Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome back to Going Underground broadcasting all around the world from the uae, which reportedly sought to defuse tensions with Tehran through direct talks amidst renewed US Aerial bombardment of Iran, let alone Iranian strikes as the genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, supported by Britain, the US and EU continues. 20,000 Iranians were left without water after Trump bombed southern Hormuzgan province in Iran. It was a year ago today. Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran while negotiations were still underway, striking military and nuclear facilities and killing senior commanders, nuclear scientists and their families. Tehran responded with waves of missile attacks on Israel, the full impact of which is still heavily censored. Days later, on June 22, the US entered the war on Israel's side, striking the Ford out Isfahan nuclear sites with B2 bombers and Tomahawk missiles, with Donald Trump subsequently declaring Iran's nuclear program obliterated this year, citing a so called imminent threat. Washington and Tel Aviv again used the ruse of peace negotiations to launch a war of aggression, killing Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei and members of his family, as well as slaughtering 168 elementary schoolgirls. the time of this episode, Iran retains its massive stockpile of enriched uranium and according to our guest, it could produce between 10 and 20 nuclear weapons in a matter of days while US Israeli threats, ultimatums and military actions bring the world closer to thermonuclear catastrophe. Joining me again is Professor Ted Postal, professor Emeritus of science, technology and National Security Policy at mit. He served as a scientific advisor to the chief of Naval operations at the Pentagon and is one of the world's foremost experts on nuclear weapons, missile defense and ballistic missile technology. He joins me now from Omaha, Nebraska. Professor Postal, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Obviously it's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Great to be by the time this is being broadcast, we don't know what Trump has either posted on Truth Social or what he has destroyed. But I suppose the obvious initial question to you, who's been a senior advisor at the Pentagon, does the US Have a sustainable strategic position in this war?
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Oh no, not at all. And it's amazing to me the lack of ability on the part of President Trump to somehow recognize his situation and act accordingly. Now, I nobody should misunderstand what I'm about to say as in any way support for Trump, but he has maneuvered himself into a situation where the domestic political environment in the United States is constraining him to a great degree. It would require a great deal of courage and independence on his part to do the right Thing, which of course is to back away from this whole process. But he's under a lot of pressure from the Israeli lobby in the United States, which has extraordinary outsized influence on both the President and the American Congress.
This lobby has large amounts of money.
The American political system has been damaged severely by the uncontrolled ability of special interests to provide money to elected members of Congress and to the different political parties.
They engage in retribution against anybody who stands up against them.
And this is a very, very powerful domestically driven force which has actually led to many Americans, like myself, for example, being extremely angry that our political leadership is more likely to do something that is what the Israelis want, rather than what's in the best interest or security interest of the United States, not to mention the rest of the world.
So we have a big problem here in the United States with the influence of this Israeli lobby.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: I mean, I said you were at the Pentagon. What did you think of the seeming dissonance between the way the Pentagon at CENTCOM was saying that these were self defensive strikes? I mean, it was absurd, but it was very different from what we were hearing from Trump and technically the head of the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, who said, we want to destroy. Well, echoing the kind of rhetoric of destroying a civilization, I have to say. I mean, I was speaking to you from Dubai, Oman, just up the road. Trump said he'd destroy the whole of Oman if necessary.
If they didn't behave like everybody else. We'll have to blow them up.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: He said, well, I'm afraid I speak incidentally as an American critic. I love my country and I want to see my country do the right thing.
But I'm afraid that the American government masks its malevolent goals by talking about supporting democracy, defending itself. There's nothing defensive about this whole operation. We started it with the Israelis, and this was a war of choice, not a war of defense. From the Iranian point of view, this is a war of survival. And this is something that many people who are trying to understand this, you know, the dynamics of this war should keep very high in their perceptual analysis of what's going on. You should keep in mind that from the point of view of the Iranians, and I mean all Iranians, people who are opposed to their governments, you know, would like to change their government as well as people who are supporters of the current government.
This is a war of existential survival. They are dealing with two countries, Iran and I mean United States and Israel, who have made it clear that they want to destroy Iranian civilization.
That's their objective. So this is a war of survival. This has nothing to do, this has nothing to do with your internal politics. If you're in a country, it's your country, and you are seeing an adversary who aims to destroy your country, to destroy your civilization if need be, you are going to fight and you're going to fight very seriously.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: But surely they'd war game this in. You personally have been involved in war gaming at the Pentagon, specifically, obviously over nuclear strikes. I mean, would they not be sitting at the Pentagon right now thinking there'd be some people on that side acting as that side, saying exactly what you've just been saying?
