00:09 – Announcer
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go to YouTube and search “Mission Implausible” podcasts or click the link to our channel.
00:17 – John Sipher
In our show notes – I’m John Sipher and I’m Jerry O’Shea. We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around the world.
00:30 – Jerry O’Shea
Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
00:34 – John Sipher
Now we’re going to use that experience to investigate the conspiracy theories everyone’s talking about, as well as some you may not have heard.
00:41 – Jerry O’Shea
Could they be true – or are we being manipulated?
00:43 – John Sipher
We’ll find out now on Mission Implausible.
So we’re doing something a little bit different today. This episode is a joint production with The Steady State Sentinel podcast. The Steady State is a nonpartisan nonprofit made up of former US national security officials, created to defend constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and national security from threats at home and abroad.
Our guest today is perfect for both shows. We’re joined by Andy Weber – one of the most experienced American officials in the world of nuclear, chemical, and biological threat reduction. Andy spent decades in US national security, including as an Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Before those senior titles, Andy was a young American diplomat in post‑Soviet Kazakhstan at a moment when the world was only beginning to understand what the collapse of the Soviet Union had left behind: nuclear weapons, usable uranium, biological weapons facilities, and lots of scientists who had worked inside one of the most secretive military‑industrial systems ever built.
We’ll chat about his role in the covert 1994 mission to remove over 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium – as well as anthrax and other biological agents – from Kazakhstan, later described in David Hoffman’s Pulitzer Prize‑winning book The Dead Hand.
Andy, welcome. Take us back to Kazakhstan in the early nineties. What did the collapse of the Soviet Union look like from the ground? And what was the security like at those former nuclear and bio weapons sites?
02:12 – Andy Weber
It was incredible. An amazing time to be there. I volunteered to go, spent a year in Russian language training, and arrived in the summer of 1993. It was still a relatively new country. The strategic facilities were protected, but frankly their biggest protection during the Soviet period was that they were closed cities – nobody could go to them, completely closed off to visitors. Then that system fell apart, so they became accessible. They just weren’t designed with modern security the way we think about it.
02:51 – Jerry O’Shea
We talk about conspiracies and conspiracy theories on this program, but this was an absolute lackof conspiracy, right? This was just a factory – Operation Sapphire, you can look it up – with incredible amounts of material that you could make a bomb out of. It was just sitting there.
03:07 – Andy Weber
It was a huge process of discovery because we didn’t know it was there. I learned about it initially through my driver‑mechanic, my fixer. His name was Slava. He asked me shortly after I arrived if I’d be interested in buying some uranium. I could have just laughed it off, but it was such a crazy time in history that you had to pull the string on all these threads.
That led to an introduction to a factory director named Vitaly Mette, then several months of building trust with him – including on a moose hunting trip – and eventually through a retired KGB border guard colonel named Korbatov. He provided me with detailed information: six hundred kilograms, enriched to 90% uranium‑235, which is weapons‑usable.
I reported all that back to Washington. There was a lot of skepticism. I think they thought I was being scammed – there were so many crazy stories about suitcase nukes being sold at the time. So it wasn’t until we got permission from the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, for me and a technical expert from Oak Ridge to visit the facility secretly and see the inventory for ourselves.
04:36 – Jerry O’Shea
But Andy, there was a lock on the door, wasn’t there?
04:38 – Andy Weber
After that inspection visit in March 1994, we reported back that it was protected by a good padlock. The sort of padlock you see in an antique shop – Civil War era. Imagine. I feel safe.
04:58 – John Sipher
I remember in The Dead Hand – David Hoffman talks about this – that when Washington finally figured this out and created a whole effort to come get the stuff, this massive C‑5 aircraft was sent secretly. And you were in the control tower, and nobody spoke English. You had to guide the planes in.
05:21 – Andy Weber
It was a frightening test of my Russian language. They were telling me in Russian what to tell the cockpit of that incoming C‑5. But it landed safely. I was very relieved.
