kilograms with the Iranians have got leftover. So it's a pretty substantial amount in these.

scuba tanks that I like to think of all stacked up in a warehouse buried underground. There's a guy, a guy smoking, the security guy smoking next to him. But don't you, but 13 kilograms, like, you could fit that on a bicycle. Like somebody could have just ridden out with that on your back. Yeah, I think it's a bit heavier than that. And I think it was in these big containers. And there was all these special tracking equipment on it. And it went by boat.

It's crazy. And that's why we had to keep it secret. I'm glad it's safely in Russia. That's good. I'm glad we got it to safety. Mission accomplished. Mission accomplished from Carrera, Agent Carrera. He does it again.

He got the nuclear material to the Russians. Well done. Let's go back to Iran. Let's talk about what it would take, though, to get hold of this material. Because, I mean, you know, we're talking about material buried underground. Someone I spoke to a former intelligence officer said, if you're going to try and get to it, you probably need minors, as in equivalent of people with hard hats. and pickaxes and giant mustaches. This is not a small operation, would it be, you know, to go to this site, assuming it is

an Ispahar and get it, is it? Maybe both of us have used the word raid at multiple points. And like, raid is not the right word because raid implies that you're in and out quickly and, you know, it's dangerous, but you can do it fast. That's not really what we're talking about here. So, spoiler alert, this would probably be the largest special. operation in history. Yeah.

And that's according to a former NATO commander. It's risky. I think it's very risky. But I do think it's feasible. And we'll talk about what that means. And it would take some time, as we've discussed. So who would go on this operation? Now, you would need a significant amount of operators.

Seal Team 6, Delta Force, these kind of very elite special mission unit guys. For reference, I mean, the rescued airmen we talked about, there were 100 plus. Yeah, 100 operators, yeah. In Venezuela, there were 200 for the Maduro raid. So hundreds and hundreds, this would be more. And then in addition, this is what makes this so different is in addition to the operators, let's assume we're just talking about Isfahan here. This is what you might need for one facility.

Hundreds and hundreds of operators and maybe three to four thousand, a brigade-sized kind of blocking force, right, which is going to control. access to the facility while the operators and some of these technical experts work. So very much unlike Venezuela operation or the raid to get Osama bin Laden, you're talking about a very large number of people involved. As we discussed, the core operators would be kind of, you know, from these tier one units, Delta CEL Team 6, they both have counter WMD missions and have trained for those. Attached to them would probably be a nuclear disablement team, maybe scientists as well, who would come in once the facility is under control.

There would probably also be additional specialized units, maybe green berets, maybe even more, I guess, conventional type units like the 82nd or 101st Airborne Division. And it's possible that there could be Israeli special forces that would supplement these units as well. And it's worth saying some of those airborne forces are or have been on their way to the Gulf. Yes. And I think one of the thing that has been noted

in terms of the force size that the U.S. is sent to the Gulf, It is not enough to do a ground invasion, you know, in the sense of a full-on war. But if you are talking about having the option for that, this kind of special operation, then the kind of force which is being sent to the region would be what you need, the kind of brigade-sized force to do the perimeter security. Because I think that's what's so interesting about this. And I think requires a bit of unpacking is that this is not a mission where you go in, takes a couple of hours, drop the guard.

pick them up, go out with the nuclear material. You would actually need to go in for a considerable period to this site to ensure you could get access to it. You would effectively have to set up a base, a perimeter, and hold it against Iranian opposition for some time, wouldn't you? You would. And spoiler alert, you would probably have to be on the ground for at least days. So you're not going to do this in a single period of darkness, like the rescue of of the airmen or like the bin Laden raid or like the Maduro capture. This is happening over a long period of time. So it's probably worth talking about, okay, this force of thousands.

Yeah. How do you get them there? How do you do the infill and how do you get it all set up? So the workhorses would probably be Shudok helicopters flown by the night stalkers, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. In Venezuela, there were at least six, maybe eight. So there'd be a lot more here. You probably also have, it's a C-130 variant called the MC130J Commando.

