Ankit Panda

But for me, what fundamentally has changed with Iran is that we have lost what many of us call the continuity of knowledge about their activities.

And this

is a really important idea that I think just needs to be understood, which is that after the airstrikes last year, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, which does the verification of everything that's happening in Iran to give us confidence that they aren't diverting nuclear material to a bomb program.

hasn't been able to do its work in the country.

And so that means that our completeness of understanding what is happening in Iran is just going to be, I think, a lot more difficult to restore to the point where I would say that the level of confidence that we would want, that we fully understand everything that's going on in Iran just might not be possible to restate in the coming months or years.

And I think that's just a really important limitation on this whole issue.

North Korea was the subject of my first book about six years ago, and the argument I made in that book was that they are here as a nuclear power, and I think we in the United States need to recognize that.

Our policy for the longest time on North Korea has been essentially a nonproliferation policy.

Basically, we don't want them to get the bomb, so how do we take the bomb away from them and put them back in the box?

I think, you know, the horse has left the barn on that a long time ago.

And so now the question for us is what kind of relationship do we want to have with North Korea?

And, you know, things have gotten a lot worse.

I can't give you an exact number on how many nuclear weapons they have just because, you know, there's just a lot of uncertainty associated with it.

My best estimate is that they are in the range of around 100 nuclear weapons worth of material.

How much of that material has actually been converted to usable nuclear weapons is a much more difficult question to reason about.

But they certainly do have

what I would consider to be a force capable of accomplishing many of their key deterrence objectives.

President Trump, of course, has a very special history here with the North Koreans.

He met with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un three times during his first presidency.

And since returning to the Oval Office, he has said positive things about engaging with Kim Jong-un.