05:33 – John Sipher
I also remember a story about you guys on these rickety trucks, sliding over ice…
05:40 – Andy Weber
It took almost six weeks to package the material for transport. A huge operation – over thirty people came from the United States to do that packaging work. Then we loaded it all onto Soviet‑made trucks, and we decided for tactical surprise to make the movement from the factory to the airfield in the middle of the night.
We were racing against winter – to get the stuff out before it was too late for the C‑5 Galaxy to even land in that part of the world. The movement was at 3:00 in the morning. I was in the lead Volga sedan. We had some armed escorts. The trucks were sliding on black ice. It was a very cold night, and I was worried one of them would slide off a bridge and I’d have to report to Washington that it was floating down the Irtysh River.
Luckily they know how to drive in those parts in bad weather. We made it to the airfield, and at first light the first of two C‑5 aircraft came to pick up the team and the highly enriched uranium. It was flown back without any landing – aerial refueling – all the way to Dover, Delaware, then overland to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
06:56 – John Sipher
I guess that was the longest C‑5 flight ever.
06:59 – Andy Weber
Right. If you look at a globe, it’s literally halfway around the world.
07:03 – Jerry O’Shea
So you’ve talked about the “stuff” – HEU up to 90%. The stakes: that stuff could make X amount of nuclear bombs.
07:16 – Andy Weber
At the unclassified level, about two dozen nuclear weapons. Much of it was in readily weaponizable form – 90% enriched, weapons grade, and a lot of it was pure uranium metal. To fashion it into a gun‑type nuclear device would have been relatively simple.
07:40 – Jerry O’Shea
So you beat North Korea, or Iran, or Al Qaeda to it.
07:44 – Andy Weber
Yeah. Think about it: Iran went through all that trouble to develop a nuclear program, built big enrichment facilities underground – thirty years of work, billions of dollars. Had they acquired this material from Kazakhstan in 1993 or ’94, they would have short‑circuited that whole process and would have had enough material for about two dozen nuclear weapons.
08:12 – John Sipher
You’re enemy number one for the Iranian regime. That’s good to know.
08:16 – Andy Weber
They were definitely seeking this material, trying to get it.
08:20 – John Sipher
Weren’t they trying to deal with scientists and buy their way into the program?
08:23 – Andy Weber
The Iranians were scouring the former Soviet Union – Russia and the neighboring states – for expertise, for materials, for weapons. A lot of it was for sale. They would invite experts to teach at universities in Tehran. At the factory that had the HEU, when we visited, they had a stack of wooden crates addressed to an address in Tehran. We were told by the factory director that it was Iranians seeking to buy beryllium metal, which was also produced there. But had they known about the highly enriched uranium, I’m sure that would have been their next purchase. That deal was stopped.
09:10 – Jerry O’Shea
It sounds like a Hollywood movie – one US official saves the world, kind of sort of. You must feel really good being part of that.
09:19 – Andy Weber
Leading the team that actually did it… well, like anything in government, it’s always a team sport.
09:25 – John Sipher
Tell us a little about banya diplomacy. It sounds like personal relationships – your Russian language, the fact that you could drink with these guys – probably did more to help close down those evil Soviet programs than all the treaties in the world.
09:38 – Andy Weber
It was an incredible time. At least every week, sometimes several times a week, I would meet people who had never in their lives met an American. It had been a pretty isolated part of the Soviet Union. They’d always looked up to us as enemies, but they admired us, and then they had the chance to meet somebody. The fact that I spoke Russian really helped in terms of building trust – and doing what they enjoyed: hunting, fishing, drinking, taking off your clothes and beating each other with birch branches in a Russian banya. It was really the personal trust and those relationships that made the work possible.
10:27 – Jerry O’Shea
I need a little help with HEU percentages. To take uranium from 0% to 20% is about 90% of the work. 20% only gets you to the threshold of making a weapon, right? Then when you get it up to 60% – which takes a lot less work – you’re on a dangerous threshold. And 90% is weapons grade. Hiroshima’s Little Boy was about 80%.
Can you explain how important that is – especially for what’s going on in Iran?
