#WTH: Why the endgame in Iran matters

They have a lot of bad stuff

Nuclear enrichment cascade at Natanz

Donald Trump wants people to think he’s not in the regime change business. We understand why: He does not want analogies with Iraq. My view differs substantially from the conventional wisdom on Iraq, but the reality is that notwithstanding the neighborhood and the illegal nuclear ambitions, the two are dramatically different. Iran has an advanced nuclear weapons program. It still has very capable nuclear weapons scientists. And it has at least some of the the component parts necessary to form a nuclear weapon.

Nuclear weapons aren’t Lego. It’s not simple to break it apart and then continue on with the pieces. But it’s not impossible either. The United States and Israel dealt Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions a serious blow last summer, but it wasn’t fatal. This fact is even more important if you understand that in 2003, the Islamic Republic made a transition from a North Korea-style program to a Japan-style one. What does that mean?

Fundamentally, we understand that North Korea made a decision that regime security would be ensured by having nuclear weapons. Now it does. Japan believes, like a mature democracy, that while it may one day require such weapons, it prefers merely the ability to have a nuke within a reasonably rapid time certain. On demand, as it were.

After the 2003 U.S. attack on Iran’s numero uno enemy, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the toppling of his regime; after the incredible demonstration of American military power in both Afghanistan and Iraq; the leadership of the Islamic Republic made a strategic decision to transition from a North Korea model to a Japan model. That is how nuclear weapons experts assess today’s Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Under such circumstances, the demands made by the Trump administration during months of negotiations are both reasonable and clear: Close down your enrichment and storage sites and forgo anything more than — maybe — token medical enrichment forever. Give up your stock of near-fissile material, enough to make several nuclear weapons. If Iran’s is a peaceful program, as they claimed, there is no need for enrichment. Period.

From one perspective, these demands should have been appealing to the now late Ayatollah Khamenei; the regime as it was constituted would remain in power, and potentially retain not simply the ability to return eventually to its clandestine program, but also the ability to support its terror proxies and otherwise interfere in the region. And it could have expected to be able to trade these concessions for relief from the sanctions that have throttled the country’s economy and given rise to civil unrest. Certainly this compared favorably to the alternative of retaining the right to enrich uranium, but remaining under sanctions as a consequence, and facing the risk of renewed military action should the regime ever seek to exercise that right.

But from another perspective, the Iranians simply didn’t trust Donald Trump. Perhaps he was going to bomb anyway? Perhaps he would renege on this deal as he did on the JCPOA? More importantly, the regime simply calculated — like most singularly focused issue groups — that any compromise was defeat. And so here we are.

Donald Trump has clearly rejected the Powell Pottery Barn rule — you break it, you own it. It was a dumb “rule” to begin with, and Trump is not much of a fan of such silly tropes. He rightly looked at Libya and noted that Obama broke that and didn’t do squat. His view is that the nukes, the missiles, the terrorism, the hating on Israel, and the whole kill-30,000-of-your-own-people attitude was intolerable, and with the State of Israel, let loose.

Thoughtful Washingtonians of a certain ilk wonder what it is that Trump is hoping to achieve. Well, see above. They ask further whether he has a plan, as if the absence of such a plan undercuts the entire raison d’etre of this conflict. It does not. Most such post-conflict plans don’t work brilliantly, much to my regret. And channeling the President, I suspect he doesn’t care much as long as a new regime doesn’t do the same bad stuff the old regime did.

Fair enough, but there’s a problem.

While the President may be uninterested in developing his inner neo-conservative and micro-managing a future Tehran government, there will be post-conflict requirements that are critical to his mission. For example, as David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security points out in our fascinating pod interview,

I think one thing that is left out, and it’s hard, but the nuclear scientists and scientists looking at advanced weapons, drones, missiles, we need to get a better sense of how to draw them into a new regime so they don’t leak to enemies in either revenge or just to see them as an opportunity to make money. I don’t think much thought’s been given to that. I mean, the Israelis mostly focus on how to kill them and deter them and how to get informants, but I don’t think they’re really thinking about that this is a group, as it was in the Soviet Union, that could turn out to be very dangerous.

