Introducing The Iran Breakdown with Mark Dubowitz

DUBOWITZ:

Rich Goldberg, great to have you on the podcast.

GOLDBERG:

It’s great to be here. I feel like we know each other and now we’re on a podcast together. It’s amazing.

DUBOWITZ:

Well, it is amazing. It occurs to me, Rich, I think I’ve known you almost two decades. I worked with you on Iran policy beginning when you were a young staffer working for then-Congressman Mark Kirk, and then obviously in the Senate you were working for Senator Kirk. And then Rich worked in the White House as the director in charge of countering Iran’s nuclear program. So, big jobs. Also, I think he took some detours as Chief of Staff to Governor Rauner of Illinois and obviously served our country with distinction in the US Navy. So, first of all, thank you for your service. Thank you for all you’ve done. I can think of no better person to talk about Iran policy under the Trump administration than you, Rich. So, let’s break it down.

GOLDBERG:

Let’s do it.

DUBOWITZ:

All right,. Let’s begin where we are. Trump has come in. He’s facing a serious threat in terms of Iran’s expanding nuclear program. Where are we? Position us with respect to the nuclear threat that we face and then we can talk about the way forward.

GOLDBERG:

So I always like to make analogies that translate this to people at home listening. And if you’re somebody who’s watched the Super Bowl recently and you’re thinking about football analogies, I think the Iranians are sort of on the one-yard line right now of the nuclear threshold. Remember the three key legs of the nuclear stool for the Iranian nuclear weapons program. You know his, Mark, they need fissile material, right? So they need the nuclear material that we always hear about in the news. They’re enriching uranium. They’re at 60% high enriched uranium. They were caught at 84% high enriched uranium by international inspectors. They’re obviously are producing also a 20% high enriched uranium. They’re producing low enriched uranium. We know that weapons-grade uranium threshold is 90%. They’re there. They’re not actually producing it, just to clarify. They’ve come really close to it and been caught there in the eighties.

GOLDBERG:

But understanding that with all the advanced centrifuge technology that they have developed and deployed over the last four years, they have reconfigured those centrifuges, put them into what we call cascades and designed their ability to produce weapons-grade uranium when they choose to do so. That’s my view. I think they’ve proven to us the technical capacity. And if you look at some of the estimates that are out there of how long it would take them to take their current stockpiles of 60%, 20% and move to that 90% to have enough fissile material for one bomb’s worth, we’re talking about a long holiday weekend. And then you add on days and weeks after that to get two bombs’ worth, three bombs’ worth, four bombs’ worth and so on. And so from the fissile material threat, it’s sort of in the rearview mirror.

GOLDBERG:

There was a time at which we would say, “Oh, they just have this much stockpile. They don’t really know how to get the weapons grade. They’re still working on it. They still doing R&D on advanced centrifuges.” I think that time has come and gone and we should talk what that means prospectively for any sort of arrangements that you would negotiate with them because it changes the dynamic fundamentally. But that’s one leg of the stool. Second leg of the stool, delivery systems, right? If you had a nuclear weapon, how would you deliver it? Well, they have ballistic missile. They have cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and they’ve proven that they know how to use them and they will use them, in fact. Twice last year, we saw them use ballistic missiles against the State of Israel for the first time in history. So the delivery systems are there and continue to be tested. And by the way, we know that they have a space launch vehicle program that’s a cover for an ICBM program, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Program.

GOLDBERG:

They’re working on the delivery system, not just to hit Israel or Europe. They want to hit the continental United States. Defense Department, our Intelligence Community has been telling us that for years, and they continue working towards that goal. So the material, they’re already there. Delivery system certainly against Israel, against Europe is there, soon to be potentially against the United States. And then the last question is the weapon itself. That’s the part that we’ve never been able to say, “Got you. You’re doing the weapon.” We had the intelligence community telling us that they halted the formal weapon program back in 2003.

GOLDBERG:

We had evidence from the International Atomic Energy Agency showing that at least it went on in different ways through 2009. The nuclear archive that the Israelis found, Mossad brought out of Iran back in 2018 shows us details and then some of these sites that the UN has tried to get into and has taken soil samples to certain places, finding evidence of nuclear material, all sort of has alarm bells going off, saying, “We think something’s still happening somewhere, but nobody can say, ‘Here it is. Smoking gun. You’re working on the weapon here.'”

