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Scott Horton: evaluation

26 Jun 2025 Lex Fridman Podcast #473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

“The Iranians had announced to the IAEA that we had built a new facility here, and we are going to introduce nuclear material into it within six months.”

— Scott Horton

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Speaker
Scott Horton
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Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
26 Jun 2025
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…That’s not true at all, right? They have to resort to a crude analogy about football yard lines because they can’t say the truth, which is that they had zero weapons grade uranium, they were not producing it. They were trying to get the United States back in the deal that they are still officially within the JCPOA with the rest of the UN Security Council wherein they shipped all of their enriched uranium stockpile out of the country to France to be transferred to fuel rods. Their insistence was on their continued ability to enrich uranium, and so this goes to one of the things that he at least sort of brought up that deserves addressing. When Trump came into power in 2017, he decided on this Israeli influence maximum pressure campaign, and he said the JCPOA was the worst deal in the history of any time any two men ever shook hands and all these kinds of things in his hyperbolic way, which of course made it very difficult for him to figure out a way to stay in the thing or to compromise along its lines. But the fact of the matter is if he had just played it straight and said, “Listen, Ayatollah, we don’t have to be friends, but we do have a deal here, which my predecessor struck with you, but I don’t like these sunset provisions and I want to send my guys over there and see if we can figure out a way to convince you that we really wish you’d shut down and them all together.” Or this or that or the other thing, and tried to approach them in good faith. We talk about yard lines and things. We had a JCPOA, okay? So toward peace, we were past the 50 yard line. Donald Trump could have gone to Tehran and shook hands with the Ayatollah as Dick Cheney complained that we had cold relations with Iran back in 1998 when he was the head of Halliburton and said, “We can do business with these guys.” Donald Trump could have gone right over there and done business, and instead he gave into Netanyahu’s lies in this ridiculous hoax that they had uncovered all these Iranian nuclear documents, which he pretends is legit, where all they did was recycle the fake Israeli forged smoking laptop of 2005, which they lied and pretended was the laptop of an Iranian scientist that was smuggled out of Iran by his wife and had all this proof of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program on it, but every bit of that was refuted, including the thing about the warhead he said was refuted by David Albright and his friend David Sanger in the New York Times, that all those sketches of the warhead for the missile were wrong because when Mossad forged the documents, they were making a good educated guess, but they didn’t know that Iran had completely redesigned the nose cone of their mid-range missiles and had an entirely different nose cone that would require an entirely different warhead than that described in the documents. Iran had completely redesigned the nose cone of their mid-range missiles and had an entirely different nose cone that would require an entirely different warhead than that described in the documents. And why would they have been designing a warhead to fit in a nose cone that they were abandoning? And so that was refuted. David Albright completely discredited your claims there pal, and then they later admitted that it was a CIA laptop. There was no laptop and they later admitted Ali Hainan admitted who was a very hawkish, not director, but a high level executive at the International Atomic Energy Agency, admitted that that intelligence was brought into the stream by the Mujahideen-e-Khalq communist terrorist cult that used to work for the Ayatollah during the revolution, then turned on him, and he turned on them and kicked them out. Then they went to work for Saddam Hussein where they helped crush the Shiite and Kurdish insurrection of 1991, and then they became America, Donald Rumsfeld’s and Ariel Sharon’s sock puppets and later Ehud Olmert’s sock puppets when the United States invaded Iraq and took possession of them. They’re now under American protection in Albania, and these are the same kooks who just a few weeks ago you might remember saying, “Look, new satellite pictures of a whole new nuclear facility in Iran.” Isn’t it funny how no one ever brought that up again? Didn’t bomb it. It was nothing. It was fake. Just like before when they said, “Hey, look, here’s a picture of a vault door.” And behind that is where the secret nuclear weapons program is except turned out that vault door was a stock photo from a vault company. It meant nothing and they had repeatedly made claims that were totally refuted, just like I’m about to refute his claim, that they ever were the ones who revealed for example, Natanz. He was implying that Natanz and Kham were both buried and hidden until revealed I think you said by dissident groups. That is the MEK sock puppets of the Israelis, but it was your friend David Albright, not the Israeli Mossad through the MEK who revealed Natanz facility. Ask him, he’ll fist fight you over it. He claims credit he was first and said, “This is a facility.” However… Claims credit he was first and said this is a facility. However, they were not in violation of their safeguards agreement with the IAEA. They were still six months away from introducing any nuclear material to that facility. When it was revealed, they weren’t in violation of anything. And then on com we had a huge fight about this at the time. The party line came down from all the government officials in the media that they had just exposed the facility there. Com is Fordo. Same thing. When in fact that wasn’t true. The Iranians had announced to the IAEA that we had built a new facility here, and we are going to introduce nuclear material into it within six months. Here’s your official notification. And then a few days later, they just pretended to expose it, when it was the Iranians themselves who had admitted to it in going along with their obligations under their safeguards agreement. ication. And then a few days later, they just pretended to expose it, when it was the Iranians themselves who had admitted to it in going along with their obligations under their safeguards agreement. It’s just completely wrong. Why do they bury them? They buried them for protection because clearly the Israelis have indicated since the 1990s that they consider any nuclear program in Iran to be the same thing as an advanced nuclear weapons program. You’re hearing that today. For them to have a nuclear facility at all is equivalent to them going ahead and breaking out and making a nuclear weapon, and so of course they know that they have to have it buried to protect it from Israel. That doesn’t mean that they are trying to get nukes. It does mean, as I already said, that they wanted to prove to the world that they know how to enrich uranium and that they have facilities buried deeply enough where, if we attack them, that would incentivize them to making nukes, and then we might be unable to stop them without going all the way toward a regime change, which they’re bluffing, basically betting, that we won’t go that far, considering how gigantic their country is and how mountainous and populous it is compared to Iraq next door. Now, here’s some more things that he said that weren’t true. He said Iran has been killing Americans all this time. Well, that’s almost always a reference to Beirut 1983, which you can read in the book By Way of Deception, by Victor Ostrovsky, the former Mossad officer, that the Israelis knew that they were building that truck bomb to bomb the Marines with and withheld that information from the United States and said, “That’s what they get for sticking their big noses in.” And that is in the book, By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky. And by the way, the Israelis were friends with them, with Iran, at the time all through the 1980s. And it was just a couple of years later when Ronald Reagan sold Iran missiles and using the Israelis as cutouts to do so when he switched sides temporarily in the Iran-Iraq war. And that was in 1983. If Ronald Reagan can sell a missiles a year or two years after that, three years after that, then surely the United States and the Ayatollah can bury the hatchet from that. And no one’s ever even, I don’t believe, ever really proven that Tehran ordered that. It was a Shiite militia backed by Iran, that sort of proto-Hezbollah, that did that attack that killed those Marines. And if there’s some responsibility for it, then damn them. If there’s direct responsibility for that, not just their support for the group, then damn them for that, but that’s still no reason in the world to say that we can’t get along with them now when that was in the same year Return of the Jedi came out.…

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