Can We Stop Donald Trump From Crashing Air America?

Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upward, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction.


A video posted by US President Donald Trump to Truth Social depicts him in a crown, piloting a fighter jet emblazoned with the words “King Trump,” and dumping feces on “No Kings” protesters in Times Square, on October 19, 2025.
(Screenshot: President Donald Trump on Truth Social)

John Feffer
May 20, 2026

TomDispatch

Ever since North Korea suffered through the death of its first leader in 1994, a loss magnified by an economic collapse and a devastating famine, outside observers have likened the country to an airplane experiencing a serious malfunction. The major question they posed: In the end, would North Korea experience a soft landing or a catastrophic crash?

Perhaps a reformer would come along—say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of reunification with South Korea.

More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but North Korea’s worst-case scenarios might involve violent power struggles, the return of famine, and a free-for-all scramble for the country’s loose nukes. US analysts have gamed out the consequences of just such a hard landing—and so has the Pentagon with its OPLAN 5029—and they all add up to a tragedy not only for North Koreans and the region, but also potentially for the United States and the rest of the world.

The North Korean government has, however, defied such scenarios by somehow surviving, while rejecting reunification with the South and turning up its nose at conventional versions of reform. Despite additional challenges—a sustained Covid-19 quarantine, several distinctly hostile governments in South Korea, and a flatlining economy—the regime has so far avoided collapse and, if anything, tightened its control over its population. For the time being at least, the North Korean plane evidently has no intention of landing, much less crashing.

Given the state of the airplane—a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear—it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Today, in an improbable plot twist, however, Donald Trump’s United States is starting to seem ever more like an aircraft in distress.

After all, the present pilot of Air America, exhibiting signs of psychosis or perhaps dementia, has begun to dismantle the cockpit under the delusion that it’s his to transform into a ballroom. The crew—and indeed much of the supporting infrastructure on the ground below—has been decimated by budget cuts. The airline itself is fast taking on debt. Many of the passengers are praying for a soft landing and hoping that, if the plane does touch down for a risky layover, they will get a new pilot.

But another fear lurks in the background. Given the state of the airplane—a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear—it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Those of us on board, gripping our armrests in terror, are asking ourselves one question above all else: Is it too late to avert catastrophe?
Trump’s Totalitarian Tendencies

North Korea has come closer than any country in the modern era to building a totalitarian state. Beginning with the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, its leadership has eliminated all oppositional politics; suppressed virtually all signs of civil society; and tolerated no freedom of the press, speech, or assembly. Nor is there any freedom of religion, unless you count the personality cult attached to the Kim family leadership, which is now in its third generation.

But all totalitarianism is aspirational. The Soviet Union had its dissidents and underground samizdat literature. The Confessing Church movement attempted faith-based resistance to the Nazis. Likewise, the North Korean government’s control over the population is not total, as can be measured by rising levels of private enterprise and covert enthusiasm for South Korean culture.

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites—an elected US leader and the North Korean dictator—is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control.

So, too, are Donald Trump’s totalitarian tendencies aspirational. He would like to achieve total control, but he’s hemmed in by institutional limits. Still, he prefers to bypass Congress with rule by executive decree. He has attempted to control the media, rein in the power of universities, and tilt the electoral playing field to benefit his party. He has aligned himself internationally not with democrats but with autocrats. He has had a particular fondness for authoritarian leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Javier Milei of Argentina who consolidated their power within democracies. But he has also gotten cozy with the likes of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who doesn’t bother at all with elections.

The most inexplicable friendship Trump developed while in office is certainly with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson. Having traded escalating threats during part of Trump’s first term in office, the two leaders grew closer after several in-person meetings and a raft of exchanged letters. “I was really being tough,” Trump explained in 2018. “And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really.”