This group could be highly motivated to help our enemies, including terrorists, so I think that needs to be done. Also, I mean, again, we’re not military planners, we’re not advocating military strikes, but I think... The US and Israel need to show that they’re going after and succeeding in limiting the remaining parts of the dangerous nuclear program, and particularly the enriched uranium stocks, some of the weaponization activities that we see appear to be being reconstituted before the war. Just make sure that we’re not sitting here three months from now wondering, did Iran scarf off 50 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium and has created a small enrichment plant to turn it into weapon grade?

In recent years, the Islamic Republic has focused on ensuring its program is dispersed, that various elements (centrifuges, fissile material) are hidden away, and that scientists are compartmentalized. We will not, as hard as we try, get it all from the air. And if we’re not going to see boots on the ground, we must have a trustworthy Iranian government in place to ensure that pieces of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program do not go astray.

Add to this the fact that the current leader of al Qaeda, Saif al Adel, lives in Tehran, and you see a whole new layer of risk about what might happen to all of Iran’s weapons materiel.

We dive into the nature of the Iranian nuclear program, ask hard questions about whether we would be here if Donald Trump had not in his first term withdrawn from the JCPOA, and explore whether there are analogies to Iraq in our discussion with Albright. See below.

TRANSCRIPT

Q: We’re about 57 hours into Operation Epic Fury. Where do you see things right now?

DA: Well, I think I see mostly attacks on the missile launching or offensive missile program in Iran and then command and control. And as far as we can tell, and we’re using satellite imagery every day ... Look, no nuclear site’s been struck. But I wouldn’t necessarily expect that this early. I mean, the nuclear sites that are important are pretty fortified. Some or one particularly is deeply underground. So I think we fully expect these sites to be attacked, or would view the operation as failing on this accomplishing the mission of really obliterating the nuclear weapons program. But so far, we have not seen any attacks.

And some of it is good. I mean, we don’t want the United States to attack the Bushehr nuclear power reactor or the Tehran research reactor. I mean, these could have radiological consequences. And like in the June war, I would assume the US and Israel have told Russia we will not attack the Bushehr nuclear power reactor.

Q: Talk a little bit about the status of the Iranian nuclear program.

DA: Before the war, in June, it was sort of in two parcels. One is the parcel to create highly enriched uranium for potential use in a bomb. And as you know, they could make weapon grade uranium in a matter of days sufficient for a bomb. They also had a number of sites in the other parcel to make the bomb itself. And that’s harder to understand because they’re smaller and more secretive than, let’s say, Fordow or Natanz. But nonetheless, they were preparing to be able to build a bomb pretty quickly, within months.

Israel and the United States eliminated the main enrichment sites, as you just mentioned, Fordow and Natanz. And Israel destroyed important parts of the nuclear weaponization production infrastructure. And we don’t think they destroyed it all, but in many cases it’s a linear process. You start at A, then you make something that goes to B, that is then modified into C, for example, the final weapon-grade uranium bomb component. Let’s say they took out B. And so you can’t get from A to C then. And they did that across several components of the nuclear weapon, and they also destroyed some of the expertise by killing some key... We call them Iranian Oppenheimers.

Q: What remains since the war in June?

DA: What we’ve seen is some salvaging operations and potentially rebuilding operations, reconstituting operations on the nuclear weaponization side, but minimal. We see that they’re carefully protecting the remaining stocks of highly rich uranium, which were not destroyed in the June war. The assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency is most, much, if not all, I’m almost quoting Director General Grossi, of the enriched uranium, highly enriched uranium is in an Isfahan mountain complex that’s part of the Isfahan nuclear site.

And through satellite imagery over the months, we saw that tunnel entrances had been heavily damaged by Tomahawk missiles. We think maybe some earth penetrator warheads had been put on the Tomahawks, and that Iran was opening the tunnel entrance. And one particularly, we think they drove vehicles in. So we don’t know what they’ve done, but they were trying to gain access to some of these stocks of highly enriched uranium. Director of Grossi said this morning in a press conference, “Well, we hope they haven’t moved any.” So we remain uncertain collectively what exactly Iran’s done with these highly enriched uranium stocks.

Q: What do the Iranians appear to be doing in order to harden and to reconstitute?