It's basically modified so it can fly at very low altitudes. So it's designed for covert transported infiltration. And it can also conduct, and this will be really important in this case, conduct aerial refueling of helicopters. So you can have a lot of helicopters. You can need to have a constant refueling network above this site so that you can maintain air superiority or dominance over a particular area for a long period of time. Now, those C-130 variants, they can carry maybe up to 80 soldiers.

And interestingly, Gordon, six of those MC-130Js were conducting training at an RAF base. Mildenhull, yeah. Yeah, possibly indicating preparation provision. That's also closer to Iran than if they were in the States. So this group might reach Isfahan. Again, Isfahan, by the way, 500 kilometers inland. Yeah. They could go from ships and bases.

the Persian Gulf. And even though the U.S. and Israel have destroyed much of Iran's air defense infrastructure, as we saw from the rescue of the, in particular, the pilot, that can still shoot stuff down. Yeah. So you would need a huge number of supporting air assets to ferry in all these troops and protect them while they work on the ground. Now, Maduro raid, there were 150 plus aircraft in the support package. So it would have to be significantly larger than that. Yeah. And then I guess the point is what you've got to do is effectively either use existing airfield or make your own runway, airstrip, on which to land them and to place these. Because you've got to bring in heavy equipment. I mean, this is the thing, isn't it?

You know, you're not just dropping off a few guys from helicopters. You're going to need heavy digging equipment in order to be able to get to this site and the nuclear material, which again is really challenging and to make sure you have control of the skies that you're taking out any potential incoming Iranian military or, you know, revolutionary guards who are in the region are trying to get there. You've got to be kind of taking them out. I mean, there's a lot already going on just to get your teams to the site, to create that kind of cordon where you can land a team and hold an airstrip in order to do the extraction or that do the mission. Yeah, I mean, there's multiple Iranian bases that ring as Fahan, right, the city

itself that would need to be hit. I mean, maybe they already have been. You would think that there would be some amount of missiles, rockets, and drones that would be constantly inbound and that you would have to deal with, probably from an air-to-air standpoint. So you would have to have assets in that support package that can destroy inbound missiles and rockets and drones. You would need real-time satellite coverage, you have a whole, you know, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance kind of web of drones and planes and satellite imagery

that are going to be looking at this whole thing in real time. A steady relay of dozens and dozens of refueling tankers to allow for that whole, you know, sort of set of, kind of that air support package to stay in the air for a long period,

like potentially days. Yeah. So it's not a simple thing. Now, that blocking force of maybe a bridge aid, three to four thousand people would need to seize the area around Sfahan to establish a Gordon so that nothing can come in or out that we don't want. You mentioned the airstrip, right, Gordon? It's possible because there are bases there. The other option is, you know, you could commandeer an existing Iranian facility and use that as your kind of staging point. Or you could create a makeshift air strip nearby. And as we saw with the rescue of the airmen,

That can go wrong. Yeah. That can go wrong. You can get stuck. Yeah. What you probably would do is you would have engineers from what are called combat deployable construction battalions, the CBs that would go in and be able to make effective runways, right? They could actually do the engineering and construction work in real time. Like they can construct if you have the right length and if you have the right soil and the right setup, they could construct suitable runways in just a couple days.

So if you need to increase the kind of amount of runway capacity, you know, you could do that with engineering work. You mentioned the diggers and the kind of the fact that you can have to actually get into one of these facilities, which is buried under potentially hundreds of feet of earth and rubble at this point. So you would need what we'd all recognize as sort of typical construction equipment, earth moving stuff, big tiggers, right? Right, yeah, kind of. Sorry, that's a very British reference, but yeah. We get it. We get it. Yeah.