11:14 – Andy Weber
Kazakhstan had 600 kilograms of 90% enriched – weapons‑usable. Iran today has about 450 kilograms (970 pounds) of 60% enriched HEU. With their remaining enrichment capacity, they can enrich that to 90% in a matter of weeks. Then they would have to convert it to metal to make it bomb‑usable, but they’re pretty close. That’s about ten to twelve nuclear weapons’ worth of material. It’s currently in the form of uranium hexafluoride gas.
11:55 – Jerry O’Shea
But they also have about eleven tons of uranium enriched to a lesser degree – to 60% or 50%?
12:04 – Andy Weber
Another key figure that everybody glosses over: in 2015, when the Obama administration signed the JCPOA with Iran, they had zero highly enriched uranium – only enriched to 3.67%. And before that agreement even entered into force, they allowed 97% of that low‑enriched uranium to be transported out of the country – with help from Kazakhstan to Russia.
It was only after 2018, when Trump pulled out of the agreement because he was going to negotiate a “better” one, that they built up this inventory of highly enriched uranium, which is extremely dangerous. And it’s still there.
12:51 – John Sipher
The part we forget too is the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program. How much did Soviet officials hide? Tell us about the “Freed Losk” incident and what you guys did to get rid of weaponized anthrax.
13:07 – Andy Weber
We pretty much missed the scope of the Soviet bioweapons program from an intelligence perspective during the Cold War. I was able to visit many of the facilities and work with hundreds of scientists and engineers. It was enormous – at one point it employed about 50,000 people, with over 50 facilities.
The largest facility of all – in 1979, a military biological weapons facility accidentally released anthrax into the environment and killed over 100 innocent civilians waiting at bus stops. That was covered up by the KGB. After that, they decided maybe it’s not such a great idea to build anthrax facilities in major cities. So in the 1980s they built a new secret city in Kazakhstan called Stepnagorsk – the world’s largest anthrax factory. It was capable of producing and loading onto weapons 300 metric tons of anthrax and other bacterial agents during an eight‑month mobilization period.
I visited that facility in the early and mid‑1990s. In June 1995 we made a secret visit with American experts, and eventually we negotiated with the government of Kazakhstan to completely destroy that facility. If you were to go there today, you’d just find a field of grass.
14:53 – John Sipher
You must have had lots of vaccinations.
14:55 – Andy Weber
I was part of a special vaccination program – for things that are generally not available, like tularemia and plague and other very rare diseases that were used.
15:07 – John Sipher
So you might be the one person left after the biological war that’s coming.
15:12 – Andy Weber
I’ve got pretty good immunity.
15:26 – Jerry O’Shea
So if that’s what was going on in the Soviet Union, what was going on in the West? Offensive capabilities – was that totally forbidden? Did we have our own?
15:38 – Andy Weber
We had a significant program, very successful. Our Joint Chiefs of Staff really thought it was on a par with nuclear weapons in terms of strategic effect. We almost scared ourselves with some major tests in the late 1960s. President Nixon, with help from Henry Kissinger and a wonderful scientist named Matt Meselson, decided to get rid of America’s offensive biological weapons program. It was outlawed by Nixon in 1969, and then they negotiated the Biological Weapons Convention, which completely prohibits the development and stockpiling of biological weapons. That entire type of weapon is banned globally.
As the ink was drying on that agreement, the Soviet Union expanded its biological weapons program. That horrible facility at Stepnagorsk – the anthrax factory – was built in the 1980s.
16:42 – Jerry O’Shea
Did we know they had these programs to this extent? And did they know that we didn’t have these programs? Because their propaganda was “NATO is offensive, we’re going to be attacked.”
16:57 – Andy Weber
They knew for sure that we had stopped. The people with the highest security clearances knew we were no longer engaged. They visited our facilities through a process called the Trilateral process. Ken Alibek (Kanatjan Alibekov) was part of that inspection team, as was someone I became very good friends with, Lev Sandakhchiev – who ran the Vector facility in Siberia. They were absolutely convinced we didn’t have a program. A lot of the scientists were lied to by their government – told “we’re only doing this because the US has a program” – but the leadership level knew we didn’t.
