Does Iran Have a Nuclear Way to Stop the War?

By Thomas Neuburger

I’m writing about a striking but unverified report by journalist Pepe Escobar:

Iran wants to end the war now, and is willing to detonate a nuclear device on Iranian soil to do it.

Is this statement true? I don’t know, but the answer could come rather soon. Would it work if they carried it out? I think, absolutely it would. If Iran said, “FAFO. We’re now North Korea,” Israel would know they face their own demise if they fight Iran now. Time for the new reality to finally take hold.

Where Things Stand Now

According to conventional wisdom, the state of the war is now a tenuous ceasefire, with a side dish of Israeli invasion and slaughter in Lebanon. Until recently, the U.S. has been regularly breaking the ceasefire — attacking small boats, shelling Gulf installations — and receiving slaps in return, proportionate responses to constant, aggressive offenses.

In the big picture, Trump has already lost, as have the U.S. and Israel. But if the game never comes to an end, so goes the thought, there can be no final score and no final defeat.

So the war is in limbo, a safe middle ground for attackers with no way to win. Limbo provides a time to rebuild, a time for well-battered Israel to catch its breath, and a time, under color of truce, for Israel to expand into Lebanon till the U.S. military, finally, bends to its will and once more starts bombing Iran.

A Permanent Hot Ceasefire?

What’s the next phase? I had thought, prior to this weekend, that Iran was misplaying its hand with a patient acceptance of Trump and Israel’s game of slap-and-negotiate, just enough slapping to hurt (or in Lebanon, collaterally kill), but not enough cause for Iran to strike back hard and restart the missile war. A sweet spot to be if you’re Trump.

How many of these insults would Iran be willing to take? It plays to Trump’s hand to find out, since winning the midterm elections is next on his tour, just after he liberates Cuba. In fact, Trump would like this phase to go on forever, or at least until after November. Israel is much more anxious for Iran’s collapse, but they’re patient, in public at least. So I thought a permanent “hot ceasefire” might be where we’d stay.

On the Iranian side, the IRGC, the military wing of the Iranian revolution, is not patient at all. Do Iran’s political leaders share their frustration? Or has this gone on too long, even for them? Escobar has an answer to that, assuming he’s right.

Does Iran Have Access to Nukes?

As you know, I listen to many alt-media podcasts. Last week I heard Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA analyst with friends in multiple places, say that he and Pepe Escobar, a Middle East reporter, had heard from a source that Iran had gotten the bomb and was willing to use it to end the war for good. Certainly stunning if true.

Johnson said they couldn’t verify any of this, but he and Escobar were looking for verification.

We now have Escobar’s report, what he considers verification, via the podcast Dialogue Works, hosted by Nima Alkhorshid. The answer, according to Escobar, is yes, this is true.

Their full conversation appears at the top of this page. I’ve cued it to start at the relevant part of the discussion, but listen from the start if you wish. My comments and a transcript of that section appear below.

What Escobar Heard: Iran Has a Nuke and Will Use It to End the War

In the podcast, released Wednesday June 3, Escobar relates that during the previous week, he and Johnson heard from an “absolutely hardcore top-shelf source” about a call on the previous Thursday between Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. (Recall that Pakistan is the intermediary in the current peace negotiations.)

The call lasted 105 minutes and Escobar’s source “had the full briefing.” In the call, Pezeshkian reportedly retold Sharif that:

1. There will be no more nuclear negotiations from now on, no more nuclear talks.

2. Even negotiation toward a “diluted JCPOA” is now off the table.

3. And in Escobar’s words, Pezeshkian then said, “If American threats persist, which is the case, then we should conduct the detonation of a nuclear device on Iranian soil, executed not as an act of war, but as an irreversible sovereign demonstration of capability to control escalation dominance.”

Again, stunning if true.

Escobar said he has reached out to Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei’s office for comment, and he expects a response by Friday, June 5. Whatever the response, Escobar will then publish what he has sometime next week.

As to what Escobar thinks the Iranians will say, he expects a “no-response response”:

We can imagine that the Iranians are going to go probably for plausible deniability because this is immensely sensitive. But it doesn’t matter. They can phrase [it] in a way that will be what the Americans call a no-response response. [The statement] can be sophisticated enough — and the Iranians are masters at it — [so] that you can read it any way you want, because obviously they’re not going to say that their president was lying to the Pakistani prime minister. That’s not the case. If Pezeshkian actually said that to Shahif, he had a go-ahead from above. No question about that. Obviously [this shows] that we [Iranians] are fed up with all your [American] bullshit. And that’s it. If you keep provoking us, this is what we’re going to do. You should take this into consideration from now on.