But you would also need what I think is not commercially available tunneling equipment. Yeah. That would be able to get through reinforced doors. Because this is going to be one of the big problems and one of the things that drives the timeline is that underneath all of this rubble. Yeah. You probably have a situation where the way in is to get through a door, a piece of reinforced, forced metal. Yeah, but not a normal door, I was going to say. It's not a normal door. And it's probably four-ish feet thick. And so what you're basically doing is you're having to bore through

a safe underground, essentially. And we'll come back to this. So yeah, you have you need to get all that equipment in, right? So you could, you could parachute some of it in on palates. Or once the airstrip is up, you could land the equipment and then bring it to, to, to, to, you know, to, the site. Now, keep it by this whole time, you're potentially engaged in firefights with Iranian forces who are firing stuff at you or trying to breach the perimeter, right? So just keep that in mind. And it's good to take hours to get even to the points and to drill. So the main blocking force is holding that perimeter. And what you probably have is this kind of the special mission unit. So it could be Delta Force. It could be the seals. Plus this kind of engineering.

component that go inside. I think it's fascinating because so much of the driver of the timeline comes down to this piece of it. So again, those entrances are buried in Earth. How deep is that Earth? Well, is it 50 feet? Is it 100 feet? You need to use earth-moving equipment to basically tunnel.

This is where your, you know, comment about miners is spot on because you have to essentially dig a tunnel through the earth. And then you get to the skin of this door. It's not a normal door. It's like the Hoth-based door. It's like 20 to 30 feet wide, 20 to 30 feet tall. It's up to 4 feet thick. You can't break it down with a battering ram.

You can't blow it up. It's made of alloys that are resistant to boring and drilling. And again, that equipment, I actually think it is highly classified tunneling and boring equipment that is going to essentially carve or dig or bore a hole through that door that would be large enough for somebody to walk through. So you think about how much force and energy that's taking. Yeah. It could take maybe eight to 12 hours to do that a long time. It's going to take you more than a single period of darkness to do that.

And keep in mind, like, you're not just standing out in the sunshine while this is happening. You're already at the bottom of a very deep dark hole. You're wearing night vision goggles because it's pitch black down there. This is brutal. Yeah. Brutal work. You've got 80 plus pounds of the usual kit. Because, again, you'd have to assume at some point, someone might be.

shooting at you. So you got body armor on. You've got those goggles. One of the guys I spoke to who had some sense of the planning for these types of missions said it's more like working on an oil rig. And it actually made me think of the film Armageddon, Gordon. Classic Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Owen Wilson, young Owen Wilson, where they're drilling a hole on an asteroid hurtling through space. That's more of what this is like. Exactly. It's it's not a a normal military operation. And as you said, this means we are talking about not just hours, but potentially days when you think about trying to get down there. And in comparison, I mean, the whole Maduro operation took about 30 minutes, Bin Laden Raid, 40 minutes. I mean,

this is completely different. So then you get finally to your target, maybe under fire, who knows. Is it booby-trapped? I guess that's possible. I mean, we don't entirely know how much the Iranians have prepared for this eventuality and what kind of things they've done. But you've got to now get in there and work out how you're going to get it out. And I don't think anyone is quite sure how these facilities are laid out. We probably have some sense. But again, it's this problem of like, you know, the IAE had inspected stuff years ago. It's like, well, do you know, do you have a layout from 2023? Is that still right? It's going to change. You know? So as operators, you get through the hole, let's say.

Yeah. And you're in, yeah. You're underground. Yeah. And you're deep underground, potentially. So communications are a problem. Not only is it a problem that you can't see. But your radio is not going to work back to whoever's running the mission.

