Jim Rickards: NEW Intel on Iran vs. Israel | Paradigm Press
Summary
Transcript
All right, we’ve got breaking news and an update to the war story of what we’re seeing in the Middle east. Doesn’t seem like diplomacy is working out. It doesn’t seem like there’s diplomacy at all, I guess. And we’ve gotJim Rickards here. Jim is a former advisor to the CIA and Pentagon. He has had boots on the ground in the Middle east. He knows how war games play out.
And right now we’ve got a story that’s not being told that we might be seeing escalation that could lead to nuclear fallout, could lead to nuclear war. Um, so, Jim, get us caught up. Diplomacy. No, diplomacy. What’s going on over there? And what does everyone need to know? Yeah, we’re not seeing much diplomacy. I wish there were more. The, you know, nobody wants to talk to the Russians, but the Russians, like, okay, we’ll just keep quitting the war.
Israelis are not talking to the Iranians. There’s some back channel there. The US is trying to use diplomacy, but unfortunately, we have completely incompetent, not very bright people in charge, starting with the president, who’s mentally impaired. But even Jake Sullivan, national security advisor, is a campaign hack. When I look at Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken as a secretary of state, and I compare them to Republicans and Democrats some decades past, whether it’s Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, James Baker, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, etcetera, some of the giants of diplomacy, foreign affairs and national security, and I look at the sign of the b team, more of a c team that we have in place.
That’s discouraging and cause for concern. But what happened in Israel? Because I woke up this morning and heard the news and looked at the markets, and they hadn’t moved a lot. Stocks were kind of sideways. Gold. It was sideways. It wasn’t soaring as because, well, yeah, Israel did this rate on Iran, but not much happened. And Iran said, well, we’re not going to retaliate, and maybe this is over at this point or whatever.
I don’t view it that way. I was surprised the markets were so kind of nonplussed by the whole thing. What Israel struck was in the Pasina city called Natanz. Natanz is the center of the iranian nuclear program. Now, you have to understand what in a nuclear program. I’m using the word program kind of loosely. It’s got a lot of parts. You need a nuclear reactor to get the fuel.
You need an enrichment facility, so called yellow cake that they use in. They can put in nuclear reactors. It’s got to be enriched to about a 90% U 235 level. And that’s a very, very difficult process. And Iran does have that capability. So they’ve been building up this, what they call HEU, highly enriched uranium. You need research facilities because you got to figure out how to do all this.
Looks kind of like Los Alamos. You need engineering, mechanical facilities, create the missile, create the bomb, et cetera, and a lot else besides. So these things have many parts. They’re all technical, they’re all challenging. One by one, Iran is getting there, but it’s all centered in this area. In the times, you can’t put a nuclear reactor underground. You can’t. They’re above ground. We know where they are. Israel has moved on.
At least Iran has one. You don’t want to mess with those, because now you’re back to a Chernobyl type situation. There is the enrichment facility, but this stuff is buried deeply underground. It would almost take a tactical nuclear weapon to blow up their uranium enrichment facilities because they’re deep underground. But the one thing the Israelis they did hit is their research facility. And that’s important because without the scientists and the research capability, you can’t really advance, even if you have these other components in place.
To me, that’s a very big deal. Not only an israeli attack on iranian territory, we’ve crossed that red line. Okay, so when Israel attacked the iranian consulate in Damascus. Now, that consulate was sort of a phony consulate. So they could have terrorists generals meeting close to the battlefront. But be that as it may, technically, Iran could argue, well, thats our territory. When you have an embassy overseas, its a little patch of your home country.
So when Israel attacked the iranian consulate in Damascus and Syria, Iran said, you just attacked Iran because that was our consulate. Then Iran attacked Israel the other night with his 300 missiles. Thats a whole other story. And now Israel has struck back at Iran in this Natanz vicinity. Well, okay, all of a sudden, Israel and Iran are shooting directly at each other. They’re not using the hoodies or the Hezbollah or Hamas or iraqi Shiites.
They’re attacking each other directly on their own territories. And Israel is a nuclear power. They’ve never admitted it, but they are. No one doubts that. And Iran is inspiring nuclear power. So you’ve got one full nuclear power, one near nuclear power, attacking each other directly. It’s called a war. So I don’t know why everyone’s shrugging that off. Hopefully it doesn’t get worse. Hopefully it doesn’t go further here.
But we have. If you go all the way back to the Hamas attack in Gaza and then the israeli response in Gaza, then the hoodies closing the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, the US attacking the hoodies, not that we’d do any good, but we did. Hezbollah shooting off some missiles, Israel striking back at Hezbollah, then Israel heading the council at Iran heading Israel, Israel heading around. This is called escalation, and this is how nuclear wars begin.
I’ve studied this since the 1960s. I actually have a chapter in my new book coming in November on the new books on artificial intelligence. But I look at how artificial intelligence interacts with nuclear warfighting. So that’s my kind of particular topic. But I just know a lot about nuclear war fighting doctrine. And one experts disagree a little bit. But one thing they all agree on is that nobody wakes up and says, hey, nice day.
I think I’ll drop a nuclear bomb. Nobody does that. But what does happen is you escalate. One side hits, another side hits back. They hit back, they hit back and you escalate. And this is all laid out in the 1950s, by the way, but not much has changed in terms of the theory. And finally somebody gets backed into a corner like, okay, that’s it. Last straw. I have to use nuclear weapons.
And the irony is the country that decides they have to use nuclear weapons, the other side says, oh, you’re going to use nuclear weapons. We have a preemptive policy, which is if you’re going to, we’re going to do it first, because the first guy to strike, nobody wins, but theyre a little better off, at least in the short run. So you have a preemptive nuclear strike by the guy who didnt think he was going to do it in the first place.
Thats still true. Whats going on? We are walking out the Iran and Israel and the world are walking up this escalatory ladder. I lived through the cuban missile crisis. I remember in those days it was pre Internet, we had newspapers. I remember I was like 1112, I guess it was eleven years old. And one day I looked at the newspaper and it was in the middle of the cuban missile crisis.
And it was on the front page there was a map, and it showed Cuba and the eastern United States up to Maine and Canada. And there were these concentric circles, and the circles were distances 100 miles, 500 miles, 1000 miles that missiles might fly depending on the missile. And what everyone did is they want to see where they live. Am I in one of those circles? Do I live somewhere where a russian missile, soviet missile in Cuba could blow me up.
In my case, the answer was yes. I lived near Philadelphia, which is well within one of these circles. We did air raid, jewels and the whole thing. So I remember that period very well. But it was one where Kennedy and Khrushchev backed down. They were going up the ladder, and they backed down and backed down some more, and then it was resolved. I don’t see Israel and Iran backing down.
I see them continuing to go up the ladder. And if you want to know what nuclear war is like, people don’t seem familiar with it. But picture yourself with where all the skin has been ripped off your body and you’re walking around with your eyeballs and your hands. That’s what happens in nuclear war. So I don’t know why that’s not getting more attention from the White House, but we have incompetence in charge.
Yeah, that’s some terrifying stuff. Jim, we appreciate your take on this. It’s a fast moving story. It keeps evolving, and we’re going to keep you on our speed dial in case anything’s happening. If you’re at home and you’re not caught up with strategic intelligence and Jim’s letter, make sure you read it. We’re here on YouTube. Go ahead, give us a, like, give us a subscribe and we’ll keep you up to speed on what we see coming and any next moves that could happen there in the Middle east and beyond.
Thanks again for your time and everyone home. We appreciate you tuning in. Thanks again. Thanks, Jim, and we’ll see you next time. Thanks. .
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