Why Do This Now?

Why would Iran do this? And why do it now? The answer was mentioned above — perhaps Iran is done being jerked around. Escobar’s comment on that:

This could be the Iranians trying to tell the mediators, look, we are fed up. That’s it. We’ve been trying to tell you all the time that we are fed up. We have tried everything diplomatically. The Americans keep changing the rules of the game, and they keep violating the ceasefire. So all that for Iran comes down to the same thing — they [the Americans] are untrustworthy, and they only understand a stark message if we deliver a stark message to them. So obviously, they [Iranians] talk to the mediators and tell the mediators, look you should tell the White House now that this is our definitive position. And if they don’t stop the provocations […] we are willing to end our [posture of] nuclear ambiguity.

If this is all true — a big if — the Iranians, cautious and hardliners, have had it at last.

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Transcript

A transcript of the part of the conversation discussed above is printed below, edited lightly for clarity. The interview took place on Wednesday, June 3. This part starts at 16:22. All emphasis below is the speaker’s.

ESCOBAR: So, Nima, I have to go back to the bombshell of the week, which Larry [Johnson] and I revealed on Monday. And for that, we are both getting a lot of flack from everywhere. Totally expected. […]

During the past week, we got information from an absolutely hardcore top-shelf source about what happened between President Pezeshkian and Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif. It was a phone call last Thursday that lasted 105 minutes and our source had the full briefing about the phone call.

During this phone call, something immensely important happened. President Pezeshkian told Sharif over the phone that, number one, there are no more nuclear negotiations from now on.

Number two, why? Because the Americans are not respecting the Iranian order for the proceedings that the Iranians were basically talking about every day. First, you end all wars, including blockades, including the Israeli war against Lebanon and Hezbollah. Number two, we start discussing Strait of Hormuz and only on the third stage we get to trying to get a new nuclear dossier.

So Pezeshkian said number one, no more nuclear talks.

Number two, even the remote idea of trying to have negotiations leading to a possible new nuclear deal, which would be a sort of a diluted JCPOA — not even that, the Iranians are saying.

And number three, which is the killer — and I want to quote the words of how the source put it to us. This is what Pezeshkian said. So we have to assume that the conversation was Farsi and Urdu on the phone, maybe with an English translator for both sides because Pezeshkian doesn’t speak English [and] Sharif does. So there was a translator involved. Maybe this is a direct translation from Farsi to English.

So Pezeshkian said, if American threats persist, which which is the case, then we should conduct the detonation of a nuclear device on Iranian soil, executed not as an act of war, but as an irreversible sovereign demonstration of capability to control escalation dominance.

Well, this is as incandescent as it gets, right? So, what happened immediately afterwards?

First of all, you know that Pezeshkian would never say that to the Pakistani prime minister without clearing it with Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. It’s quite obvious, isn’t it?

Assuming our source is that ... In fact, Larry [Johnson] and I, we kept asking questions one day after another, until he [the source] said, “Look, if I didn’t want this information to be in the public domain, I would never have passed it to my Pakistani connection, [and?] I pass it to you.”

So he, I would say, backs his information a zillion percent, because this guy is on the table. This guy is in the direct negotiation between Iran — indirect, sorry — between Iran and the US on the Pakistani side. So he’s on, you know, top of the chain.

So what would lead Iran to pivot from nuclear ambiguity, which is the current Iranian position, to having an undeniable demonstration on Iranian soil?

And, of course, everybody’s asking the obvious questions.

What kind of bomb is that? Is this an Iranian bomb — meaning totally developed indigenously in Iran, and it’s very easy because Iran has excellent scientists. Wouldn’t be a problem [for them] to develop a nuclear weapon.

Did they have outside help? In this case, there are a few candidates. The number one candidate is Russia. Did they get, let’s say, a ready made bomb from either Pakistan or North Korea? It’s also possible. Did they have input from North Korea? Because the discussions at the nuclear level between Iran and North Korea have been very very strong for quite a while.

So obviously nobody knows anything about that [these questions] and the source did not elaborate on that, first of all because he was basically telling us what happened during the phone call.