So you're kind of on your own. There's probably been a solution created for this. But I think it is safe to say that communicating and surviving underground is really hard. And Isfahan is pretty big. isn't it? I mean, what we think? It's big. It's not, this is not like a one warehouse target. The underground facility at Isfahan is thought to be about 20,000 square meters, which is about 215,000 square feet. That is roughly the size of the hardened facility that NORAD has at Cheyenne Mountain. It's bigger than a Walmart super center. Wow, that means anything. If that means anything to you

And it's basically four American football fields of floor space. Three football fields for English, British, non-American international listeners, by the way. Three soccer fields. Three soccer fields. So yeah, we're in this kind of crazy underground place buried in a mountain or buried deep underground, I guess. You don't necessarily have a map of what it looks like now. Maybe they do. Maybe they've managed to steal one.

Maybe they've managed to kind of use some ground penetrating radar to work out where it is. but then you've got to find your way to wherever this highly rich uranium is held. Again, have you got the intelligence to know exactly where it is? And can you be sure if you spot a bunch of big scuba tanks or trash cans, can you be sure that they are the real thing? Because without wishing to give the Iranians any ideas, and I'm sure they may have thought of this already, I'd be tempted to put some dummy ones in there, hide them all over the place.

Put in 300 trash. cans or scuba, you know, scuba tank-sties things and let people work out which ones have got the real stuff in and which one have them and have them in different rooms. As I was researching this, Gordon, I did have this question that I haven't seen any answer to and I wanted to put it to you, which is when you get through the hole, get through the door, what do you think's in there right now? Part of me wonders if the whole thing is kind of buried half, very buildings, or what you're wondering whether it's like Indiana Jones Raids the Lost Art Warehouse with lots of boxes endlessly and you've got to kind of open up all the boxes and go, oh, that one's got

the Ark of the Covenant, that one's got the highly enriched uranium. I don't know. I have no idea. I don't think anyone does, do they, apart from maybe the Iranians. Yeah. I kept thinking when you get in there, is it just an abandoned, is it like an abandoned warehouse where the lights are off, but otherwise you're kind of moving around and able to navigate through there. You've got to find it and confirm that it's the right stuff. We all know. You can use the equivalent of a Geiger couch or something like that to establish what it is. Well, and so then you're faced with what do you do with the stuff, assuming you can find it, right? So if you blow it up, which is kind of a bad option, it would basically splatter everywhere.

It would release a toxic hydrogen fluoride. You probably wouldn't want to do that in the facility because you also might not be totally sure you could. You'd want to have full certainty that you had destroyed all of it if you're going to take this risk, right? One of the other options that's been raised is that you could kind of dilute it or sabotage it. on site, which is doing something called downblending. That strikes me as difficult. That strikes me as to be sure that you've downblended it and that it couldn't be upblended, whatever the correct phrase is.

Enriched. I believe enriched is the phrase. To go back to his highly technical, I'm showing one of the limits of my nucleology. Doesn't strike me as straightforward and probably not quick. To be a successful operation, you want to say you've got it. I mean, that's what, if you go back to Pete Hegseth and others' comments is that they want to, they want to extract it, which again is certainly more ambitious than the option of just kind of blowing up a room. You've gone down. Now you've got to go back up through, you know, whatever hole you've drilled, carrying what we think of maybe up to 20 tanks of highly enriched uranium. Yeah, there's a whole, I guess, piece to this on the equipment side, which is, well, how do you move that stuff up the tunnel? I mean, there's a whole engineering and kind of construction piece to this that's front and center. again, as you extract it, and whether that's going out on a Chinook helicopter or a bunch of C-130s,

those planes could be shot at. Either the Iranians recover it, or it blows up and it disperses in a radioactive cloud, which would not be great, not just for Iran by the region, I guess. And if, you know, another complication is that if moisture enters the cylinders during transport, that could interact with the uranium gas to actually produce a toxic, I'll read this directly, So I get it right. Urinal fluoride and hydrofluoric acid gas, which might cause an explosion. So you could have, you have a handling concern consistently, which I think is why you have these engineers from either disablement team or the Department of Energy or somebody who understands how to handle this stuff safely. And then once you've gotten it all out, then it could be eventually downblended in the US or elsewhere. Well, you could put it on a, put it on a convoy with me and take it to Russia. Take it to the Gordon Carrera.