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Well, I think there, if you're talking to the, to the military officers, which I have been fortunate enough to work closely with when I was at the Pentagon, whatever their political views are, and they do have their own political views, if you get to know people well, you learn about them. They are servants of the American Constitution and they are mostly concerned with not doing harm to, to the United States and also providing military capabilities when it's needed.
And that means that they are very reserved about. They understand the limits. The soldiers I know at least understand the limits of what military activities can do.
And I'd be surprised if many of them are for this.
So I think this, I, I think if Trump ordered, for example, Nuke used to use nuclear weapons, I think there, I can't say for sure, but I think there's a real chance that people will say no.
I mean, thank God the American system has a military that has been trained and, and, and is dedicated to supporting the Constitution of the United States.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: So, so we've seen, though, historically, where that's gone gruesomely awry, to say the least.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: So absolutely, I'm not, no question, I'm one of the harshest critics of the military when these things happen and when they cover it up, which also happens.
But I think if you talk to people about their ethical standards, if it comes up against a choice of doing something that could be overtly lead to the destruction or terrible damage to the United States, I think almost all military officers will not do it. And I think using nuclear weapons is one of those things. It's in a very special category. If you tell them to attack a ship in the Caribbean in an unjustified criminal attack on a ship that without warning like has been happening, for example, some people will do it. Although we did have the commander in the Caribbean ultimately resign from his position, he did eventually stand up.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Of course, there are reports There are reports now that some of those strikes that Trump ordered hit reported human trafficking victims in the Caribbean. But anyway, I want to get back to Iran. Yeah, professor, personal.
Again and again, Trump just keeps on talking about the fact that the impetus for all of this is for peace because he doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. You've said that actually there is no way of getting Iran to get rid of the potential for them to be able to have nuclear weapons because they have knowledge.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Well, they have more than knowledge.
I have knowledge, but I can't build a nuclear weapon because I don't have capability. I don't have equipment.
And the extraordinary cadres of individuals who have special expertise. You know, it's one thing for me to describe how an enrichment centrifuge works and describe the physics of it. It's another thing to build one.
You know, you need cadres of technical experts, really high level professional engineers who can.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: With Trump killing them all. Trump is bombing the universities, the schools of science, the elementary schools.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: There have got to be tens of thousands, if not more of these people. I mean, you can't erase cultural capability.
All societies have vast numbers of people who are extraordinarily capable, some of whom are in positions where they're working at it, and some of whom are in subordinate positions who can take over if someone else is killed.
Look at Russia under Stalin, this murderous leader. He killed over 90% of the absolute top military leadership of Russia before Germany, Nazi Germany attacked Russia. He eliminated his highest level military officers.
And very quickly the Russian military reconstituted itself at great cost, of course, because Operation Barbarossa killed an enormous number of Russians. And all of these people who are great leaders in the military at the top levels of the Russian military came out from the lower ranks.
You have people with great talent everywhere.
And when you have a society that's under threat, all of a sudden political differences become irrelevant.
Your society is under threat and you do what you need to do to protect your country. That's what happens. And you can't kill everyone. You'd have to kill tens of thousands of people. You don't even know who these people are.
So if you have people modifying and running these centrifuges and you kill them, there'll be others who come beneath them, who have been mentored by them, who have been around, who have studied.
There's no way to kill enough of them to stop the program. This is just a bizarre approach, not to mention difficult.
Yeah, so I don't think the Israelis have had, has any chance of working. And it's just a brutal, immoral strategy, which unfortunately has been the way Israel has conducted itself over the last few years. I mean, maybe earlier than that if you're anti Zionist, but certainly in the most recent years, certainly, you know, in the last five or 10 years, especially with Gaza, the Israelis have been totally out of control. They have a messianic group of people who would have been brutal 5,000 years ago according to the culture then, living now, who somehow think that there should be something like a greater Israel, whatever that means.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Professor Postal, have to stop you there. Differing views on that style in history, I should add. But I'll have to stop you there. We've had a few connection issues. More from the professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT after this break.
Welcome back to GOING underground. I'm still here with the former scientific advisor to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon, Professor Ted Postal. Professor Postal, we were talking about how it's a myth and everyone in Congress and in the White House should understand it, that Iran can remove the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons. But I got to ask you, why doesn't Iran just say it has nuclear warheads and delivery mechanisms? Wouldn't that just end the war?
[00:14:44] Speaker A: No.