[…]

So what happened immediately afterwards? Sharif, the prime minister, when he heard that, said wow! He understood the seriousness of it all. So he ordered his foreign minister [Mohammad Ishaq] Dar, who was in New York, to call the Americans immediately. So he [Dar] called Marco Rubio, and Marco Rubio said, no, come to Washington. So the next day he goes to Washington, and he sits down in front of Rubio, and he explains the whole thing. This was on May 29th. That was last Friday.

And guess what happened on May 29, last Friday? Trump stopped talking and acting and ordering any kinetic action against Iran. Immediately afterwards.

[ED. NOTE: Trump’s reported angry phone call with Netanyahu took place on Monday, June 1.]

Okay, now we’re back [to] this week. Considering once again that Trump’s attention span is [that] of a kid and he lasts only a few seconds or minutes. Perhaps he even forgot what he learned last week from Rubio himself — Rubio briefed him, right? So now [U.S.] kinetic action is back.

But we can detect a different tone already on Trump. He’s not threatening Iran anymore for the past few days. That’s where we get to [Trump saying] okay, I’m going to stop by Tehran and have a nice meeting with Mojtaba Khamenei.

Before he was saying he was going to annihilate Iran, he was going to send Iran back to the stone ages [finger quotes], he was going to exterminate a civilization, you name it.

So the tone changed. That’s already quite quite something, because... And then there’s an extra thing, two things that Dar told Rubio in Washington face to face.

Number one, Iran will not surrender any of its highly enriched uranium. Nothing. And that’s a final position. The U.S. simply cannot change this position. We all know that Iran was never willing to transfer highly enriched uranium outside of Iran. We already knew that. But now the Americans have a confirmation from the Pakistani foreign minister directly to them.

And number two, Dar told Rubio that China is directly involved, because China has delivered state-of-the-art strategic defense systems, especially shoulder-fired MANPADs, via third countries so they have plausible deniability.

You’ve seen the rumors of the Americans commenting that China is supplying high tech to Iran. Well, they already suspected that. Now they got a straight out confirmation from the Pakistani foreign minister.

What this means? This means that this trio, this triad, this strategic alignment, is totally in effect, and it’s Iran, Pakistan and China working together.

So you can imagine how freaked out the Americans are after that, and there’s nothing they can do against it. First of all, because they are counting on the Pakistanis to help get some sort of off ramp with Iran, even though the Americans obviously have no idea what they [themselves] want. Number one, they keep changing their demands one day after another. If they agree on something, the next day they change again.

So the possibility of having a a deal between Iran and U.S., I would say, are less than zero, as it goes on.

What if there’s no deal? What the Americans are going to do? They’re going to restart the war? No, it’s impossible for them. They don’t have the means. It’s totally opposed by US domestic opinion. They know that every scenario leads to a quagmire even worse than what they are [in] now. And worse, the Iranians are prepared for the war to go on, and that’s what they have been demonstrating with these provocations, one provocation after another. Okay, so now we’ll respond 1.5 times harder and soon maybe more. They’re not intimidated — on the contrary. So this is where we are.

In terms of this hypothetic nuclear bomb, I am waiting for a response from Iran, and this is with our friends at the Cradle — I’m sure you all know that I am a columnist for the Cradle as well.

So I sent them the article that I already wrote which basically what I’ve have been explaining to you this past few minutes is inside the column, and it’s going to land at the desk of one of the members of Mojtaba Khamenei’s inner circle. And that’s the great thing. He said, yes, I will respond. It was supposed to be tonight, It’s probably going to tomorrow night. Tomorrow night I would say Iran-Moscow timeline. So when we get to Friday, we will already have a response that is practically official because this guy is at the top of the food chain in Tehran.

And then I want to publish the column telling all the story, including the official uranium position, and then that’s it.

So we can imagine that the Iranians are going to go probably for plausible deniability because this is immensely sensitive. But it doesn’t matter. They can phrase [it] in a way that will be what the Americans call a no-response response. And it [the statement] can be sophisticated enough — and the Iranians are masters at it — [so] that you can read it any way you want, because obviously they’re not going to say that their president was lying to the Pakistani prime minister. That’s not the case.

And if Pezeshkian actually said that to Sharif, he had a go-ahead from above. No question about that. And obviously [this shows] that we [Iranians] are fed up with all your bullshit. And that’s it. If you keep provoking us, this is what we’re going to do. You should take this into consideration from now on.

So this is where we are.

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