Pod Insights If You're Listening Is Trump pushing more countries toward nuclear weapons? About this episode President Trump promised he'd negotiate a better nuclear deal with Iran than the one struck under Barack Obama, which he's described as "the worst deal ever negotiated." But after another Trump-brokered ceasefire appears to have broken down, that looks increasingly unlikely.
So what did it take to get the 2015 deal over the line? Matt sits down with former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, one of its lead negotiators, to talk about negotiating with Iran, Trump's approach to diplomacy, and how worried we should be about the risk of nuclear conflict.
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0:48 Speaker 03 G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. As I'm recording this on Monday, the 13th of July, the ceasefire agreement between Iran and the US looks like it's off again, with Iran attacking commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the US conducting airstrikes on Iran. It's proving, in Trump's eyes, unexpectedly difficult to come to an agreement with Iran to end the war and stop their nuclear weapons programme. To me, it seems like he will be lucky to strike a deal that's as effective as the Iran nuclear deal signed under the Obama administration in 2015. The deal in 2015 was negotiated under very different circumstances, over years, not weeks,
1:30 Speaker 03 without the pressure of an active war and led by career diplomats and physicists, not the president's son-in-law and his golfing buddy. Today, I'm talking to someone who was actually in the room when that deal was struck. Ernest Moniz is the former US Secretary of Energy and a lead negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. I sat down with Secretary Moniz before the latest ceasefire collapse to ask what it's really like to negotiate with Iran, what he makes of the Trump administration's approach, and how close we really are to nuclear catastrophe.
2:16 Speaker 03 Mr Secretary, one of the things that has fascinated me about your career is the massive difference between you and your successor as the Secretary of Energy. You're a nuclear physicist who was replaced by former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who had once said that he wanted to abolish the Department of Energy.
2:36 Speaker 04 It's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, education, and the, what's the third one there? Let's see.
2:45 Speaker 03 And later admitted that he didn't really know what it did. It's obviously easy to laugh at that fact, but what the Department of Energy actually does is a little bit counterintuitive. Is that right?
2:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think actually very few Americans frankly really do understand what the Department does. The Department's roots are in the Atomic Energy Commission.
3:04 Speaker 06 In August 1946, the President signed into law an act creating Atomic Energy Commission. Atomic energy for peace or war? This was the question.
3:13 Speaker 05 Which inherited the Manhattan Project and therefore carried on with nuclear weapons, started the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. It was responsible for harnessing the atom or the nucleus for nuclear power. So it was from its beginning a nuclear weapons, national security, and fundamental science agency. The next big change really came in the 70s with the oil embargoes. And that led the Presidents, in particular President Carter, to say, we need an energy department.
3:48 Speaker 07 I will ask the Congress for its help in combining many of these agencies in a new energy department to bring order out of chaos.
3:56 Speaker 05 And why don't we use this Atomic Energy Commission thing, which is already doing some energy? And very interesting, with a certain look towards the events today in the Strait of Hormuz, the security issues that were raised by the oil embargo.
4:16 Speaker 05 Led to the start of things like solar energy as a security initiative, not as a clean energy initiative. And finally, the third major event, I would say, which changed the character of the department, was the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union.
4:33 Speaker 07 In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lowered for the last time, and an era comes to an end.
4:39 Speaker 05 That led to things like the nuclear nonproliferation program starting. It led to the issue of starting to clean up the Cold War nuclear weapons mess as opposed to adding to it. And so that's the department today. It's got major missions in nuclear weapons, in nonproliferation, in fundamental science, in energy, and in environmental cleanup. And that's fundamentally the department.
5:06 Speaker 03 Yes, and by nuclear nonproliferation, we're talking about preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. You know, it obviously has trained inspectors and that sort of thing in order to go and make sure that other countries are abiding by nuclear safety principles. But it also collects loose nuclear material, is that right? Sends out people to find and collect those things. So it's kind of an intelligence agency as well.
5:29 Speaker 05 Well, we do have an intelligence function. We are one of the 18 intelligence agencies. We, I'm still saying we. Unknown to most people, the collection or elimination of materials that could be used in weapons, for example, highly enriched uranium, it's been eliminated from more than 20 countries. There are still more than 20 countries that have some, but we're kind of halfway through the elimination of countries possessing this material. So it's a big story.
5:59 Speaker 03 They've just renamed the Department of Defense to Department of War. Maybe they should rename Department of Energy to Department of Don't Touch This, It's Very Important.
