[0:00]More breaking news, today President Trump said if he didn't attack Iran, they would have had a nuclear bomb and quote, within two weeks. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says the US will not occupy Iran and it will be up to the people to choose their new leader. There will be no American boots on in Iran. This is not Iraq, this is not Germany, this is not Japan. We're going to free the people up from a terrorist regime, and the goal is not only to help the Iranian people to chart a new destiny, to make sure no matter who takes over in Iran, no matter who it is, no matter who the people pick, they cannot become the largest state sponsor of terrorism. Join me now, Joe Sirincione, National Security Analyst and Vice Chair of the Center for International Policy Board of Directors. He's also the author of Nuclear Nightmares, securing the world before it is too late. Welcome back, Joe, it's good to see you despite the circumstances, but I'm curious your reaction to President Trump saying Iran was two weeks away from the bomb. That is simply not true. As your previous guest from the House Intelligence Committee said, the administration has presented no evidence to back up their claims of an imminent threat, not the missiles and certainly not the nuclear weapon. And And here's why we can say that with some confidence. We have a very good idea of what Iran has, and the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has helped certify that. And we know how much uranium they have, in particular, how much 60% enriched uranium they have. And that's the stuff they would use to make a bomb, the core of a bomb. They could take some of that material, put it back into into centrifuges, wouldn't take that many, a couple of hundred centrifuges. And in about a week or two, they could have enough material for a nuclear bomb. And this people often confuse this, a material for a bomb and a bomb. But the material is the hardest part of making a bomb, but it's just the first step. Then you have to turn that enriched uranium, 90% enriched uranium into a metal. You have to shape it into the the components of the bomb. You have to assemble the bomb. You have to have a bomb design. Iran probably has that. They probably got it from AQ Khan of Pakistan. And then you'd have to test that weapon. And that's necessary step. For example, North Korea, their first nuclear test was a fizzle, didn't work. They had to test it again. And then you'd have a crude bomb. If you want to put it on a warhead, that's months more of work, but all of that just to make a bomb would take several months of work even if they were doing it in parallel with their enrichment process. So two weeks, no way. No way. So as we're talking with you, we're also showing video of the missiles being launched. What do you suspect was destroyed and to what extent? Well, it appears that the impetus for the strike, as we're here reporting now from the Washington Post and the The Guardian and MS Now, is that they saw an opportunity to have a leadership strike. And that's what you're seeing there. I believe that's the IRGC headquarters. That's a Centcom video and these are cruise missiles taking off from um, one of some of our destroyers. That's what they were going for mainly, but, as I say, there's several hundred other targets and they were almost certainly going after the missile sites, and they've test testified to that and we see that. They're going after the air defense sites. You see that in some of the videos. The little radars, the housing that's going on. And of course, it seems to be some additional uh bombing at Isfahan, which is where they do some of their uranium conversion and where we believe some of that 60% of which uranium is stored. So they're trying to further degrade a nuclear program. One they claimed was obliterated last June, but now one they insist we still need more uh damage to contain that program. And am I correct in recalling that Isfahan was targeted in June, and so if it needed to be targeted again, is there any likelihood based on this combined attack, again, a rarely robust one from the US and Israel, that will be coming back sometime next year to continue bombing nuclear sites in Iran? Almost certainly. That's why we've argued for for years, there is no military solution to this problem. You cannot bomb away another country's nuclear program. It's it's never worked even though we've attempted to do it in many many circumstances, because the knowledge is still there, the machinery is still there. And in this particular case, in the June strike, we hit several sites at Isfahan, and I've visited Isfahan.
[4:49]It is a relatively soft target. There's lots of things you could knock out with surface bombing, but they have now deeply buried tunnels in Isfahan, and almost certainly we didn't get those, and we've seen the Iranians do work around those in recent weeks, covering the tunnels, putting protective covers over some of the entrances, et cetera. So I can understand why that would be on anybody's target list, but still, there are sites like at Fordo, the other enrichment site, at Natanz and at Isfahan that are simply too deeply buried for the US to hit. That's where they may have centrifuges. That's where they may be storing some of the gas. So it's highly unlikely we could eliminate that by military means alone. You need an agreement. You need inspectors to do that. Uh, a sober conversation, Joe, Cerincione, but I thank you for it, nonetheless.