DA: I think what we see is, and again, it’s limited by our resources and the limitations of satellite imagery, and then the other information to the extent we can gather from governments, is that Iran is recovering things. I mean, unfortunately, you bomb a facility that’s involved in making weapon grade uranium cores, some of the things involved are pretty big and heavy and pretty robust. And so were they destroyed or just damaged?

And so, an example would be what’s called a vacuum induction furnace, absolutely necessary to melt uranium and particular weapon grade uranium and then process it down the line into a final shape. And again, we don’t know if that was hit. We know the site where that furnace likely was, but was it recovered? And Iran would have a hard time buying another one internationally and the ones they would make would probably be pretty low quality. So we have uncertainty there.

But they’re trying is what we see. They have not given up their ambition to build nuclear weapons. And that becomes very apparent when you look at this imagery. Iran refuses to let the IAEA inspect the enriched uranium stocks, which is a requirement of the safeguards agreement and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. So I think when President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, say that the program is being reconstituted, I wouldn’t perhaps go that far, but the evidence supports that they have not given up their ambition and that it remains a threat.

Q: Why are the Iranians so obstinate in the face of military pressure to pursue this weapon system?

DA: Well, let me just focus on the enrichment. The June war, and it was collectively the United States and Israel, destroyed their gas centrifuge program. They cannot produce the feed material anymore for a centrifuge program. The facilities to make centrifuges were destroyed. 22,000 centrifuges were either destroyed or put out of operation and probably would be hard to recover. And so you have a program that no longer really exists, but it has its remnants, and including, as we’ve discussed, the enriched uranium, it also may have some centrifuges it built, but didn’t deploy. And they’re not going to be making low enriched uranium for nuclear power reactors in this decade or the next. And so they’re still going to be buying it.

And so why won’t they give up enrichment, because they don’t need it? They claim they don’t want nuclear weapons. And the other reason that we’re seeing emerge, and we have Iranians on the staff, and we monitor the press, that they’ve somehow... They think it’s a slippery slope. Again, it was Khamenei mainly and his close advisors who are no longer with us, [thinking] that if they give in on this to the United States, then they’ll have to give in on missiles and proxies, and pretty soon their regime will collapse.

So it’s kind of a mindset that any concession will lead to more, and therefore they can’t do it. And now it’s irrational, but it’s their rationality, irrationality. And then the other part is you have to worry, and this is our concern, is that they continue to harbor nuclear weapons ambitions. The enriched uranium is kind of money in the bank. It’s effectively a full year’s worth of production from the pre-June enrichment program, and most of it is in the form of 60% enriched uranium. Well, over half of this money is in the form of 60% enriched uranium, which can be turned into weapon grade uranium very quickly, even with just three, 400 centrifuges. And so they have this, in a sense, this deposit in a bank, and they don’t want to give it up.

Q: Why didn’t we take that out in June?

DA: Well, I was in meetings in Israel two, three years ago, and this came up. I mean, of course, anybody planning strikes... And we were not planning strikes, but wanting to know what would be struck. Certainly I raised this issue, and there’s a chance that maybe the highly enriched uraniums have been what we call spiked through some clandestine operation. Think of what they did to the pagers against Hezbollah. But it’s harder to spike this, because of criticality concerns, you only put about 25 kilograms in any one container. So you have many, many containers of this and it’s at multiple sites, mostly at Isfahan, and very dangerous material. You just don’t open a valve and stick something in. If you release the uranium hexofluoride into the atmosphere, it rapidly reacts. And if you breathe it, not very much can kill you. So it’s hard to get it into these containers.

But that’s a possibility, that we’re worried about something that when Iran goes to enrich is going to break their... The spiking would cause the centrifuges to crash once they introduced it into the centrifuge. But we don’t know. And I think it was just an omission. And if they didn’t spike it, it was a mistake. Not to more carefully plan how to take out the enriched uranium and take out in the sense of destroy it. And I think that that has to be a priority for this mission. I’m worried that it’s not.

Q: What do you think about some of these newer sites and remaining nuclear scientists?

DA: Let me start with the scientists. I haven’t seen any evidence of more scientists being killed, but I saw that their bosses were. There were two current chairman, former chairman of the SPND, which is the organization that controls the nuclear weaponization. They were killed. Also, Shamkhani. I mean, they had many reasons to kill Shamkhani, but he was one of the spark plugs for the initial nuclear weapons program in the late ‘90s and early 2000s and maintained a role at a very senior level continuing that program. And so we think that last June was going after the Iranian Openheimers. This one is going after their bosses. We’ll see if they identify other people in the program and then kill them.

