Mark Dubowitz

And then the IAEA, the United States and the intelligence communities went after this detailed

went into it and discovered that this Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had an active program to build five atomic warheads and was a very detailed program with blueprints and designs, all of which was designed under Ahmad to build a nuclear weapons program.

So again, it's interesting to say that he doesn't have the intention to build nuclear weapons when he actually had an active nuclear weapons program.

And we can talk about what happened to that program after 2003, and there's a lot of interesting details.

So when you combine the fact that he has an active nuclear weapons program

He has sites that are buried deep underground.

He has weapons scientists who come out of the Ahmad program and continue to work on the initial metallurgy work and computer modeling designed to actually begin that process of building a warhead.

And all of this has been hidden from the international community.

He has spent estimates of a half a trillion dollars on his nuclear program.

in direct costs and in sanctions costs.

And one has to ask, and I think it's an interesting question, to compare the UAE and Iran.

The UAE signed the gold standard.

They said we'll have no enrichment capability or reprocessing.

They spent about $20 billion on that, and it supplies 25% of their electrical generation.

Khamenei spent...

a half a trillion dollars, and that program supplies maybe 3% of their electrical needs.

In fact, they have a reactor that they bought from the Russians called Boucher, and that reactor, it's exactly what you'd want in a proliferation-proof reactor.

They buy fuel rods from the Russians, they use it, and they send the spent fuel back to Russia so it cannot be reprocessed into plutonium.

So

I just think it's important for your listeners to understand just some of the technical nuclear history here in order to unpack this question of, did Khamenei want nuclear weapons?