GOLDBERG:

We know that there’s a secret nuclear military organization called SPND with nuclear weapons scientists still employed, which was headed until his death by the godfather of the nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. But we haven’t been able to say, “You’re doing weapon work.” And the IC, the Intelligence Community never changed its position since 2007 that the program had halted and there was no formal weaponization activity going on until recently. And we know now in the last few months that has changed. Now, you have people caveating and saying different, “Well, we don’t think they’re making a nuclear weapon today.” But no longer can the Intelligence Community tell us that Iran is not engaged in a weaponization activity. And in fact, we have leaked unclassified reports saying that they are working on computer modeling towards a weapon, which the UN itself, the JCPOA, the old Iran nuclear deal called a weaponization activity. It’s obviously one of the first steps as you’re testing, as you’re thinking about height. By the way, the United States doesn’t test nuclear weapons today. We haven’t done it in many, many, many years. How do we test our nuclear stockpile?

DUBOWITZ:

Right. So computer modeling.

GOLDBERG:

Computer modeling.

DUBOWITZ:

Right. What are they doing?

GOLDBERG:

So it’s not like nothing. This is a real part of weaponization activities that they’re working on. Why are they doing that? What else are they doing? Who’s working on it? Where? We don’t have answers to those questions. One last thing I’ll leave this topic with is what if they’re not working towards a warhead? What if they’re not working on the miniaturization aspects that we all saw in the nuclear archives and what we think they were working on back in 2003 in the Imad program and fitting a nuclear weapon on a missile to deliver in a traditional sense and then building up a stockpile of these nuclear weapons. Or do they just want to go boom in the desert? A crude nuclear device to do that. Well, that’s a lot shorter amount of time, probably a lot easier to accomplish.

DUBOWITZ:

And which give us a sense, of how long this will take, the estimates of the US and Intelligence Community about building a warhead versus a crash program and a crude nuclear device. What are we talking about in terms of months, years?

GOLDBERG:

The public estimates that you’ve seen are a year, 18 months, depending on Israeli estimates, American estimates.

DUBOWITZ:

To build a warhead.

GOLDBERG:

On the warhead. A few months, six months or less on the crude nuclear device. And we don’t know where they’re at right now. Maybe they’re already working on it.

DUBOWITZ:

Right. And just to put a final point on that, because there’s been so much discussion about building a warhead that they could have fixed to a missile. But why would Iran decide to short-circuit it through a crash program and just merely do a crude nuclear device in four to six months?

GOLDBERG:

Well, you declare yourself a nuclear power. You show that you are in nuclear power. You cross the threshold. And you don’t actually know what else they’re doing. You don’t know where else they’ve built certain things. Where did the material come from? There’s a lot of hypotheticals built into this, right? If something goes boom, there was fissile material involved. Did it get diverted in the known sites where the IAEA, the UN inspectors go and see things? Did they close them down for a certain amount of time? Did they say there was a fire in a facility while they start diverting nuclear material? Is there some other place they’re enriching uranium that we don’t know about? Is there a crash program somewhere that would be involved if that ever happened?

GOLDBERG:

You would have to wonder what steps led to that moment. But the minute it happens, the intel picture just gets flooded with reports of rumors of this is going to happen. “Oh, Hezbollah has a suitcase bomb now. Oh, there’s a dirty bomb potential now to terrorist organizations.” Just the whole strategic paradigm shifts, buying Iran more time. Everybody’s a little more afraid. You think that we’re extorted today with the threat of nuclear weapons. What happens when they actually go boom? And then they say, “Oh, you really want to come after us? We might be able to go boom again. Maybe we got more surprises for you in a couple of months.”

DUBOWITZ:

Which there’s two things I want you to address. First of all, you’ve laid out today that Iran is a threshold nuclear weapons power, right? Has a fissile material that produced multiple bombs. It’s got long-range missiles to deliver it to Israel, Europe, and one day to the United States. And it’s begun initial weaponization work, which puts it on a pathway to develop a warhead or a crude nuclear device. So two questions come out of that. The first is, when did all this nuclear expansion occur? We had a nuclear deal in 2015. President Trump withdrew from that deal in May of 2018.

DUBOWITZ:

And so give our listeners just a view of when all of this expansion occurred. Did it occur under Trump, occurred under Biden? When did this actually happen? And the second thing to address is the JCPOA. Is it not fair to say that this is exactly what the JCPOA was designed to do, was to prevent all of these pathways to nuclear weapons, in which would we have been better off if we had stayed in the JCPOA and not withdrawn in 2018? Would Iran be much further away from having nuclear weapons than they are today? So I think we need to address that before we talk about the way forward.