6:07 Speaker 05 To be fair, we pointed out to the current secretary as the Trump administration, in its second incarnation, had Elon Musk taking his famous hacksaw to various departments, that a lot of his folks were in the nuclear weapons business, and this was not exactly the right time to diminish them. Those ranks, unfortunately, the Doge activities continued. And then it wasn't too long afterwards when the administration desperately tried to rehire some of the people that had been let go in the national security side. You probably know that there is a big push to modernize the nuclear deterrent. You can't do that if you're getting rid of the people who have been spending literally decades overseeing that activity.
6:52 Speaker 03 We've heard stories about the antiquated nature of the way that the American nuclear weapons program functions, you know, using old floppy disks and that sort of thing on the computers that maintain the arsenal and that kind of thing.
7:05 Speaker 05 Floppy disks are very good for cybersecurity.
7:07 Speaker 03 Yes, that's true. Very hard to hack. That's right. So it was in this capacity that you were involved in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal under President Obama. We've talked on our show about the process that the diplomats Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan went through in order to get the Iranians to the table. When did you join the process?
7:30 Speaker 05 I was very involved in the Iran issues from the first day I was Secretary of Energy. The department and its laboratory personnel were always engaged as kind of the technical arm of the negotiations. So I was regularly in the Situation Room when the President and the Vice President were having meetings on Iran. The change came early in 2015 when frankly, the negotiations carried out in the usual way with the foreign ministers had made progress, but clearly was at a cul-de-sac, particularly in the negotiations on the nuclear side. So that's when the decision was made.
8:10 Speaker 05 The chief nuclear officers of Iran and of the United States would directly join and take part in negotiating the nuclear elements. Of course, we converged on July 14, Quatorze Juillet, and signed the agreement. But then came phase three, also less visible publicly, after the agreement was reached.
8:34 Speaker 05 The Iranians tackling a pretty gargantuan challenge of actually implementing all the things they had agreed to. Because the agreement would not actually go into effect until they had in fact shipped out ninety eight percent of their enriched uranium, allow the international inspectors to have cameras and seals everywhere, to destroy the reactor that would make plutonium, the other nuclear weapons material. So they had a lot of things to do. Our job was not over. We had to help Iran carry through on all of its commitments, and I have to give them credit. We thought it would take the better part of a year. They got it done in January.
9:18 Speaker 05 So the agreement started into effect in the middle of January twenty sixteen, and then President Trump in his first term in May twenty eighteen withdrew from the agreement, and that starts the saga that we are now seeing play out today in the Gulf region.
9:34 Speaker 03 Trump's team is negotiating with the Iranians in a very different atmosphere to the one that you were negotiating with them in twenty fourteen, fifteen, that period. Obviously, a much more hostile environment in the midst of an active war. What was it like negotiating with the Iranians in that period where the war was a bit colder and where tensions were not as high? Were they helpful, friendly, good to work with?
10:04 Speaker 05 One should not underestimate the tensions that were there. These were brewing for a long time. It was in two thousand and three when there is a consensus that Iran got a bit cold feet in some of its organized nuclear weapons activities, but kept building the enrichment capability, for example, to produce the nuclear materials that they would need for nuclear power or potentially for a nuclear weapon. So in twenty fifteen, the good part is that I would say John Kerry and Javad Zarif, the foreign ministers, had a pretty good relationship of personal trust.
10:46 Speaker 05 Clearly, the countries had very divergent objectives. Then, when Ali Salehi, the Iranian nuclear officer, and I joined the negotiation formally, we had a lot of pretty lucky circumstances. Ali was a graduate student, a PhD student at MIT when I was on the faculty at MIT in the 1970s. We did not know each other then, but we had a lot of common friends. George Shultz, who was Secretary of State during the, in the Reagan years, negotiated many important things: arms control with the Soviet Union, the Montreal Protocol for the ozone layer, et cetera.
11:30 Speaker 05 When I spoke with George, he would always emphasize he viewed the key to negotiating hard things was building personal trust with your corresponding partner. I think we had the kind of personal trust, and even though we had very different objectives, and we were pretty fierce in defending our country's prerogatives, we knew we could do it in an honest way, and it was very, very helpful.
11:54 Speaker 03 Did you have sort of informal interactions with them as well during some of these negotiations? For example, in Vienna, did you meet over the negotiating table in a professional manner and then go and have dinner and drinks afterwards?
12:06 Speaker 05 Well, not, not the drinks.
12:07 Speaker 03 Not drinks? No, no, of course, yes.
12:10 Speaker 05 But the answer is yes. Salehi and I, my estimate is we spent somewhere between 60 and 70 hours of one-on-one negotiation.
12:19 Speaker 03 Right.
