Mark Dubowitz

That's an interesting history.

That's not what the 2007 NIE says.

What the 2007 NIE says is that, and you are correct, according to the 2007 NIE report,

is Iran made the decision after the invasion of Iraq not to pursue an active nuclear weapons program anymore.

Because we were putting their best friends in power in Baghdad for them.

Well, because the United States had gone in and in a matter of 100 days had taken down the Iraqi army.

That's why you and I did not publicly support the Iraq war, did we?

As far as I possibly could.

They had fought an eight year war with where almost a million people, Scott, as you know, had been killed.

So they were they were afraid that the United States was going to march from Baghdad to Tehran.

So they make a decision to end their active Ahmad program.

They make a decision to build up the key capabilities they need to retain an Iranian nuclear weapons option, specifically the enrichment capabilities at Natanz and then Fordow and at Iraq, giving them the plutonium route.

And then what they do is they take the members of the Ahmad program, the nuclear weapons scientists that have worked on this, and they disperse them.

So they're now no longer in a formal weapons program.

They're put in a number of different research centers and universities.

And Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who you mentioned...

who's in some respects, I wouldn't call him the Oppenheimer of the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

He's more like, who was in the Oppenheimer movie, Leslie Grove, the guy who was actually responsible for the organization and the training and the recruitment and the guy that actually ran the program as opposed to Oppenheimer, the sort of brilliant nuclear physicist.

This is Fakhrizadeh.

So Fakhrizadeh takes control of this program