Podcast # 19: Nuclear Showdown
Scott: My name is Scott Paton. I am talking today with Allan Colston. He is the author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”. This is a book dealing with prophecy.
For those listeners who may be new to this topic, this Podcast is another in the series “Signs of the Times”, and is titled “Nuclear Showdown”. Hello Allan and welcome to the Podcast.
Thanks Scott. It’s good to be with you again.
Scott: Allan, in your last Podcast you talked about Iran, and how it is trying to develop nuclear weapons. Before you go into further detail, perhaps you could start off by telling listeners what it takes to build a nuclear bomb in the first place.
That’s a good point Scott. Well in theory, building a nuclear bomb is fairly straight forward. Just get the necessary ingredients and then put them together in the right way. However in practice things are not quite so simple. And to understand why we need to go back to Albert Einstein.
As you know Scott, Einstein came up with probably the most famous equation in all of science, and that is E = MC2. What that means in reality is that all matter is simply a form of energy. In fact, incredibly large amounts of it. Just to give you an example, there is enough energy locked up inside a single airplane ticket to fly a plane around the world several times.
So the trick to making a nuclear bomb is to find a way to unlock this energy, and then unleash it in the form of a bomb. Now as we were taught in school, every atom has a nucleus, or centre. Inside this nucleus are varying amounts of protons and neutrons. And the heavier the atom is, the more protons and neutrons it has.
Scott: So how do you go about unlocking this energy?
Well Scott, the problem is that most elements in Nature are stable. And because the nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together inside the atom is so strong, it is extremely hard to get atoms to break apart. In fact, when the United States finally succeeded in doing this in 1945, there were only two ways of doing so. And basically, the same is true today.
The challenge is to find an atom that is large enough to be unstable, and then find a way to cause the nucleus of this atom to break apart. This process of splitting the atom is called nuclear fission. Another important point is that there has to be enough nuclear material available to create what is known as “critical mass” for an explosion to take place.
In a bomb, an initial explosive charge causes more and more neutrons to be released. These neutrons then cause other atoms to break up, causing a chain reaction. So when they break apart, they cause other atoms alongside them to break up as well. And this chain reaction then keeps going until there is so much energy that the bomb explodes.
Scott: So what materials do you need to make a bomb?
So far only two elements have been found to be capable of causing the chain reaction needed to make a bomb. One element is Uranium, and the other is Plutonium. What makes them suitable for nuclear weapons is that both of these elements have very large nuclei, containing large numbers of protons and neutrons.
Uranium has 238 protons and neutrons, while Plutonium has 239. But what makes it so difficult to build a nuclear bomb in practice, is that neither Uranium or Plutonium are easy to come by.
The reason is that the Uranium ore usually found in nature is a stable element, and is therefore unable to trigger a chain reaction. So to cause an explosion, this ore has to be changed into Uranium 235. It has to be artificially enriched until it is in an unstable state. This is a long process requiring highly specialised equipment known as centrifuges.
Plutonium on the other hand, doesn’t exist in Nature at all, so it has to be made artificially. And the only way to do this is inside a nuclear reactor. So the problem for Iran, as I explained in my last Podcast, is that once they made the decision to build nuclear weapons, they first had to acquire a regular supply of either enriched Uranium or Plutonium, or both.
Scott: And what did they have to do after that?
They also had to find a way to hide this from the eyes of the world, and from the Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Because Iran needed time to develop the fissile material needed to make nuclear weapons, they needed to con the Western world into believing that all they were after was to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
And so began a carefully choreographed series of negotiations that were designed to go nowhere. And in this they have been brilliantly successful. These negotiations first began in 2003, and they have been consistently going nowhere for the last ten years. The latest round of negotiations were held just two weeks ago in the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan.
Despite two days of intensive negotiations, the EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton announced that these talks had also been fruitless. There can be little doubt that this news would have been warmly received in Iran, and their chief negotiator Saeed Jalili would have been highly praised.
Scott: Why do you say that, Allan?
Well Scott, since the entire purpose of these negotiations has been to keep the Western nations talking, so that they would not have a reason to make good on their military threats, these successive delays have provided Iran with the breathing room needed to acquire the necessary fissile material for making nuclear weapons.
But although Inspectors for the Atomic Energy Agency have so far been unable to visit the various nuclear sites in Iran, they have issued reports which give outsiders a pretty shrewd idea of what has been going on behind the scenes over the last few years.
As I pointed out in my last Podcast, the main locations used by Iran to enrich Uranium are in underground installations located at Natanz and at Fordow. You can also add another one to this, and that is the heavy water reactor in Arak, which is used for the production of Plutonium.
Using Plutonium to generate a nuclear explosion is not new. Although the original atomic bomb that was dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima used Uranium, the next one that was dropped on Nagasaki was a Plutonium-implosion design bomb. The main advantage of using Plutonium in the manufacture of a bomb is that it is a lot easier to create and control the chain reaction process.