17:45 – John Sipher
Even Gorbachev, who was seen as someone against the hardcore KGB and military, supported this program.
17:52 – Andy Weber
Gorbachev signed a decree expanding the biological weapons program in the mid‑1980s.
17:59 – John Sipher
This led to the Nunn‑Lugar Agreement, often described as one of the great post‑Cold War successes. Why hasn’t that become a model we’ve used more in the future?
18:09 – Andy Weber
It’s a great model. I had the privilege of being involved. The Nunn‑Lugar program started in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed. It still continues to this day. We do great work all over the world.
An example of how that model was used successfully: when the Assad regime used chemical weapons on a large scale and killed over 1,000 men, women and children in August 2013. By threatening the use of military force, we got Syria to join the Chemical Weapons Convention. We negotiated an agreement to remove and destroy 1,300 tons of chemical weapons. The people in government who made that happen – people like Ash Carter, Liz Sherwood‑Randall, Laura Holgate – had all been involved in the early Nunn‑Lugar years.
19:14 – Jerry O’Shea
The rhetoric coming out of Russia today – Putin says the Soviet collapse was a great humiliation and we humiliated them. But what you’re saying is we actually helped. We spent enormous amounts of money to clean up the mess the Soviet Union had created to kill us. We employed their nuclear scientists to keep them busy, to keep North Korea from poaching them. They know NATO is not an alliance looking to capitalize on this. And yet their propaganda is that they’re coming back because of humiliation. For folks who buy into that – including in one of our political parties – what do you say?
19:57 – Andy Weber
It’s the big lie. This program helped Russia tremendously. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Russia – improving security at their nuclear facilities, at their biological research centers, upgrading laboratories, engaging in peaceful research, employing scientists. Yes, it was in our national security interests, but it also made the world safer.
It was Putin himself who took the lead in shutting down this program. He claimed it was just being used to spy on their sensitive facilities – which was not true. It did give us transparency at those facilities, because that’s where the work was done. Our teams spent a lot of time working in remote facilities across all eleven time zones of Russia. Putin shut it down. My last visit to Russia was with Senator Lugar in August 2012. That’s pretty much when Putin decided to end the program. Then Crimea happened in early 2014, and that was it for our cooperation with Russia.
21:24 – John Sipher
I think we’ve learned a lot about how to create fake narratives from Putin’s use of that. I often say that NATO threatens Russia like a lock threatens a thief. They know it’s a defensive alliance.
21:37 – Andy Weber
One example, since you guys are into conspiracy theories: the big Russian lie about the Ukraine biolabs. That was my program – the one Tulsi Gabbard is pushing. It’s a complete fabrication.
We started a program working with Ukraine to strengthen their public health laboratories – to make them safer, more modern, so they would have a better ability to detect and respond to infectious disease outbreaks and prevent them from becoming pandemics. I was directly involved. The Ukraine effort started after 9/11. The agreement was signed when Senator Lugar and Senator Obama visited Kyiv – I was part of that trip in August 2005.
The Russian disinformation – just like the HIV/AIDS story, which we know is a well‑documented KGB fabrication – they started using the same playbook: a female journalist in Bulgaria planting ridiculous stories. Same with the National Center for Disease Control we built in Tbilisi, Georgia. Then it escalated to the point where Putin himself was talking about it.
He had a three‑star general, Igor Kirillov, who was actually one of the leaders of their illegal chemical and biological weapons programs – which continue to this day in violation of the BWC. He was found guilty in a Ukrainian court of using chemical weapons inside Ukraine. He was leaving his apartment one morning and there was a scooter next to the doorway. General Kirillov is no longer with us. It’s perverse that the general in charge of their illegal programs – using chemical weapons in Ukraine – is the same person going on TV spouting lies about Ukrainian biolabs.
23:47 – John Sipher
They do it all around the world. I remember in Indonesia, the Russians tried to spread disinformation about some of our Navy programs. So it’s a lie they play over and over.