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites—an elected US leader and the North Korean dictator—is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control. Whether intentionally or not, Trump has applied some of the features of the Kim family playbook to his own governing style. In doing so, he has also damaged, perhaps irreparably, the very idea of America.
Different Beds, Same Dreams

One of the key elements of North Korean politics is the personality cult of the Kim family, which casts a long shadow over the country’s culture. Drawn in part from northern Korea’s earlier Christian heritage—through the development of a trinity of founding figures, the 10 commandments of Kimilsungism, and pervasive themes of sacrifice and redemption—that personality cult has generated so much fervor among many North Koreans that even defectors have spoken of their pride in founder Kim Il Sung and his ideology.

Trump, too, has tried to construct such a personality cult—by placing his name on public buildings (the Kennedy Center), putting his face on US coins (the semiquincentennial dollar), inserting his image in future passports, and planning a golden statue of himself at his presidential library that resembles one of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. So far, however, outside of the MAGA faithful, his cult seems to have generated little more than ridicule.

Another aspect of Pyongyang’s governance that probably attracts Trump is its overemphasis on the military. North Korea devotes 34% of its gross domestic product to military spending (compared to Russia at 6% and the United States at under 4%). Although it hasn’t launched any wars of its own for more than 75 years, Pyongyang has dispatched thousands of troops to help fight Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the 1990s, the government has spoken of a songun—military first—doctrine to justify the sacrifices made to maintain a huge standing army, a range of missiles, and a small but significant nuclear arsenal.

Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated 1 million people.

Similarly, the prevailing theme of Trump’s second term has been war and military spending. Despite his once-upon-a-time promises not to become involved in “forever wars,” particularly in the Middle East, Trump joined Israel this year in an attack on Iran, a conflict that cost over $11 billion in its first week alone. He has proposed an astonishing $1.5 trillion military budget, an increase of 50% over last year’s already bloated total, and that sum doesn’t even include the costs of the Iran War.

Then there’s Trump’s economic thinking, if you can call it that. He has repudiated the free market orthodoxy of his fellow Republicans to embrace a form of economic nationalism: high tariff walls to reduce trade imbalances, a focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, and the repudiation of international rules of the road (like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) in order to drive a dagger into economic globalization. In such respects, Trump’s approach resembles North Korea’s path of import substitution and defiance of the international rule of law.

In North Korea’s case, such an economic strategy has been partly born of necessity, given the economic embargo imposed on it after the Korean War of the early 1950s. Trump, however, is steering the US economy into a tailspin without provocation. If you add together the costs associated with his kamikaze tariffs, the follow-on effects of the Iran War and boosts in military spending, the gutting of government programs investing in the economy, the watering down of environmental regulations, and reductions in government revenue because of tax cuts, Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated 1 million people.

But, you might point out, Wall Street is still on an upward ascent. The US economy is still growing, however modestly, and, while US food insecurity is rising, famine isn’t on the horizon. To return to the airplane analogy, the in-flight experience has become more uncomfortable for those who can’t afford business class, but that doesn’t mean a crash is imminent.

Or does it?
A Soft vs. Hard Landing

Whether he is consciously modeling his efforts on North Korea or not, Donald Trump wants to make an indelible imprint on the United States. He aspires to fundamentally change the demographics of the country, the structure of the economy, and the nature of its politics. To do that, he aims to ensure that his MAGA personality cult, his anti-government crusade, and his self-defeating economic policies outlive his own tenure in office. That will certainly require a substantial dismantling of democratic safeguards given that such policies don’t attract majority support.

In other words, much as Kim Il Sung destroyed anything that could have challenged his authority—the church, the intelligentsia, landowners, rival political factions—Trump has now launched a scorched-earth policy to ensure that his successors can’t undo his damage. If the Democrats regain Congress in November and even the White House in 2028, they will inherit an enormous bill for Trump-era damages (and count on a chorus of Republican voices improbably blaming them for the disaster).