One of the things that happened after June is Iran stepped up a lot of security and secrecy around the remaining nuclear scientists. And also, interestingly, we don’t see the traditional nuclear establishment, the atomic energy organization of Iran being targeted. Eslami is its head. He comes out of the IRGC. He’s definitely aware of the nuclear weapons effort in the past, and he is still alive. So I think they’re not going after the traditional nuclear people, including centrifuge people.

On the Pickaxe Mountain, the background - Israel blew up a huge advanced centrifuge assembly facility that was nearing completion at Isfahan and Natanz in 2020. Iran said, “Well, we’re going to rebuild it under a nearby mountain that’ll be fairly deeply buried.” And they’ve been working on that for the last five years, and they’re still not finished. And you can see they’re still excavating because they have to bring the dirt out, but they are getting close to being finished and we’ve seen trucks going in, closed trucks. The suspicion has been for several years that it could also hold a small enrichment plant. There’s no evidence of it. The IAEA has never gone in. They’ve never received a complete declaration for the facility, and so it’s of great concern. It was not attacked in June, and it’s a good point that the war was suddenly stopped, and maybe Israel was planning more operations [before US called a halt].

We don’t get into it too much, but you have to look for vulnerabilities in the mountain. On the surface, this one looks a lot harder to destroy than Fordow. It is deeper than Fordow. They’ve hardened in recent months the tunnel entrances, but US is pretty creative, and there’re always vulnerabilities. And if nothing else, you can go in through the front door. And in fact, the Iranians are so worried about that at Isfahan that they buried the tunnel entrance. It’s buried them completely and leveled them with the surrounding hillside. So they worry about this. But at Pickaxe, they’re continuing construction. And we would think that it’s a legitimate target that should be taken out because it could be where they would try to reconstitute Iranian enrichment feeling invulnerable, as they said they were in Fordow. So we’ll see.

Q: What do you say to the people who say, “This is just Iraq all over again”?

DA: Well, they’re very different, very different situations. You probably know I was very active in 2001, 2002, 2003, looking at both programs. And I looked at the Iraq one and said there’s not... We couldn’t exclude a small nuclear weapons program. This goes back to 2002. Scientists, you can’t exclude tiny little things, but I felt there was no major program. The evidence put forth by the Bush administration was completely flawed. It was well known among the intelligence people that I know who deal with nuclear intelligence. And it’s a great tragedy that the point of view dominated that there was some Iraqi nuclear weapons program based on gas centrifuges.

But at the same time, we’re looking at Iran and discovering secret enrichment plants, big secret enrichment plans, all kinds of other evidence of secret enrichment. And finally, early 2003, Iran admits to it, but one of the constant problems with Iran has been that they admit to something when they’re so caught they have to, and then they hide more. At that time, they were hiding another enrichment plant, which we now know is Fordow, that was part of a crash nuclear weapons program that was ongoing and large in 2003, and that a lot of it was missed by the United States. So it’s very different situations.

Now, roll forward, Iran was faced with US troops in Iraq; faced with no longer worried about Saddam, stopped the program, but their own internal documents for this nuclear weapons program say it continued afterward, and there’s been evidence afterward, but it’s shifted its purpose. It went from let’s build five nuclear weapons quickly, which was their ambition, to let’s be prepared to build them if we’re given the order. And so that’s the nuclear weapons program we’ve seen for the last several years.

Q: What have we seen?

DA: There’s been various intelligence community statements that part has picked up. No one has said, except a misguided intelligence assessment that said that it stopped and didn’t restart. But even those people have published some things several years ago that said, “Yeah, but some weapons work did continue,” but it’s not a structured nuclear weapons program like the Aman Plan. And from my point of view, that misses the point. It’s a different kind of nuclear weapons program that we’re facing now where they don’t have an order to build weapons. In 2001, 2000, they got the order to build them. Now they don’t have an order to build them, but they’ve tried to maintain [the option].

