David McCloskey

And there are basically three legs to this piece of furniture.

One of them is the production of the fissile material.

That is what most of the Iranian conversation, the public conversation is about.

It is how much highly enriched uranium at what enrichment level do the Iranians have?

So it's the production of the fissile material.

The second component is weaponization.

I mean, I'm tempted, Gordon, to have you give us another science lesson about... Yeah, go back to our Klaus Fuchs episodes if you want those.

Go back to our Klaus Fuchs episodes.

But you can't just take...

a big square of highly enriched uranium and like toss it out of an airplane, right?

Yeah.

It might hit someone on the head.

If it fell in the water, it might get somebody sick.

But it's not... You got to turn it into a bomb.

And that is...

work on high explosives, electronics, advanced metallurgy, material science, all of these very specialized kind of areas of study and machining and fabrication to actually create the warhead.

And then the third component of a weapons program is the delivery mechanism, because that warhead has to be fitted onto something that can then be delivered to your target, and in this case,

It's almost certainly a ballistic missile.

So it's not one site and it's not just the production of the fissile material, which again is where we focus so much of our time and energy publicly.

Yeah, I think the focus on the production of the fissile material makes some sense because the biggest, most well-known sites are all, I mean, the ones you just read out, Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, are all involved in the production of the fissile material, the production of the highly enriched uranium that would be necessary to include in a bomb.