Is Trump pushing more countries toward nuclear weapons?
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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. G'day, Matt Bevan here, this is If You're Listening. As I'm recording this on Monday the 13th of July, the ceasefire agreement between Iran and the US looks like it's off again. With Iran attacking commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the US conducting airstrikes on Iran. It's proving, in Trump's eyes, unexpectedly difficult to come to an agreement with Iran to end the war and stop their nuclear weapons program. To me, it seems like he will be lucky to strike a deal that's as effective as the Iran nuclear deal signed under the Obama administration in 2015. The deal in 2015 was negotiated under very different circumstances over years, not weeks, without the pressure of an active war and led by career diplomats and physicists, not the president's son-in-law and his golfing buddy.
Today, I'm talking to someone who was actually in the room when that deal was struck. Ernest Moniz is the former US Secretary of Energy and a lead negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. I sat down with Secretary Moniz before the latest ceasefire collapse to ask what it's really like to negotiate with Iran, what he makes of the Trump administration's approach, and how close we really are to nuclear catastrophe.
Mr. Secretary, one of the things that has fascinated me about your career is the massive difference between you and your successor as the Secretary of Energy. Your nuclear physicist, who was replaced by former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who had once said that he wanted to abolish the Department of Energy.
It's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, education, and the... What's the third one there? Let's see.
LAUGHTER
and later admitted that he didn't really know what it did. It's obviously easy to laugh at that fact, but what the Department of Energy actually does is a little bit counterintuitive.
Is that right? Yeah, I think actually very few Americans, frankly, really do understand what the department does. The department's roots are in the Atomic Energy Commission.
In August 1946, the president signed into law an act creating the Atomic Energy Commission, atomic energy for peace or war. This was the question.
Which inherited the Manhattan Project and therefore carried on with nuclear weapons, started the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. It was responsible for harnessing the atom or the nucleus for nuclear power. So it was from its beginning a nuclear weapons, national security and fundamental science agency. The next big change really came in the 70s with the oil embargoes. And that led the presidents, in particular President Carter, to say we need an energy department. I will ask the Congress for its help in combining many of these agencies in a new energy department. to bring order out of chaos. And why don't we use this Atomic Energy Commission thing, which is already doing some energy, and very interesting, with a certain look towards the events today in the Strait of Hormuz, the security issues that were raised by the oil embargo
led to the start of things like solar energy as a security initiative, not as a clean energy initiative. And finally, the third major event, I would say, which changed the character of the department, was the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lowered for the last time, and an era comes to an end. That led to things like the nuclear nonproliferation program starting. It led to the issue of starting to clean up the Cold War nuclear weapons mess as opposed to adding to it.
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