00:00Any interest in listening to the actual nuclear physicists in the U.S. Congress here?
00:07So I'm Congressman Bill Foster. I'm a PhD physicist who worked for 25 years at Permian National Accelerator Lab,
00:15designing giant particle accelerators. I know this technology pretty well.
00:19I was very disappointed that we learned very little about the high inventory of high enriched uranium,
00:2960% enriched uranium, and its whereabouts and what that meant for the breakout time to Iran's first nuclear device.
00:39There is, I think, frankly a very over-optimistic portrayal of what was and was not accomplished by this mission
00:47because we do not have understanding and control of where all of that material is.
00:54I want to remind everyone that the 60% enriched material, while not weapons-grade, is weapons-usable.
01:01The Hiroshima device uses a mixture of 50% and higher enriched uranium and works pretty well.
01:08It is well known by thousands of physicists around the world.
01:13The physics of a simple gun-type device, almost all of the components there require no special nuclear materials.
01:25The conversion of the 60% enriched materials, first to green salt and then to metal, cast them into parts,
01:35is all documented on the Wikipedia pages of Little Boy.
01:40If you look up that article, you will see, unfortunately, just how straightforward it is to make such a device.
01:47And I was disappointed that we did not see that the goal of this mission, from the start, was to secure or destroy that material.
01:56That's where they're hiding the ball, and that's where we have to keep our eyes on.
02:01The President says it's all beneath all this rubble.
02:03Would you expect to see radiation levels or something like that if this had been damaged or destroyed?
02:08Not necessarily, for technical reasons that I can't talk about.
02:17But you have to understand that this inventory, we're talking about 20 or 30 scuba tanks full of material,
02:29where any two or so of those scuba tanks provide enough material for a first material.
02:35That is what we're trying to understand where the location is on the disposition of,
02:40in a situation where the intelligence may or may not be completed.
02:46When the President says it's very difficult to move that stuff, do you buy that,
02:50or do you think that those are the type of tanks that could have been moved out?
02:54To the extent that he was listening to competent technical people when he made that statement,
03:00he must have been referring to things like centrifuges and other infrastructure.
03:05The UF-6, as conventionally transported, is in cylinders that you can see exactly what they look like on the web,
03:14and are not hard to transport through a number of ways.
03:19If there's not certainty that that uranium was destroyed,
03:24are you worried that there will be additional strikes in order to complete the mission?
03:29If we can somehow guarantee that we have secured or destroyed that material,
03:36the world will be set in place.
03:38If that is not what has in fact been accomplished here, we are not saving it.
03:44In that case?
03:45In terms of a first Iranian nuclear device.
03:49In that case, would you support additional strikes to get rid of it?
03:53I'm not going to talk policy here.
03:55I'm talking about what's known from the physics involved
03:58and what the capabilities are given the inventories of different kinds of uranium.
04:05What about the centrifuges and other infrastructure in Fordow and these other facilities?
04:10Is it credible that that was destroyed?
04:12Very credible.
04:14No, very credible that those capabilities have been degraded sustainably, and I believe that.
04:20The centrifuges and other processing is irrelevant if you have a large inventory of 60% enriched uranium.
04:28That's .1.
04:30You can make a higher performance nuclear weapon with 90% enriched uranium,
04:35but that doesn't have to be the game that Iran is involved in.
04:39Did the briefers try to make the case that it was still there to you guys?
04:43I don't want to talk about that.
04:46What's your level of concern about the potential, not necessarily of a thermonuclear device,
04:49but of a dirty bomb possibly going off at a U.S. base or Israel?
04:54The dirty bomb isn't what we talked about.
04:57I'm talking about a Hiroshima-style, gun-type, straightforward,
05:02you know, a yield in the tens of kilotons nuclear device.
05:06So when you say that material should be destroyed, how does one destroy that material?
05:11You can disperse it enough that it's unusable.
05:16UF-6 is very reactive.
05:18If you just let it loose in a cave, it will find something to bind up with.
05:23And so, you know, it's possible to recover it with a very extensive effort,
05:26but that would be a different ballgame than just getting your hands on a couple cylinders of the pressurized UF-6.
05:35What do you believe needs to happen next after this?
05:38I think that we have to understand the leverage that the Iranians and the free world have
05:44and to engage in serious negotiations with Iranians about putting a permanent lid on their nuclear program,
05:53starting with getting IEAA surveillance on their entire inventory of about 60% enriched uranium.
06:03You talked at the outset about how this wouldn't have happened if the JPCOA hadn't fired apart.
06:09No.
06:10Yeah, I think, frankly, that the game was lost when President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA.
06:16Under that, under the JCPOA, we had very strict limits and enforced limits on their inventory of enriched uranium at different levels.
06:24And when that was lost, the game was lost, and now we're in a situation where they have very large inventories of quite significantly enriched UAM.
06:36And unfortunately, that applies a very small breakout time to a first nuclear device.
06:42Under the JCPOA, I spent many, many hours in the SCIF looking at different breakout scenarios.
06:49The fundamental representation there was that there was a one-year breakout time.
06:55If the Iranians kicked the inspectors out with the equipment that they were allowed to have, it would still take them a year, okay?
07:02And now we're in a situation where it's days, all right?
07:05It was days prior to the strike.
07:07But they nonetheless have already used that equipment to make a very large inventory of 60% enriched uranium.
07:14And that's the situation we're in.
07:16So if the uranium was not destroyed, they still have that capability to break out a bomb in a few days?
07:21In a very brief period of time.
07:24What's your level of concern about that?
07:26Enormous.
07:29What's a very short level of concern?
07:31It depends on how much work they've already done.
07:34If you look at what was done to build the Hiroshima, the little boy bomb, almost all that could be done in a small artillery shop.
07:46And there are a lot of that kind of capability all around Iran.
07:50You don't need bomb physicists at this point. You need engineers.
07:55You need machinists. You need technicians.
07:59You know, the physics is known.
08:01What did you make when Israel targeted all those nuclear scientists?
08:04That was important. That had a large impact on their capability going forward.