The way we see what’s going on is they’re trying to get back... They’re just trying to follow the strategy, prepare to build nuclear weapons, try to reduce timelines, and now they’ve just been set back dramatically and they’re just trying to keep that mindset going. And so I think when people say, “Oh, it’s like Iraq,” or they say they don’t have a structured nuclear weapons program, they’re missing the point, missing what’s going on and that limits the options and you’re not properly making sense out of what’s going on. And so you don’t even understand what’s happening.

Q: Did we go after the wrong country in 2003?

DA: Yeah, I think so. And also, look at how they ended this. It’s called the Aman Plan. It’s their code name. It’s a logistics plan. It’s the translation. It’s classic nuclear weapons signatures. But they ended it out of fear of the United States. There were other reasons. The IAEA was breathing down their neck, armed with intelligence from the United States and US allies. And Saddam was gone, but fundamentally, they were worried about being attacked. So just the threat of attack got them to kind of put the program underground.

Interestingly, they didn’t stop building Fordow. It was called Al Ghadir - the plant to make weapon grade uranium using low enriched uranium as a starter material, and they never stopped that. And when inspectors went in there in 2009, when it was revealed by Western powers, they looked at the piping. And I talked to three of them and they said this plant was being designed to make weapon grade uranium.

Then they left. When they came back, all the evidence of that, all the piping, the equipment had been stripped out. And when they asked, “Why did you take out all this piping?” They said, “Oh, we needed to repaint the ceiling.” And then put in different kind of piping to make low enriched uranium.

Q: What are your concerns about the custody of that program in the sort of chaotic transition that might happen in the wake of this operation?

DA: I wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on this with Andrea Stricker, and Andrea initiated it, but it reminded me of this problem and we ran into it post-war in Iraq. And again, the Iranian situation is different. In Iraq, we were worried about natural uranium bomb designs, classified centrifuge designs. In Iran, we’re worried about a full-blown nuclear power reactor, Bushehr. We’re worried about operating research reactors, Tehran Research Reactor. And we’re worried about huge stocks, relatively huge stocks of highly enriched uranium, and 20% enriched uranium. And even the low enriched, there’s tons of low enriched uranium and Natanz and Isfahan. So there’s very dangerous nuclear assets there.

And we wrote the op-ed a couple of weeks ago because we were hoping that if the United States does succeed or over succeed and creates instability, a reversion to sort of provincial control. I understand one of the things that Khamenei did was order, sort of pre-delegate authority to, I’m calling them provincial commanders and leaders. Does the situation become highly instable? Is there potential for armed insurrection?

Q: What is your primary concern out of those possibilities?

DA: I think the primary concern would be the highly enriched uranium stocks at Isfahan. Would some enterprising group decide to dig back in and try to see if they can find some? Would they try to sabotage Bushehr? Or would the chaos lead to safety problems at Bushehr? It doesn’t take much.

We know that from the case in Ukraine with the Zaporizhzhia reactors that they’re very dependent for emergencies on kind of thin electric wires. We always think of the wires that take the electricity from the nuclear power plants, but there have to be electrical lines coming in that would run the pumps to cool the reactor when it’s shut down because there’s so much heat generated by the fission products that it can melt the fuel and cause a catastrophic meltdown.

So we know from internal documents, we studied the Bushehr nuclear reactor on a safety question. They’ve had fires in these emergency electrical lines. The regional electricity authority is not particularly competent. And if there was total chaos, would those people even be running the regional electrical system? So you do have to worry that you have to be prepared for what could be a catastrophic accident if all goes badly.

Q: Is there a danger that as the regime collapses and there’s chaos on the ground, that terrorists could obtain the components for a dirty bomb or ultimately for a weapon of mass destruction?

DA: There’s a lot of radiological sources in Iran, not a lot, but many, and those could be grabbed and used in a dirty bomb potentially. But I think on the nuclear weapon, I think from point of view the good ISIS, which is very dedicated against the bad ISIS, they lack the ability to, sort of the knowledge and experience to the weaponization side. We know that Al-Qaeda was working on some of that in a rudimentary way in Afghanistan before the war there, before the US invasion. So there’s very valuable information in the Iranian system. And that if they were determined, they could try to identify people. Those people may be more than willing to help in a chaotic situation. They may be more than willing to trade nuclear weapons design information, or more importantly, initiation of a nuclear weapon. How do you get the thing to detonate? So they’re not so worried about the design, but how do you get it to detonate? And that’s where they really lack knowledge and experience.