12:20 Speaker 05 Often going well into the evening. The Iranians and the Americans and Europeans had two separate dining rooms. You will not be surprised to find out that the American dining room closed much earlier than the Iranian dining room. And so, after our negotiations, I would often join Salehi in their dining room, but I then, frankly, found the food to be much more interesting. In fact, I still have, my wife has, actually, to be technically correct, the recipe for a wonderful Iranian dish called pheasant jawn that I ate there and brought home the handwritten copy so that she still cooks it.
13:04 Speaker 05 These were very, very important trust-building kinds of activities. And early in our negotiations, Salahi and mine, he had his first grandchild come into the world. And the next time we met, I was able to bring him from the MIT bookstore two baby gifts, one of which was only an MIT nerd could give and could like. You know, we had many of these personal relationships that really helped the negotiation along because the negotiations, you know, sometimes inevitably got testy, but were always professional.
13:39 Speaker 03 The reason I ask you about the personal relationships and about the overlap is we're currently seeing the opposite of that. We're seeing negotiations carried out by, on the Iranian side, some of the people you worked with during that process are still around. Abbas Araki was involved in the process back in 2015 and-
13:57 Speaker 05 He was the deputy foreign minister then, and now, of course, the foreign minister.
14:00 Speaker 03 Yes, indeed. But on the other side, it's not former MIT colleagues or people with colleagues in common. It's J.D. Vance, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, the president's golf caddy partner. These are the people who are publicly the faces of the negotiation process. Would there be people who perhaps are less prominent than them but would have a much higher level of expertise? Would they be involved in this as well? Or is it just these three guys going in and trying to understand the technical requirements involved in coming to a complicated agreement like the one they're trying to come to now?
14:45 Speaker 05 Well, first of all, I don't think, you know, you have to be a nuclear physicist to negotiate. And in fact, that's more the exception to the rule. But I do think it's very important that the negotiators use the large team they have supporting them. They do have technical people on their team. Whether they're being used effectively enough is a question. And I think the proof in the pudding will be what does an agreement actually look like, assuming one is reached at all. I think one should not confuse the memorandum of understanding with having been an Iran nuclear agreement. It was really an opening the Strait of Hormuz agreement.
15:28 Speaker 05 Sort of, but especially in negotiating with the Iranians, an agreement with them has to be much more, let's say, detailed than is generally the case in diplomatic agreements. Ambiguity is not the friend of this agreement. And my concern is that if an agreement is reached, it will have the ambiguities, certainly on the technical side, that will complicate implementation enormously and I think probably sink the agreement in pretty short order. So I think that's where the negotiators really do need to use their teams effectively and have a more complex agreement than would be their norm.
16:13 Speaker 03 Well, there's one that they could copy and paste from 2015, potentially.
16:17 Speaker 05 Well, I'll point out a difference and a similarity. One of the obvious major downsides of the United States withdrawing from the agreement is the fact that Iran, in the 2015 agreement, was restricted for 15 years to no more enriched uranium than 300 kilograms at 3.67% enrichment. 3.67 may not mean much, let's just say that's very low.
16:44 Speaker 03 That's for nuclear energy, a power station sort of level.
16:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, a typical nuclear reactor, a power station, would have 4% to 5% enrichment, and this was even below that. Certainly well, well short of what you would need for a weapon. A downside is now, before the bombing of June 2025, the IAEA, the International Inspectors, had seen just over 440 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium. And 60% enriched uranium is not weapons-grade, but it is usable directly in a nuclear bomb, without further enrichment.
17:25 Speaker 03 Oh, I see.
17:26 Speaker 05 That's not understood very well. So that's a case where you can't copy and paste because that problem didn't exist in 2015, and it's a very big problem right now. However... Another place that was absolutely critical were the extraordinary verification and transparency measures that Iran agreed to in 2015. Some measures that no other country in the world has ever been subject to. That's the level of distrust, frankly, that there is in terms of Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions potentially down the road.
18:05 Speaker 05 So that's a case where if the current negotiators can even just replicate what we had in 2015, that would be a major accomplishment.
18:14 Speaker 03 Do you think that the events of this year make nuclear proliferation to countries that do not currently have nuclear weapons more likely than not now?