The Goverer option. I'll guard it. The Carrera option where it ends up in Moscow. But all of that we've described is like that is what when we talk about what would it take to actually destroy or eliminate Iran's nuclear capabilities. What we have just described at one facility is probably not even the answer to that question. It doesn't necessarily get everything. Yeah.

It doesn't necessarily get everything. But that is a big piece of it. Okay. So as we wrap up, I guess the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The point we've made it, it's not easy if anyone had to work that one out. So maybe the question is, I mean, I'm not a great fan of predictions, but do we think it's going to happen? My view, it's an option. Oh, you got to be more, come on, Gordon. That's weak sauce. No, okay. More than an option, I think Trump and his team are actively preparing to do it if they feel they need to.

They are preparing to do it, but that is very different from giving the go ahead. Sure. They are clearly getting everything in position that if they feel they have to do it, they will do it. But I think it does come down to, are there other options? Will the Iranians, the Iranians aren't going to give this up easily? Do you think they would give it up at all? I find it really hard to see. They want to maintain the right to enrich uranium. That's something they've said all along for peaceful purposes, which we've discussed, is something many would dispute. But so I find it very hard to imagine they do that. I mean, there were other options in the past, which is you could put it under IAEA supervision and downblend it. You know,

know, there are things you could probably do and find ways to negotiate some way of giving the Iranian some room to say, well, we've still got it, but it's for the Americans to say, well, it's no longer dangerous. So, I don't know. What do you think? Well, as we should say, you know, in, we have the Heggseth comments from yesterday, the 8th of April. You know, in late March, the White House press secretary's set of mission to retrieve the highly enriched uranium is an option on the table. So very much to your point, I mean, it is under consideration. I will venture a guess and say that I think it will happen. Wow.

Potentially after, you know, maybe a period of kind of stabbing in the dark diplomatically to see if one of the options you just presented, like the Iranians turning it over to the IA might pan out, which I don't think it will. I realize I'm going out of the limb here with this prediction. But I think I think Trump will do it. And I think he will do it because unlike the. destruction or attempted destruction of Iran's ballistic missile force, its Navy, or the regime. Going after 20-ish scuba tanks of stuff, you can do that. You can get that.

And then you can claim a big win. You can say, look, every president for the past 25 years has tried to figure out a way to deal with Iran's nuclear program. I solved it. Now, I think what we're seeing is, like, on the regime side, on the military political objectives that have been set or thrown out there to justify the conflict, you can claim victory on them. It's harder, I think. Yeah, although with this administration, I think they will claim victory with whatever they get. And they have. And they have. And they already have, even though, you know, the Straits of Hamoos are kind of barely open, if at all.

So I think I kind of agree with you that it would give them something they could definitively claim as success without having changed the regime. But boy, the risks are high. But I also think the nightmare for both the US, Israel and the whole region is you leave in power an angry, hardened Iranian regime run primarily by the Revolutionary Guards. Which is what we have where we're heading. But who's seen that perhaps the only deterred that they could develop against future attack is to have a nuclear. You've basically created an incentive for Iran to do what it's not done before, which is race and do whatever it can to get a nuclear bomb because it's the only thing, as per the North Korean example, that can protect it in its mind from future attack. And you think they may try and do that, then that would drive you towards thinking, we need to resolve that nuclear question and try and get the nuclear material.

And that might be the only way of doing it. Yeah. So there's the question of, do we think it's going to happen? And I'm saying yes. I think you're saying maybe. Is that as far as you know? I'm hedging. You're hedging. Well, so here's a second question, which is, do you think it should happen? I'm not sure. Should is such a weird word? Because I kind of think I would like there to be a nice diplomatic solution in which Iran agreed to give up maybe it's highly enriched uranium. Let's say you attempt that and don't get it. Don't get the diplomatic solution.