First of all, I think it would be a very bad thing for the Iranians to do this. And in fact, I think the Iranians understand this. This is one of the many reasons why I have been rather impressed by how cleverly and thought out the Iranian strategy, both political and military, has been.
What Iran does not want to do is provoke its neighbors like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, some of the Gulf states, the GCC states, into getting nuclear weapons or developing nuclear weapons programs, because Iran's security would be greatly reduced if it was surrounded by nuclear armed states.
So what the Iranians very cleverly have devised as a strategy is to bring themselves to a point where they can obtain nuclear weapons if they choose to. In other words, relatively quickly, but not step across the line.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: How quickly? How quickly?
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Well, it's hard to know without exact details, but certainly to build a few nuclear weapons from what they have initially, you could imagine it being done in weeks or months easily and maybe even in weeks.
They have the 60% enriched uranium hexafluoride.
What they have to do is enrich it to 90%. That takes almost no time given the centrifuges. They have maybe a week.
Then they have to convert the uranium hexafluoride, which is a special material. It looks like it's a gas A lot of the time. And sometimes a solid that looks like a salt, you have to convert it to uranium metal, you have to get the fluorine out of it.
That's straightforward.
It's a straightforward process.
And that could take literally again, a few days. Even if they're, if they're set up to do it. And you would expect them to have the. The equipment set up. If I were in their position, I always try to put myself in the position of an adversary.
And if I were advising an ayatollah and I were asked in a position to advise them, I would say, let's not do it.
Let's be prepared to do it. Let's find a really deep underground facility or several of them, all of which, each one of which are capable of doing the job, set them up. We don't need a lot of equipment, given what we already have. So we already have the equipment. We set them up so they're ready to go.
And we don't do it, though.
And we just let people know that we don't want to do it. In fact, we tell people, you don't
[00:17:47] Speaker B: think some of your research, you don't think some of your research is being used by Netanyahu as leverage over Trump? Because Trump keeps on appearing to be horrified by the prospect of the imminence of a nuclear threat, when, of course, the Iranian government has repeatedly said on theological grounds, because of the previous fatwa, it won't have nuclear weapons.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Well, I think I'm glad that Trump is horrified and afraid of nuclear weapons. That's. That makes me more comfortable with him rather than. There's very little I'm comfortable with with regard to this man, but the fact that he's extremely afraid of nuclear weapons is. Is good.
And so, for example, Cy Hirsch's recent discussion, which, in fairness to psy, he was careful to say it was more of a muse of Trump rather than a serious statement, at least he indicated that it appeared to be not as serious, that he was just talking freely at the moment.
It's very clear that Trump is extremely afraid of nuclear weapons, and I'm sure he would be advised, if he thought about using them, that this would open a box that none of us want to see opened and cause the Iranians could proceed to build nuclear weapons. And I do not think Iran is the big nuclear threat is the big nuclear instability in the Middle East. Israel is.
You have a leadership in Israel that
[00:19:23] Speaker B: is
[00:19:25] Speaker A: willing to push their country into a situation where their own military leadership, their own military leadership is telling Them.
There are reports of this now. Their own military leadership is telling Netanyahu, you know, we are on the ropes.
We cannot do anymore. We are, you know, we are at the limit of what we can do. We're losing soldiers at a high rate. We're a small country.
We cannot sustain taking these territories and holding. They have to hold these territories too, because you're dealing with hostile populations.
And they are at the limit of what they can do.
They shouldn't have been there. They shouldn't have been put there by their leadership. That was Netanyahu's fault, and the military didn't stand up to him. So it's in some sense their responsibility as well.
But Israel is on the line. And now if things escalate, which I'm afraid they're likely to do, the survival of Israel could eventually come into question.
And the amount of damage that the Iranians are in a position to do to Israel is enormous.
The capabilities of their ballistic missiles are extraordinarily greater than what we initially saw even in the June 2025 war.
I was estimating, based on data I had collected, that the Iranians could do significant but modest damage to Tel Aviv if the war escalated. Well, I was wrong, because there was a whole generation of newer, more capable missiles that are impossible. I want to underscore impossible to intercept.
They are not close to being subject to intercept, and they have bigger warheads that are more destructive.
And Iran has large numbers of them, and they're more accurate, which means that they can focus them doing more heavy damage on targets that are more valuable to the Israelis.
Then there are the drones.
