00:00I mean, before the war, Iran said that it was open to the idea or suggested it might be open
00:05to the idea of handing over some of its enriched uranium.
00:07Now they're saying they won't hand over any of it.
00:10And that's coming from none other than the supreme leader, Khamenei's son.
00:16So in many ways, what they're doing is saying we're very much still here.
00:21And in fact, we're taking a much harder line on pretty much everything we can think of.
00:25Is that how it looks to you?
00:26Yes, they're playing it, moving it around.
00:30They have three or four really strong cards.
00:33And uranium, the enriched uranium, because they don't really know where it is.
00:40American intelligence plus Israeli intelligence, which would be a combination of electronic and human intelligence,
00:47is still not establishing the site, whether it's split up, whether it's in one collection, two collections, or even more.
00:53That was the point of the attack on Fordor Mountain a year ago.
00:57It was the point of further attacks.
00:59Is it in a location known as Mount Pickaxe?
01:03I mean, it's just a codename, but they think it was a very deep repository under rock and mountain.
01:12Is it under Isfahan?
01:14Is it with the other established centers like Natanz?
01:18It's really very peculiar.
01:20They've got to get to that, and they can't guarantee it.
01:23I think that where the jeopardy is for the Americans is they seem to be talking themselves, rather strangely, into
01:29a limited ground operation.
01:31And I think that would be extremely dangerous.
01:33It would be dangerous because it could set off a lot of other things.
01:36But it would be extremely hazardous for the United States.
01:40But what they're looking at is long wars.
01:43It's very interesting how they have got into this.
01:46It seems that, you know, going back to my earlier days of reporting and so on, this was the mess
01:53that was Vietnam.
01:54But it was one thing leading to another.
01:57It was incrementalism.
01:58And that is the danger for America here.
02:03And they've got a trump card, pardon the pun, just handed over to the Iranians in that they are claiming
02:11the great chokehold of the Straits of Hormuz.
02:15And only overnight, we had a rather strange claim that all the upper Gulf is now beamed by some Iranians.
02:22And I think that this is a zheur, it's a ploy, rather than an actual fact of diplomacy.
02:28But they're claiming it could potentially be all Iranian sovereign water.
02:32This is ridiculous.
02:33But they are preparing to have a fight as well.
02:38They don't want it.
02:39And they're preparing to have a fight, above all, not necessarily with the Americans, but with the Gulf opponents.
02:45Particularly the UAE.
02:48And that is something that is in everybody's interest, not least the Americans themselves, to defuse.
02:55To make sure that that doesn't come to a very nasty regional conflict which could go on for a long
03:00time.
03:00Because there are a lot of very nasty regional conflicts around which feed into this.
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