00:00Well, let's talk now to Dr. Paul Dorfman, the founder of the think tank, the Nuclear Consulting Group.
00:06Paul, welcome. Good to see you. I mean, what is your assessment? How serious is this chapter?
00:13It's clearly a serious event, and any potential attack on a nuclear site would have potentially serious consequences.
00:24It's important to note the Bushir, which is the Iranian nuclear power plant on the Gulf Coast.
00:33The point about the Gulf is that it's basically an enclosed lake that doesn't turn over.
00:39It has a very small exit around Hormuz.
00:43But the key about this is that a huge amount of drinking water for all of the Gulf states, including
00:49the UAE, Saudi,
00:51an enormous amount of Gulf states, use the Gulf for their desalination plants for their drinking water.
01:00So if there was any substantive leak, radioactive leak, that would have serious consequences for the population drinking water of
01:10the Gulf.
01:12Many miles away, President Macron of France has been speaking and saying that France is going to increase the size
01:19of its nuclear arsenal
01:21and strengthen its deterrent, he says, with the increasing risk of conflicts globally.
01:27Your reaction to his speech?
01:32It's an increasingly unstable world, and as we've seen, civil reactors are now in the front line.
01:38And that has implications for civil reactor nuclear proliferation in terms of the so-called nuclear renaissance.
01:48Because if you have civil reactors, you can then start to think about going towards weapons enrichment.
01:55Now, in terms of Macron and France, clearly Macron is viewing America as not as secure a friend as before,
02:06especially in the context of Russia and how Russia has invaded Ukraine.
02:14So it looks as if it's a, one can, one can posit from Macron's point of view, also Met's and
02:24also Starmer's view,
02:26clearly now they're thinking about upping the, you know, tooling up the nuclear in the context of not thinking that
02:33America is now a substantive ally.
02:36Paul, thank you. Good to see you.
02:37Dr. Paul Dorfman, the founder of the think tank, the Nuclear Consulting Group.
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