And the air defenses have been foolishly used against ballistic missiles. The air defenses have almost no capability against ballistic missiles. We should have another short program.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: If you're up, you're an expert. You're an expert. Unless we're running out of. You're an expert on the Patriot missile. Showing the complete lack of effectiveness of the radio Patriot missile system. I have to say, Thaads have done quite well here against the drones, which I think is the point.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: No, no, the fads have not done well.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: Well, something's protecting us here in Dubai, but I tell you, because we're running out of time. I've got to just ask you, I mean, given that I have. The Going underground is now broadcast from Dubai. What will the effect of the Busheh nuclear plant in Iran if that's continuing to be attacked by Israeli and US Projectiles, what happens to the Gulf?
Given your expertise in nuclear.
Nuclear.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: Well, I mean, if. If you had a, a meltdown of the, you know, a catastrophic meltdown of buer. It would, you know, cause radioactivity over a very large area. It would depend, of course, on the weather conditions, where, how these materials spread.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: How would Dubai be hit? Because Dubai is not being hit at all badly, given it's been the target of most of the projectiles outside of Iran and Israel.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: I could do an analysis of that, but I haven't done it, so I don't want to make any statements. But certainly under specialized conditions, Dubai could receive some levels of radioactivity. If the weather.
It depends on the wind.
If the wind carries it in the direction of Dubai, I don't. My guess, I want to underscore as a guess because I haven't studied this yet. I mean, if you come back and ask me to study it and I'll talk to you again about it, I will.
But my guess is that radioactively could reach Dubai if you had the right or the right or the wrong, depending on your point of view, wind directions.
But hopefully, probably.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Hopefully not. Hopefully not. As I said, we're under a total restraint here.
We're under time constraint. Yeah. I wanted to ask what you thought was the impact of Iranian strikes on Dimona as well, but I suppose I'd better just move to Zaporizhzhia because it's the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and repeatedly British, European Union, American armed, Kiev has been, I mean, in the past few days it's been attacking IAEA repairmen who are trying to repair the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
What are the dangers as regards Kiev's attacks on that?
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Well, if the plants have been shut down, which I think is the situation in Zaporizhzhia, I may not be correct on that.
You may need to correct me on that. But if the plants are shut down, and in particular, if they've been shut down for a little while, a little while, could be several weeks, then the amount of residual energy in the core is small enough that they won't melt down further. If they lose cooling, there'll be a damage to the core, but there won't necessarily be a loss of radioactive material.
And that's important because the reactor may be, in effect, destroyed as a unit for producing power, but it may not be a source for releasing large amounts of radioactivity.
So in my understanding, which may not be correct, I want to underscore, I haven't looked into this, is that the Zaporizhzha reactors are shut down, that they're not operating, they're not providing power. But if they are, there is a danger.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: That's the situation. Well, just finally. Well, why not on that topic of as you said and explained elegantly about the existential nature of this war as regarded by in Tehran, what will be the impact of an Iranian attack with the missiles you described on Dimona and the Israeli nuclear program?
What will happen to Jerusalem?
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Well, I suspect that the reactor is not running, I don't know, but I suspect it's been shut down.
And if it's been shut down long enough, they could lose the facility for production of plutonium, which is what it's really for.
But if it's been shut down long enough, the radioactive release from any severe damage to the protective shelter around the reactor core, it would probably not result in a significant radioactive release. Maybe if you were near the facility, within miles of it, the wind were blowing your way, you might get a release that you might want to evacuate the population. But I don't think it would be a vast result if the Israelis have shut down the react and they should have shut this down.
If I were in Israel and I was advising, of course you don't know. I mean advising Netanyahu may be worthless
[00:27:07] Speaker B: and there's the Samson option, the Samson doctrine as well.
[00:27:11] Speaker A: Yes, well, I think that's my concern is that if the Israelis come to a point where they feel that they have no choice but to attack Iran with nuclear weapons, then we're in a different world because the Iranians will respond and they have the underground facilities to convert their non nuclear, you know, reserve of 60% enriched uranium hexafluoride to nuclear weapons, as you know, potentially weeks.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Professor Postal, thank you. Many thanks again.
[00:27:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sorry.
Thank you. I'm sorry to have gone on too long.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: No, never. Thanks Ted Postal. And that's it for the show. Our continued condolences to all those of you bereaved or affected by today's NATO nation wars of aggression. We'll be back on Monday with an economist predicting that 2 billion doll face famine because of what Trump and Netanyahu have done. Until then, keep in touch via all our social media if it's not censored in your country. And head to our channel goingundergroundtv on rumble.com to watch new and old episodes of Going Underground. See you Monday.