Let me move into some of the Iran stuff because it matters today. There’s a lot of talk about whether we obliterated their program – or if we didn’t, can we just send some special forces guys in? You wrote an excellent op‑ed in the New York Times. What would you want to know before you believe any claim that Iran’s nuclear capability had been obliterated or destroyed?
24:19 – Andy Weber
We know more about the Iranian nuclear program than just about any other intelligence target. When I served as Assistant Secretary of Defense, I was a consumer of the most exquisite intelligence – from our own sources, from Israeli sources. We had that program totally penetrated. Plus, we had IAEA inspectors, remote video cameras, and monitoring for many years.
The bombing in April – Operation Midnight Hammer – when I was at the Pentagon, we started a program to develop a special munition just for those facilities in Iran. That bombing was very successful. It took out their enrichment capacity at two places: Fordow and Natanz. What it didn’tdo was much of anything to their stockpile of highly enriched uranium – especially the 60% enriched uranium. They have about 440 kilograms of it, enough for up to a dozen bombs. That’s what I worry about.
We think we know where most of it is – in tunnels near Isfahan. We bombed the entrances to those tunnels, and the Iranians poured more dirt and put up more barriers. But we think it’s deep inside those tunnels.
Eventually, I would love to see an international effort – a negotiated agreement for Iran to allow that material to be excavated, packaged for transport, and moved to a third country. Until we do that, they still have a good possibility of developing nuclear weapons.
26:06 – Jerry O’Shea
We can’t bomb away the knowledge – this is technology from the 1940s, how to make at least a basic bomb. We’ve come to accept that North Korea has a bomb, and they’re arguably more of a threat to the US than Iran is. So we’re at a crossroads: do we negotiate and accept the legitimacy of the Iranian regime and try to work a deal, or do we try to overthrow them? If it’s the latter, it makes no sense for them to give up their nuclear weapons – that’s their fail‑safe. Do you cut a deal like JCPOA part two and just recognize that we’re going to have to live with this to a certain extent?
26:51 – Andy Weber
I think in the short term, that’s our only option – to cut a deal. It’s our only option. Let’s hope that hideous regime is replaced in the future – that the Iranian people get a better government, which they so long have deserved. But in the meantime, you have to deal with the government that’s there.
Unfortunately, we’ve probably emboldened the hardliners and strengthened the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. That’s why we’re having such a devil of a time trying to negotiate anything with them. By not losing the war and having been able to close the Strait of Hormuz, they had the world economy in a bit of a stranglehold.
27:32 – John Sipher
It’s better than having a nuclear bomb. Your New York Times op‑ed talked about the difficulty of getting out Iran’s nuclear material. What would it take to remove or secure nuclear material – like we did in Kazakhstan, like we did with chemical weapons in Syria? Can we send in a SEAL Team Six to just go in there and grab it?
27:53 – Andy Weber
When I served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense programs, I did a lot of work with the elite special forces trained in this area. They’re the best in the world. The Israelis also have very good special forces.
But you can’t get around the fact that this is not a “go in, grab a guy, and come right out” operation. Because we’d bombed these tunnels, the time on target required would probably be days – even weeks. You’d have to do a major excavation to recover the canisters of 60% enriched uranium. They’re deep in these tunnels. We don’t know what condition they’re in – some may have been damaged by the bombing and released toxic gas and chemicals.
So you’d have a special team working on the ground in the middle of Iran for a week or more. You’d need a perimeter protecting them. You’d need heavy equipment, an airfield, and thousands of boots on the ground – US soldiers – protecting that force against Iranian short‑range missile and drone attacks and ground assaults. I just don’t think it’s realistic. It’s so risky we would probably take a large number of casualties.
Yes, we could do it, but it would be so much better to do it as a negotiated solution with an international team under IAEA supervision to monitor and verify quantities and locations. I don’t see even Trump taking that big a risk – rolling the dice with our soldiers’ lives.
29:52 – Jerry O’Shea
If this isn’t scary enough… There was an article in the New York Times about Dr. David Relman, a microbiologist and biosecurity expert. He was working with an AI chatbot, and he asked it about a pathogen. The AI was able to tell him how to take a potentially dangerous pathogen, how to modify it so it can’t be treated, how to spread it in an urban area to cause mass casualties – and then, just for luck, how to get away with it and probably not get caught. He said it was telling him things hehadn’t thought of, and he’s a biosecurity expert.
