00:00Joining us now is Wayne Sanders, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Defense Analyst and retired Army Colonel.
00:05Colonel, it's a market that is trying to grab on to any bit of positivity.
00:08There's an ex-post being sent around the trading floors right now from someone from the New York Post about
00:14maybe negotiations can resume.
00:17Just how likely is it that we're not looking at escalation right now with this blockade starting,
00:22that you might have both Iran and the United States coming back to the negotiating table?
00:28You know, this is one of those areas where I think there's upsides and downsides, obviously, to both.
00:34I think this is the game of chicken, like you heard Matt say just a minute ago, where both sides
00:38of this right now,
00:39if you look at the safe passage for all except for Iranian vessels to and from Iranian ports,
00:45you know, the U.S. has some leverage here, but it still puts Iran back into the ability to affect
00:50and interdict things that are going on near the Straits as well, right?
00:54They still have some drone and ballistic missile capability.
00:57They still have threats of laying mines in the Straits.
01:00So both sides right now are still kind of up in their game in terms of what they're trying to
01:04be able to accomplish.
01:05Colonel, you know, you worked in intelligence, and I just wonder what's the intelligence community's take on Iran's nuclear capabilities?
01:13Because as we've been talking about, the president told us last year he had obliterated completely and totally their nuclear
01:20capabilities.
01:20And that's believable, seeing the kind of damage that B-2 bombers can do, right?
01:26Yeah.
01:27He's also repeated a lot over the last month that there's just nuclear dust and it's buried under rubble and
01:33no one can get to it.
01:34And probably the same is true of their centrifuges and any hope of enriching uranium.
01:40If they don't have those capabilities, why do we hear so much concern that we don't want to nuclear Iran?
01:48Well, I think one of the things the intelligence community is looking at, and it's the way that the intelligence
01:52community has always been, is they can't afford to be wrong.
01:55If you're going to be wrong, you want to be wrong because you have assessed that they had additional capability
02:00and then you had to use additional assets to be able to confirm or deny whether or not they have
02:05it.
02:05What you don't want to do is say, hey, we have enough information right now to believe that that nuclear
02:09missile, excuse me, the nuclear fissile material is gone and then find out that you were wrong.
02:14So like we said before, in terms of without having boots on the ground to confirm or deny during those
02:19areas, that ends up playing a key piece of this.
02:22The other side of it also comes from the classification.
02:24There's probably a lot of information that's going on inside the intelligence community that's being shared at the top secret
02:29level based off of what they know and what they don't know.
02:33And they don't want Iran to find out anything through the public.
02:36So a lot of that information, I guarantee you, is being very close hold.
02:39But is it possible in your experience to hide 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium or the work that would
02:48need to be done to enrich new uranium?
02:51Yeah, if it was in one facility at that point in time, I think that you would have a better
02:56understanding of it.
02:57But if any of this 441 kilograms were actually dispersed to different facilities, now, once again, you just kind of
03:03exacerbate what it is that it takes to be able to confirm or deny with the assets that you have.
03:07So at that point in time, it's OK, you believe that these are down.
03:11But if they were able to transport any of those out, I guarantee you that intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets
03:16that are over top of those, though, are watching vehicles that are coming in and out.
03:20They're looking at anything that could actually transport that material in and out of any of these locations.
03:25And then they have to figure out what the operation is to be able to interdict or mitigate if it
03:29was.
03:30Now, if you're looking at the production side of the house, there's obviously inside of Iran, they've hit most of
03:36those.
03:37The U.S. has hit most of those production facilities.
03:39So now it becomes a question as to does some other actor like China or Russia, do they come in
03:44and help them try and reestablish any of these programs?
03:47All right. Excellent clarification.
03:48That's why we love to talk to you, retired Army Colonel Wayne Sanders, formerly of military intelligence, now of Bloomberg
03:55intelligence.
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