As I said, I think the U.S. and Israel have created a situation. because there was a lid to some extent on the program with the JCPOA, the Iran deal. That lid's been taken off. That has created now a dynamic where there may not be many options to solve it if, as I said, Iran does race for a bomb now. But it is also, I think you have to acknowledge partly a situation created by policy choices from the US and Israel who pushed to get rid of that deal, which was imperfect. Completely agree, but at least had some kind of lid on that program.

But if you just looked at it from today, if you were an advisor to President Trump, which this podcast might be a good jumping off point for you to get a job in the White House, would you advise him to... Well, what's interesting is I think there'll be people around him who will say do it, because I think he's a risk taker. There are people around him who are very determined to deal with Iran. I would advise him to do it. The reason for that is because there's a lot of the war aims that,

that have been tossed out there, I think are unrealistic, probably not going to generate. And in the very first podcast we did after the start of Epic Fury, the emergency episode, what I said was, I think the return on investment here is likely to be pretty low. Yeah. It's not that it's zero. It's not that it's zero, but it's that.

You damage the Iranian military, but you've not changed, you've hardened the regime and not fundamentally changed it. And you've destroyed a lot of its infrastructure to, and its defense industrial base and a lot of its military capacity, but it's still there and it can reconstitute a lot of that stuff. But when you zoom all the way out, you think about what are American strategic interests with respect to that part of the world and in particular Iran? I think that it is in our interest that the Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon or a

nuclear capability. And I think it's in our interest that the Strait of Hormuz be opened and that there be a free flow of oil and goods out of out of the Persian Gulf. What I fear is that if we don't actually go and get this highly enriched uranium that will have ended the conflict, having a self-inflicted wound by the Iranians having closed the strait for a long period of time, we will have made some progress on degrading the nuclear program. But we will not have taken the closest thing that we have to a kill shot, which is getting all of this highly enriched uranium that they've spent decades producing and making it much, much, much harder for them to, in the future, get a weapon because we've destroyed so much of the enrichment infrastructure,

and we've taken the stuff they've already enriched. If we don't do that, I worry that what is already, I think, a low ROI on this conflict is going to be even lower. And I guess maybe we should end with me summarizing David's views as they will either give it to us or we will take it out, which is, I never thought David McCloskey and Pistol Pete Hegzeth would be so aligned, but I think basically you're in tune there with the Secretary of War. That would be my guess. But I do take your point that the options have narrowed, as they say. But David, I think that's been a really fascinating kind of insight into what that raid might look like

and the really hard options now facing those who are worried about Iran's nuclear program. Just a reminder, though, that we also have something very interesting, which is going to kind of talk a little bit more about this, a live stream with David Ignatius, who is a top columnist with some of the best sources, I think, on the US intelligence community for the Washington Post and also writes novels as well, another one of these people who writes novels. Another one of these strange people who raise art. See people who seem to write fiction, make stuff up, which is going to be Friday 17. of April on YouTube, the link is in the episode description. That's 5pm British Standard Time

11am Central Time on Friday the 17th with David Ignatius. But just a reminder, do sign up for the club. We've got a great series coming up on lots of things, but including Iraq, WMD with some really interesting. Can we tease the guests? No, let's not tease them left. Let's save it. Let's save it. Some very exciting guests who were directly involved, it's fair to say, on Iraq, WMD. Also, Steak Knife, Northern Ireland. where we've got some guests Patrick Raddenkeith, Peter Taylor, amongst others, talking about that. It's one of the most cheerful series we've ever done, right? The brutality of intelligence work and murder and the troubles.

It is fascinating, and it's a fascinating story about the complexities of agent handling or not handling agents who are doing really nasty things. Yeah, that's right. So do join us for those. Do sign up at the rest is classified.com. Sign up for their newsletter as well. But otherwise, see you next time. We'll see you next time.