Now you’ve got Anthropic telling the Pentagon it doesn’t want to give its AI to the Pentagon with those sorts of capabilities – capabilities that you or I or God forbid John could have.
30:55 – Andy Weber
I spent over thirty years of my career working against biological weapons, and they probably scare me the most. David Relman is a dear friend and colleague at Stanford – a very level‑headed guy, not an alarmist. Kevin Esvelt is the other scientist quoted in that article.
Bioweapons threats have always been a major concern, but now you add AI enablement. It makes information – how‑to information – available to a larger section of the public and to potential bad actors. And it also enables those few countries that still develop biological weapons – we’re talking about less than a handful: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran – to make more precise biological weapons, to tailor the effects.
I worry a lot about covert acts by state actors. Think of Salisbury – two GRU officers with 10,000 lethal doses of Novichok, a fourth‑generation chemical weapon, recovered in a perfume bottle. Their goal was to kill one guy. But that same capability – if we’re in a moment of tension and Russia is committing sabotage in Western Europe, or China is trying to prevent the flow of forces toward a Taiwan scenario – could be used to hit US bases in Japan, Guam, or Hawaii with a covert biological attack, tailored to be non‑lethal and hard to attribute.
So you have traditional bioterrorists and lone actors enabled by new technologies, but also state programs that could use these weapons covertly in a gray‑zone, hybrid warfare scenario – to neutralize our bases, airports, seaports, our ability to move forces.
The good news: we can use these same tools for biodefense. The Pentagon just launched a major initiative called the Indo‑Pacific Biodeterrence Sprint. By the end of this calendar year, we will have systems in place at 25 sites in the Indo‑Pacific region to detect bioattacks. That’s what we need – visible, major investments that leverage our technical capabilities. If we invest significantly and exercise those capacities, I’m convinced we can take bioweapons off the table. But in the meantime, as COVID showed, we are woefully underprepared.
34:12 – John Sipher
Looking at Iran now, the most likely thing is some sort of deal. The Trump administration called the JCPOA the worst agreement in the history of agreements – but what they’ll probably get is that or something worse. What would a serious verification regime look like? What should we look for?
34:35 – Andy Weber
You’d need intrusive IAEA inspections. Rafael Grossi, the Director General of the IAEA, is a very experienced, capable diplomat.
Any deal that leaves the highly enriched uranium in country is a failed deal in my book. We need to get that material out. It doesn’t have to come to the United States. I believe we could negotiate removal to Kazakhstan – to the IAEA Low Enriched Fuel Bank in Kazakhstan – where it could be blended down for the power sector under IAEA safeguards.
Russia and President Putin and President Tokayev of Kazakhstan have been speaking recently. From what I’ve been reading, the Iranians are talking about allowing at least some of the material to be moved out. That’s something we need to press for.
Then you have to deal with whatever enrichment capacity remains – facilities like “Pickaxe Mountain” that we haven’t really been into – to make sure they’re not operational, and then have continuous inspections. That’s what we had before 2018, when Trump walked away from the deal saying he was going to get a better one. Here we are eight years later. We don’t have a better one. We certainly demolished enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, but the material is still there, and they probably have more advanced centrifuges than they were making ten years ago. So there’s a lot of work to be done – over months and years – to have an inspection regime that ensures Iran never pursues a nuclear weapon.
36:21 – Jerry O’Shea
Andy, you’ve missed maybe the biggest point: what you need is a better CIA. Better espionage – because it all comes down to Russia’s and Iran’s plans and intentions. What do they want to do? That’s what they can do. So I’ll put in a plug for the espionage side of the house, especially the human side. You also need a robust way to get into their heads and understand what they want to achieve.