GOLDBERG:

There are two fundamental fatal flaws in the JCPOA that directly result in the threat in front of us today. And that threat was inevitable because of the JCPOA. Two fundamental ones. I know a lot of people talk about sunsets and oh, they should have been longer sunsets. Honestly, I could care less about sunsets because it’s just being held to the promise of a radical, Shiite, maniac dictator in Iran who just wakes up one day and says, “Yeah, I have a sunset. It’s today.” So thank you for whatever the JCPOA says.

GOLDBERG:

Two things. Number one, verification and number two, dismantlement. Neither occurred. The first thing you would do, you would think in a business negotiation, in any negotiation, is to say to the other party, “Show me everything you’ve got. Declare your program. I want maximum information on everything you currently are doing and have done so that I know if you’re making a concession. So I know the extent of your activities and knowledge and advancement and who’s worked on what and what facilities you have and how many things you put away somewhere.”

GOLDBERG:

They never came clean in the JCPOA. They never were forced to declare all their past nuclear weapons activities and show a chain of custody from 2003 onward to 2018. In fact, when you see satellite imagery emerge in 2018 of sites, unexplained warehouses with containers being moved out of buildings, soil being thrown up and down to try to hide things from inspectors, multiple other sites inspected in 2019, 2020, showing the presence of nuclear materials completely unexplained. Yet somehow we think tracing back to that nuclear weapons program, you have a fundamental breakdown in verification, which means anything they assured us in JCPOA, anything they conceded or said there’s a restriction, you have no idea of knowing if it’s a restriction.

DUBOWITZ:

So when then Secretary of State John Kerry was the lead negotiator for the United States on the JCPOA, said at the time, “Iran doesn’t have to come clean because we know everything we need to know about Iran’s nuclear program.” What’s your reaction to Kerry’s source here?

GOLDBERG:

John Kerry did not know that there was a secret nuclear weapons archive sitting in a warehouse in Tehran, certainly never knew the contents of it, and I don’t think anybody else did until the Israelis revealed it. And we’ve learned a lot about the program from those documents. And then you could go down the list of sites like Turquzabad and others that have been visited by the IAEA. John Kerry probably can’t even spell it, doesn’t ever heard of him.

GOLDBERG:

So how does he know all about the program? Never heard about these sites. Why is there nuclear material there, Mr. Kerry? He has no idea because they’ve never fully come clean. He’s never been inside of a military site. By the way, neither has the IAEA. They’ve never visited SPND offices, couldn’t even tell you where they are. No one’s interviewed a nuclear weapons scientist and sat down and said, “Tell me what you did.” Nobody could tell me in accounting of exactly how many nuclear capable missiles they have and where they are. So the program is completely unverified. There are aspects that are subject to verification, but in totality, the program is unverified. Therefore, if I were conducting a negotiation and I don’t even know what the person on the other side of the table has to give up, and I’m saying, “Sounds good. You’re making a really good concession here.” How do you know? You don’t even know everything you’ve got.

DUBOWITZ:

So you can’t verify what you don’t know.

GOLDBERG:

So that’s one piece.

DUBOWITZ:

Right. And dismantlement.

GOLDBERG:

Dismantlement. The minute we decided that we were just going to take Iran’s promise to not do certain things for now, for the moment, or for 10 years, or for 15 years, I don’t care how long they promise for. If you allow them to keep R&D on centrifuges, if you allow them to keep facilities open, they will just wait around for that moment where they turn a key and they whip it back out, and then they deploy more advanced centrifuges and then they figure out, and then they can just enrich uranium. So that’s exactly what’s happened. The only piece of the JCPOA where you had a sort of dismantlement was that the Iraq heavy water reactor, which dealt with the plutonium threat, the plutonium pathway to a bomb.

GOLDBERG:

Even then what happened was they poured concrete into the core to render it dysfunctional until such time under the JCPOA, they were supposed to retrofit the facility away from being one that could be a plutonium threat. Somebody can explain that one to you, but there’s all these architectural models of how you’re going to work it so it can’t actually be used to be a plutonium threat in the future. It never happened during JCPOA, it never moved forward. They always had delays.

GOLDBERG:

And they announced after we got out of JCPOA, during the Trump administration, that they had hidden from inspectors pipes that are needed to rebuild the core and could do so at a moment’s notice if they wanted to. So they had no intention of abandoning that facility. We didn’t destroy the facility. It was just we poured concrete into some pipes into the core, which apparently they could just rebuild. The key enrichment facilities that we know about, we’re talking about, Natanz, Fordow. They weren’t dismantled, they weren’t destroyed. They were retrofitted. In certain cases, we actually legitimized enrichment to continue, like at Natanz. And in Fordow, we said, “Yeah, you can keep this massive under a mountain facility that is completely dangerous and could one day be a nuclear weapons threat to us, yeah, you can keep it open and not destroy it, and we’ll have the Russians come in and do radioisotope research in there and it’ll be wonderful. What a great use for this nuclear weapons facility.” I mean, are you insane? So no dismantlement, no verification. So what happens?