And as a matter of interest Scott, all the nuclear bombs belonging to India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea use Plutonium as a fuel source. So it is easy to see why this would appeal to Iran as well.
Scott: So does Iran have supplies of both Uranium and Plutonium?
Yes Scott, they do. In fact a recent report in the British newspaper “The Telegraph” indicated that clouds of steam were recently photographed being emitted from forced air coolers at the Arak plant, indicating that the plant was in full operation.
This is further evidence that the Iranian regime has been pursuing more than one way to build a nuclear weapon. All they have to do now is to enrich the quantities they have already stockpiled to the level needed to create the chain reaction in a bomb. However they do have one final hurdle to overcome.
They have to develop the trigger mechanism necessary to create the first explosive charge within the confined space of the bomb. And this is what they have been doing at their military explosives facility at Parchin, just outside of Tehran, which has also been off limits to nuclear inspectors in recent years.
Scott: So tell me Allan, do you think that recent events in North Korea have had an influence on Iran?
Absolutely Scott. In fact the two most interested spectators in the whole drama that has been taking place between North and South Korea and the United States have been Israel and Iran – and for totally different reasons.
Iran has been watching the unfolding saga in North Korea very closely, to see how the United States would react if it was challenged by a country that possessed nuclear weapons. And based on what we have seen up to this point, the answer is “very carefully”, so as not to provoke a nuclear showdown.
Israel, by contrast, is watching events in North Korea with increasing alarm. For the way that North Korea has been acting lately is exactly how they have been warning that Iran would behave if they ever acquired nuclear weapons. In other words, Iran would be quick to challenge their enemies and threaten them with thermo-nuclear war.
Scott: So where do you think all this will end Allan?
Well Scott, my own personal view is that it will end exactly where the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel said it would end. In previous Podcasts, I have quoted from the prophecies of Ezekiel, and his prediction that there would be a coalition of Islamic nations that would launch a land invasion on Israel.
Scott: What makes you say that?
Well Scott, we need look no further than what the Iranians themselves have been saying. Speaking recently to a group of Iranian war veterans, President Ali Khamenei said that Israel would disappear from the (and I quote) “landscape of geography”, and that the country would soon be returned to the Palestinians.
This is only the latest in a long war of words in which Iran has threatened to destroy the land of Israel. And of course the leader of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu, is a man who does not take these threats lightly.
After all, he grew up with the memory of the Jewish Holocaust still fresh in his mind. He learned from the hard school of history that when a despotic leader announces to the world beforehand that he plans to destroy the Jews, as Hitler did in his book entitled Mein Kampf, then it would be wise to take these threats seriously.
And he certainly is in the forefront of those warning of the threat posed by a nuclear Iran. Another spokesman for this view is Ehud Barak, who was until recently the Israeli Minister of Defence. Speaking in an interview with the Washington Post, Barak said, and I quote:
“A nuclear Iran will be the end of the nonproliferation regime. Saudi Arabia will turn nuclear immediately, Turkey within several years, and probably the new Egypt will start moving to do it. Not to mention the potential of weapons-grade material leaking into the hands of terrorist groups from Iran.”
We also need to remember that Israel is not Iran’s number one enemy. The Islamic world has for many years now been split along sectarian lines. One group follows the Shi’ite sect of Islam, and this faction is led by Iran. The other group consists of Sunni Moslems, and is dominated by Saudi Arabia.
So as Ehud Barak has pointed out, if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, there would be an immediate rush by surrounding countries to do the same, and this would inevitably lead to a much more terrifying threat to world peace, quite apart from the danger to the continued existence of the state of Israel.
Scott: So Allan, if Iran is poised to become a nuclear power, what can the rest of the world do to stop it?
Well Scott, this is where the rubber meets the road. Since it is clear that sanctions alone will not stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and since North Korea has already shown that a country that has nuclear weapons can effectively thumb its nose at the rest of the world, then the choices facing the West are stark indeed.
During his recent visit to Jerusalem, President Obama made it clear that while he believed that there was still time for diplomacy to work in negotiations with Iran, if these negotiations were to fail, then the United States would (quote) “do what is necessary”.
I leave it to listeners to decide for themselves what Obama means by this. But if the words of Obama are not a sufficient deterrent, then the response by the Government of Israel should leave no doubt in anyone’s mind. If the United States is not prepared to bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran, then Israel will do so on its own.
So the 64,000 dollar question is this. How long will it take for Iran to explode its first nuclear device? It may be a matter of weeks, or it may be a matter of months. But I personally feel that it will be sometime before the end of this year.
And if this is the case, then the entire Middle East will be plunged into crisis. For you can imagine that if their nuclear sites are successfully attacked, then Iran will do everything in its power to retaliate, and a number of different countries will be in their cross-hairs.
And just a reminder for those people who would like to read my book, it can be reached here
Scott: Thanks Allan. You have been listening to Allan Colston, author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”. Do join us for our next Podcast, which will be another in the series called “Signs of the Times”.