36:47 – Andy Weber
I was a beneficiary – a consumer – of what I described as the most exquisite intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program. I had the privilege of seeing it when I was Assistant Secretary of Defense. Our collection capabilities across the board, combined with Israeli collection capabilities…
37:06 – John Sipher
What’s amazing to me is that when you say it was hugely successful – we were getting good intel – we didn’t have people there. I think that’s the point: when there are no diplomats, experts, academics, or spies in country, it makes it much harder to get at secrets and much easier to fool us. We’ve seen that in Iraq and Iran and other places.
37:27 – Andy Weber
But Iran has never been totally closed off like North Korea. I think we did a very good job. We need obviously to continue to understand the political intentions of the leadership. That’s always the hardest to know. You can learn about capabilities, but what’s in Putin’s head this morning – that’s not necessarily a secret you can steal.
37:50 – John Sipher
You’ve spent your whole career trying to reduce the danger of weapons of mass destruction. Are we in a more dangerous era now than in the early 1990s when you started?
37:59 – Andy Weber
If you look at the arc of the last forty years – since I started my government career and now ten years into retirement (I still consult for the government) – we had at that time five rogue states pursuing weapons of mass destruction. One by one, that number has decreased.
Libya no longer has WMD programs. With the new regime in Syria, they’re cooperating very well with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Iraq has no WMD. That’s three out of five.
Iran – we were close with the JCPOA, but we tore up that agreement, and now we’re in a much worse situation. I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope we can negotiate a solution that once and for all ends their nuclear weapons aspirations.
And then the big piece of unfinished business: North Korea. In addition to their missile and nuclear weapons programs, they also have a very large chemical weapons stockpile and biological weapons program – and their biological weapons program is applying all these new scientific capabilities we’ve been discussing.
39:25 – John Sipher
Jerry is hiding over there in Hawaii. He thinks he’s going to be safe from all this.
39:29 – Jerry O’Shea
My favorite intelligence failure when it comes to WMD comes from World War II. I wonder if you know about Operation Toothpaste.
True story. The Nazis were looking at a nuclear weapon – they weren’t as far along as we thought. The Alsos Group was trying to figure out how close they were. Before France fell after D‑Day, a group of German Nazis went into a research facility in Paris and took all their thorium. Thorium is one potential avenue to a nuclear weapon. Our intelligence said: oh my God, they must be trying to develop a nuclear weapon via the thorium avenue. Allied bombing runs were prefaced on this. Huge military resources were diverted. And at the end of the war…
40:32 – Andy Weber
…it turned out we got it all wrong.
40:35 – Jerry O’Shea
That thorium was an ingredient in a popular German toothpaste called Thoramet or Doramet. It made your teeth shiny because it was uranium – it actually bombed your teeth, but they thought it cleaned your gums.
40:50 – Andy Weber
And the Nazis thought: we’re going to lose the war – if we get the thorium, we can come up with a better toothpaste afterwards.
40:53 – Jerry O’Shea
We got it wrong. It was all about toothpaste, not a nuclear weapon. Intelligence got it completely wrong.
41:06 – Andy Weber
We’ve made some big mistakes through our history. The one that’s resurfaced in the news recently is the Iraqi fabricator “Curveball,” who sold us on the mobile BW labs – a complete fabrication. But more often we get it right. We got Putin’s invasion of Ukraine 100% right.
41:25 – John Sipher
Andy, so good to have you on.
41:26 – Andy Weber
Good to see you.
41:26 – John Sipher
I’m glad you’re keeping busy. We’ll have to have some drinks one of these days.
41:31 – Andy Weber
Currently I’m working for a small think tank called the Council on Strategic Risks. It’s amazing – I still get to work on these issues I care so passionately about. But what gives me real optimism and hope are the young people we’re mentoring. We run fellowship programs, and the next generation is so much better than we were. It really gives me hope for the future.
42:01 – Announcer
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O’Shea, John Sipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
The Steady State Sentinel is produced by The Steady State, a community of former national security professionals who spent their careers safeguarding the United States at home and abroad. Today, we continue that mission by staying true to our oaths to defend the Constitution, uphold democracy, and protect national security. Each episode features expert hosts in conversation with accomplished guests whose experience sheds light on the crises and challenges facing the nation.