DUBOWITZ:

And by the way, Rich, I want you to talk a little bit about this because the deal was reached in 2015, A number of restrictions that were temporary that would sunset. We’re now in 2025, and talk a little bit about where we would’ve been had we stayed in the JCPOA and where we were heading in the next five years. And if you could also talk about the other side of the deal, because a lot of folks focus on nuclear physics, but they forget about the economic sanctions relief side of the deal and the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran would otherwise have gotten as part of the deal.

GOLDBERG:

Yeah, so if you go from 2015 to 2030, let’s use this 15 year timeframe, you’re going through a process where Iran gets everything. They get massive sanctions relief. All of the tools, that economic pressure, get put into a lockbox under the deal. They can sponsor terrorism, they can build their long range missiles. They can foment wars throughout the Middle East. They can plot assassinations in the United States. Anything you want, all the sanctions that you would use against the regime are off the table. Central Bank of Iran, oil, sector based sanctions, everything, gold, precious metals, everything just gone. Okay, so now you’ve handcuffed the United States with sanctions pressure across non-nuclear threats, by the way, in addition to the nuclear threat, in exchange for what? Well, in 2020… Oh, they get more, by the way. Oh, that’s right, it’s not… In exchange for what? We give them more in 2020. The UN Arms Embargo, the Conventional Arms Embargo will go away. Now they can-

DUBOWITZ:

Right, and it went away.

GOLDBERG:

Yeah, it went away.

DUBOWITZ:

Yeah.

GOLDBERG:

Oh, and then a couple of years later,-

DUBOWITZ:

2023.

GOLDBERG:

… 2023, a missile embargo will go away too.

DUBOWITZ:

Yeah, and it went away

GOLDBERG:

And it went away. Oh, and by the way, guess what they waited for until that missile embargo went away, transferring ballistic missiles, transferring drones to Russia. After the arms embargo went away, drones went to Russia. After the missile embargo went away, ballistic missiles went to Russia. Totally predictable. So wait a second, so what are we getting out of this again? Okay, so they’ve refrained from enriching uranium above a certain amount, above a certain stockpile at one facility while the other one’s still open as well doing weird scientific R&D or something on radioisotope, supposedly. The Iraq reactor has been temporarily disabled for a certain amount of time until they would choose to rebuild it, which is a good thing.

GOLDBERG:

But all the sudden, 2024 comes around, 2025 comes around. Their work on advanced centrifuges is legalized. They can start deploying more and more of these advanced centrifuges and figuring out how to make weapons-grade uranium the way that they did over the last four years. And then as you get to 2030, basically everything’s legitimate. They’ve figured out how to make the weapons-grade uranium using the sunsets for advanced centrifuges, now they can. They’re actually allowed under the deal in year 15 to make weapons-grade uranium. The one thing they can’t do is make a nuclear weapon. But by the way, over that 15 year period, I mean, what is that $1.5 trillion? I mean, how much money have they reaped into their coffers?

 

DUBOWITZ:

I think our colleagues at FDD had estimated certainly over a trillion dollars in sanctions relief to fortify the economy, have a massive slush fund to finance their proxies. So, basically, just by being patient and taking patient pathways to nuclear weapons, they get a massive economic windfall. And you end up in 2030, essentially where we are today except for the fact that today the economy’s on its knees, the rial is collapsed, it’s lost 99.99% of its value since the revolution.

GOLDBERG:

And what does Yemen look like in 2030 under that deal? What does Syria look like? What does Iraq look like? What does Gaza look like? What are all these places… Totally entrenched. The region is owned by Iran that’s very wealthy. The missile program has advanced unfettered, can’t do anything about it. They probably have ICBMs at that point, and they know how to make weapons-grade uranium.

DUBOWITZ:

So Rich, let me ask you this because I remember, I mean, we spent a lot of time criticizing the JCPOA. You spent a lot of time advocating for President Trump to withdraw from the deal. You and I, I remember writing a piece in the first week of the new Biden administration, and it was advice to our friends on the Biden administration to Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk and others who were coming in about a new Iran policy. President Biden obviously had spent a lot of time on the campaign trail criticizing maximum pressure, saying that the maximum pressure campaign of President Trump had failed and that he would come in with a new policy. Talk a little bit about what that policy became and what we had advised them to do, which clearly they decided not to do. And really what happened in four years under President Biden to Iran’s nuclear program.