Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
And Trump decided on his own to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
So they kept the enriched material at Fordow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
And if that's the case, it may be that much of it was destroyed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
Again, caveat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
It's just one or two stories right now, one in NBC News, and let's see what happens over the coming days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
But if that's the case, that material may have been destroyed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
One other element that we haven't even talked about at all today, which I think your listeners should be aware of,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
We talked a lot about nuclear weapons development, warhead development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
What the Israelis did was they took out the top 15 nuclear weapons scientists who have been part of, remember I talked about that original Ahmad program and the development of those five atomic weapons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
Well, some of them who are old enough come from the Ahmad program, which is the early 2000s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
Some of them are new, but they've been, or not new, but younger, and they've been trained by the veterans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
the 15 top guys taken out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
That is akin to it's January or February 45, and the entire central team of Oppenheimer gets eliminated three to four months before the Trinity test, where we explode our first nuclear weapon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
So I would say significant damage to Iran's nuclear weapons program suggests that we potentially have rolled them back
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
for years, I don't know how many years, and all those technical assessments are still to come, but significant damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
So the question, as I said, is have they retained enough capabilities that they've squirreled away, stored in covert sites, put under deeply buried tunnels,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
to break out to nuclear weapons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
That's Scott's concern.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
That's my concern.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 β Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East
Lex, I'm sure it's your concern that they could do that.