18:25 Speaker 05 I think it's not clear, to be honest, but I also want to say that once you're not single out only the events of this year, you should add to that the events in Ukraine. In Ukraine, when Russia was not having great military success very early after their invasion, there was a lot of loose talk coming out of Moscow about using nuclear weapons. That then went away when Moscow stemmed the tide and made even some progress on the ground. But of course, now they're kind of on their back foot again, and we will see what this leads to in terms of nuclear concerns. Now, in terms of the Gulf situation, there's been a lot of destruction in Iran from the
19:09 Speaker 05 military activities, and that's because of the nuclear weapons issue mostly, at least for the United States. Israel may have some other motivations. It did earn them quite some destruction. On the other hand, it also could provide motivation for crossing the Rubicon and going to a nuclear weapon. That's where I think the negotiations come in. Can we stabilize not only the relationship with Iran, but frankly, the regional situation, and hopefully have that entire region as a nuclear weapons free zone as it is today?
19:42 Speaker 03 Just finally, earlier this year, we talked about the Doomsday Clock, the device that the The Bulletin of the Nuclear Scientists uses and updates each year to talk about, you know, how close we are to some sort of global catastrophe. They initially were talking about nuclear weapons, they're now including other things like climate change and that sort of thing. We spoke to Steven Pinker, who is a philosopher and a psychiatrist, who basically says that this countdown is not helpful and it's not necessarily logical and also it's not necessarily accurate to say that we are so close to a catastrophe.
20:21 Speaker 03 Do you think that the doomsday clock is helpful and do you see us as being in as precarious a situation as that clock indicates?
20:31 Speaker 05 Frankly, I think it's gotten a bit muddled by having these very, very different threats included in that one clock. I regret the fact that they have mixed these issues together. Now, but going back to the nuclear issue, I think it's a fact that it has captured a lot of attention and it has made a lot of people aware of the fact that the nuclear issue remains salient, and it does. And in fact, it's not only because of the Gulf situation and the Ukraine situation. I would say the United States has had a lot of success through what is called extended deterrence. A lot of countries which have the technical capability easily of building nuclear weapons
21:15 Speaker 05 in Europe, Japan, South Korea, et cetera, have not built nuclear weapons because they are under the, quote, "nuclear umbrella" of the United States. Well, a lot of those countries are now questioning how sturdy that umbrella might be. And of course, that involves a lot of the issues with the current US administration and the attitudes towards a number of allies. They're questioning whether they can rely upon the US extended deterrence. So there were a lot of issues that are bubbling. I don't think it's an accident that you're seeing a lot more nuclear movies these days. You had Oppenheimer, et cetera.
21:59 Speaker 05 I did a one-hour discussion with James Cameron, the movie director, and Christian Amanpour last August, when it was the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima Nagasaki bombings. And the little news item there was that James Cameron's next movie, after his last Avatar movie, will be called Hiroshima, or The Ghosts of Hiroshima. So, you know, I think it's coming back into the discussion. Nuclear weapons did not go away with the end of the Cold War. And in fact, the situation is looking a bit more risky. We need to think in some new ways, and I think, going back to your question, the doomsday clock is a useful construct, I think, in that regard.
22:44 Speaker 03 Are you optimistic for our ability to avoid nuclear catastrophe in the next few years?
22:50 Speaker 05 I'm a physicist, which makes me naturally optimistic. But I don't think you get there without hard work. One of the jobs that we have not done as well as we need to, things like the movies' help with this, is convincing members of the public that they have the agency to influence these policy-level issues, because that's who the politicians ultimately listen to.
23:16 Speaker 03 I guess the fear is that people will see these movies like Oppenheimer and think, well, what's the point in doing anything? Armageddon is inevitable. I'll just live my life and ignore this problem because there's nothing I can do about it.
23:27 Speaker 05 But the counter to that is that it has been more than 80 years since nuclear weapons were first used and have not been used since. And it's not easy. It requires everything, including something you mentioned earlier, the removal, for example, of high-enriched uranium from more than 20 countries. It's not like we knock off five countries in a year.
23:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
23:48 Speaker 05 It's hard-won progress, and we can't relax now.
23:52 Speaker 03 Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for giving us so much of your time this morning.
23:55 Speaker 05 Thank you. I hope we'll see some of your listeners taking up the flag with agency.
23:59 Speaker 03 I'm sure. Not a lot of nuclear weapons in our hemisphere, but we'll see what we can do to help.
24:04 Speaker 05 We want to keep it that way.
24:13 Speaker 03 Last Thursday, we looked at Donald Trump's White House renovations and why they're not as horrifying as some of his critics make them out to be. This Thursday, we're talking about something I think is far more concerning than the ballroom: the eye-watering amount of money Donald Trump is making during this second term. In an average month, he's now earning roughly twice as much as he had in all of his bank accounts back in 2020. So where's all that money coming from? You'll find out on Thursday. I'll catch you then.
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