So they may look for opportunities to recruit some people using sums of money and help getting out. I worked on a case in Iraq. Before the war, we were very depressed because we knew that it was all just motivated by false claims on nuclear and we were completely powerless to do anything about it and always had been. And it was a very humbling experience that how little influence we have with governments, including our own. But we decided, well, let’s go find some former nuclear people and see if we can find classified information.

Q: How successful might terrorist organizations be in securing assistance from scientists?

DA: I was able to connect with one who had kept all the gas centrifuge classified information and some parts, so it was kind of the crown jewels of the gas centrifuge program. And I was able to — and I knew him before the war and able to trade him coming to the United States with his family for turning over that information to the CIA — and it was difficult because they didn’t want to bring out his whole family. And it was actually quite an ugly situation I’ve never even talked about publicly and probably shouldn’t now. But we had to use what influence we did to get the CIA to fulfill its commitments, to bring out his family and himself.

That could be done by al Qaeda with scientists in Iran. All it took was scientists wanting to make a trade and having vital information. And Al-Qaeda, in chaos, one could see that, we saw in Iraq, in fact, I got a call from embedded journalist during the march to Baghdad. They reached the Tuwaitha nuclear site, and he called me and said, “Here I am. We don’t know what this is.” The army people didn’t know what it was, and it was the main nuclear site, and they had large stocks of uranium. And the storage area had been looted. But fortunately, they wanted the blue barrels holding the yellow cake to store water rather than the yellow cake itself, and so they dumped that on the ground.

But there again, there was just no security at the Tuwaitha nuclear site in the chaos of war, and that could happen at Isfahan and then potentially people could drill back in. So that’s why we want the United States to be aware of this. It was not aware of it in Iraq. All the talk of WMD, looking for centrifuge plants, the atomic bomb, and they didn’t do the basic work of thinking about securing the nuclear facilities and assets.

Q: What’s an honest and fair assessment of the JCPOA?

DA: I worked informally with the Trump administration, with the National Security Council to create a fix for the deal. It was largely motivated by Senator Corker, who at the time was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But it recognized that by 2020, 2025, let’s say 2025, all limits were essentially off in a real way, in the sense they could build as many centrifuges as they wanted. They were still limited on enriched uranium. So in the most positive way, it was a time-bound agreement, and so we would be facing what we’re facing today, just roll forward a couple years.

And I think even Biden people recognized it. That’s why he wanted a longer, stronger deal, and that he quickly gave that up. I had a former administration official tell me that they really had no Iran policy for three years. So they had the initial one, and then they just really did nothing, essentially, except go through the motions.

I think the sense was that it was an agreement that just advantaged Iran and did not... And it’s in line with the Iranian strategy, build up your capability, shorten your timelines. So you limit them in one way and then they try to find a way around it. Even things like the Arak reactor, everyone thought, oh, the Arak reactor’s going to be converted. The Chinese and British and Americans will come up with a new design. We’ll take out the calandria that filled with natural uranium to make weapons grade plutonium, we’ll put in enriched uranium and limit the number of fuel tubes where you can put in the fuel so you can’t run it with natural uranium.

Q: What about the withdrawal?

DA: After Trump withdrew, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency said, “Oh, we didn’t tell them, but we had managed to buy more tubes so we could create a duplicate of the original.” It’s called the calandria. He said, “Well, we didn’t know how long this deal was going to last. We wanted to be able to recover quickly.” So here, they just blatantly cheated, and those kind of things were suspected, but it was hard to prove them until after the JCPOA.

There was another case, we thought they had advanced centrifuges they’d made and hidden away, and the deal did not create a baseline. It didn’t say, “Okay, we want to know how many you made. It’s not enough to know how many you deployed.” Well, we think one of the surges post-2021 in advanced centrifuges was taking those out of the secret storage and putting them in Natanz and... Well, Natanz. So it was 1,200 or so advanced centrifuges.

So the deal had some very deep flaws, but we were at the time trying to think, okay, let’s make sure there’s a new deal at a 10-year mark, and if not, then all the sanctions would snap back. The idea was to do it legislatively, and it could have been done sooner. I mean, there was concern that this was just not fast enough, and finally Trump decided it definitely was not fast enough and it’s best just to leave the deal. So the buildup started earlier.

