00:00As a defense expert that you are, I mean, these claims made by Israel that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon, nothing new.
00:09I mean, they go back to the 1990s with Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, other key leaders in Israel's past.
00:19Why can we be so sure that Iran is as close as it apparently now is?
00:25Well, frankly, I don't wish to be facetious or impolite.
00:29We can't be so confident this time, but we can look at the combination of circumstances that have brought things to where they are and why Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity of not say yes and not say no from the United States to go for an attack on Iran.
00:50And he's wanted to use a military option or been considering a military option, we know, ever since 2011.
00:56Now, what's different this time was the remarks by the head of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Authority, the UN body monitoring sanctions and other arrangements under various agreements,
01:10and not least the Nuclear Anti-Proliferation Treaty terms with Iran.
01:17Now, the IAEA said that they had been cheated more egregiously than usual this time because they'd been prevented actively from getting to three sites that they regarded as crucial.
01:31And they deduced from that that this is the IAEA, and Mr. Grassi, the director, has mentioned this, that Iran had been engaged in a game of diplomatic deception about what its intents were over nuclear, particularly uranium in Richmond, whether they were going for weapons grade.
01:54And there is a general assumption, and it's not just Netanyahu's or Trump's or any of the Western allies, it's the IAEA, that they were going for quite a weapons program.
02:05And once again, we had very short timelines being offered that anything between nine and 15 warheads would be ready for action well before the end of the year.
02:14And that was the excuse. And the thing that really fascinates me, exactly what was said before the attack was launched by Netanyahu to Trump and what Trump said back.
02:27Because although Trump's support has been there, it at times has seemed quite fulsome, but not as fulsome as usual as you would get from Donald Trump.
02:37And he very much, as we hear from latest pronouncements coming from the G7 meeting, he wants it to stop.