Q: What about chemical weapons? Does Iran have a chemical weapon stockpile of any kind?

DA: Our lane on the chemical really has to do with what Iran may give to proxies to put on drones, and it has to do with pharmaceutical-based agents where you could take some aerosol phenytol... It is well-recognized it’s very deadly, and so it’s not going to kill a lot of people, but it could kill several or tens of people who are victimized by a drone attack where it’s aerosol. Iran did experiments on aerosoling these PBAs, let me call it. I’m getting tongue-tied. But in our work, we hear that they have stocks of chemical weapons, but we don’t know the truth of it, but it’s another concern.

In the Iraq case, I guess the view was initially they had lots of chemical weapons. Then I think our assessment at the end was they had no deliverable chemical weapons, and in fact that was true. They had chemical weapons hidden away. That fact, as you probably know, was kept secret by the US because they were worried about unguarded stocks that terrorists could get their hands on or insurgents could get their hands on. Still, the chemical weapon itself would be quite deadly, even if it can’t be delivered in a conventional manner, but in an unconventional manner, it could be. I think it’s something to keep in mind in Iran.

Q: What needs to be part of the Trump administration’s thinking once they begin to wrap up military operations?

DA: Well, I think I agree completely with your earlier point that the goal has to try to be some kind of stable government that can be in control of the situation. I’m not sure we can accept another dictatorship with just new tyrants in place that are ideologically-driven, but I think we have to strive for something better. I think one thing that is left out, and it’s hard, but the nuclear scientists and scientists looking at advanced weapons, drones, missiles, we need to get a better sense of how to draw them into a new regime so they don’t leak to enemies in either revenge or just to see them as an opportunity to make money. I don’t think much thought’s been given to that. I mean, the Israelis mostly focus on how to kill them and deter them and how to get informants, but I don’t think they’re really thinking about that this is a group, as it was in the Soviet Union, that could turn out to be very dangerous.

This group could be highly motivated to help our enemies, including terrorists, so I think that needs to be done. Also, I mean, again, we’re not military planners, we’re not advocating military strikes, but I think they’re not showing... The US and Israel need to show that they’re going after and succeeding in limiting the remaining parts of the dangerous nuclear program, and particularly the enriched uranium stocks, some of the weaponization activities that we see appear to be being reconstituted before the war. Just make sure that we’re not sitting here three months from now wondering, did Iran scarf off 50 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium and has created a small enrichment plant to turn it into weapon grade?

Q: What’s the most important message you would have for the President right now?

DA: Well, I’m biased, obviously. I’m a highly specialized person, a scientist. You say you want to end the nuclear weapons program and make sure Iran doesn’t build one, well then do that and focus on Pickaxe Mountain, Isfahan mountain site, and recruiting key scientists that have insight into the program to help provide a guide to where any hidden assets are. The United States can offer money and safety. I mean, it was interesting to me in the Iraq case, coming to the United States was really highly valued by people who understood in June of 2003 that something bad was going to happen, and they wanted out and they were willing to trade. I think recruiting those people is important to help you understand what’s going on, and the US should do it because Israel scares people because they will assassinate or kill people so quickly.

Listen to the pod here.

Full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES:

The Nuclear Threat After Tehran Falls (Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2026)

Imagery Update: SPND HQ, aka Nour Site, is Demolished: a New Building is Rising (ISIS, February 24, 2026)

Iran Threat Geiger Counter: A Probabilistic Approach (ISIS, February 20, 2026)

Imagery Update: New Developments at Pickaxe Mountain Tunnel Entrances (ISIS, February 11, 2026)

Imagery Update: All Entrances to Esfahan Tunnel Complex are Now Completely Buried (ISIS, February 9, 2026)

Activity on X

Iran Update (ISW-CTP, February 26, 2026)

Iran Nears Deal to Buy Supersonic Anti-Ship Missiles from China (Reuters, February 24, 2026)

US Tells Embassy Staff in Israel to Leave Now If They Want Amid Trump Threats to Attack Iran (NBC, February 27, 2026)

Israel Facing Prospect of War With a Depleted Missile Defense (The New York Times, February 27, 2026)

What Are Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities? (Council on Foreign Relations, February 6, 2026)