Any incoming reformers will face an uphill battle to convince the public to restore funding for infrastructure, whether green or otherwise. And they will have to deal with a terrifying erosion of faith in government, resulting from the incompetence, lies, and malpractice of the Trump administration. At the international level, US allies will think twice about concluding any deals with this country, given the possibility of another political swing in subsequent elections.

If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Trump’s tactics, in other words, are designed to make a soft landing ever more difficult. An inveterate gambler, he is betting that his extreme approach will enable Air America to climb into the very stratosphere, even if he is far more likely to force an emergency landing.

Nightmare scenarios have long haunted American consciousness. The sheer size of the US debt—at nearly $40 trillion, it’s the highest absolute amount in the world—could put the country into receivership if the dollar slips from its status as the global currency. Default could tear apart an already polarized society. Such a hard landing could look like what analysts of North Korea have often predicted for that country.

But North Korea hasn’t collapsed. With its considerable resources, surely the United States, too, can avoid such a scenario.

True, no one is going to make any money at Polymarket predicting the imminent fall of the Kim regime. But North Korea is not exactly following a recipe for long-term success either. Even if it limps along for another decade or two, with leadership passing to Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, any country that follows its policies of personality cult, autarkic economic policies, massive corruption, military-first approaches, and ruthless suppression of dissent is not likely to prosper over the long term. Just look at how Vladimir Putin has steered Russia into a terrifying nosedive.

Substantial reform could head off such a scenario for the United States. If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whatever it’s called—not a Green New Deal, given the irrational resistance of a large section of the US electorate to anything “green” except greenbacks—such an American renewal plan would need to restructure the US economy to favor the bulk of American workers rather than the current generation of robber barons. Implemented with a much better promotional campaign—led perhaps by future Chief of Reconstruction (and now New York Mayor) Zohran Mamdani—it would link concrete benefits to identifiable government programs and services. It would offer a striking real-life illustration of your tax dollars at work.

Such a reform plan would have to restore trust in government by punishing corruption, enlisting the public as watchdogs, and taxing the super-wealthy into semi-submission. By shifting away from war and aggressive military spending, such a project of renewal would also have to work with partners overseas to promote policies of cooperative prosperity and sustainability in order to restore a measure of trust in US actions globally. Soft landings require soft power, leaving hard power to those determined to crash and burn.

The North Korean case is a reminder that awful policies may not themselves precipitate collapse. Trumpism will not go away simply because it is on the verge of winning multiple Darwin Awards for its counter-evolutionary policies. Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upward, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction. Sheer inertia could keep Air America in the air—though with steadily deteriorating conditions on board (as in North Korea). Such a “MAGA ‘til we drop” option would not be much of an improvement over a hard landing.

In 2016, arch-conservative Michael Anton published a piece in the Claremont Review of Books arguing that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who had hijacked America. In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton imagined that Trump, aided by an energized electorate, could rush the cockpit—just like the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked on September 11, 2001— and save the country. (It was certainly an infelicitous analogy, given that Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.) Trump’s 2016 victory, however, turned Anton into a dark prophet and vaulted him into the subsequent administration, despite (or because of) the absurdities of his arguments.

In yet another stomach-churning reversal, Anton’s analogy has now finally become all too applicable. Trump has gained the cockpit not once but twice. Having failed to crash Air America the first time around, he seems determined to put his Flight 93 doctrine of heroic self-destruction into practice today. There is no guarantee that a hard landing can be avoided either now or after his departure from office. But this country, its egalitarian ideals, and its democratic traditions (if not much of its dismal history) are certainly worth fighting for.

We’re losing altitude fast. Elections approach.

Let’s roll.



© 2023 TomDispatch.com


John Feffer
John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel "Splinterlands" (2016) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His novel, "Frostlands" (2018) is book two of his Splinterlands trilogy. Splinterlands book three "Songlands" was published in 2021. His podcast is available here.
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Two Weeks to an Iranian Nuke – The Ultimate False Flag Lie

by David Stockman | May 8, 2026 |

The now endlessly repeated notion that Iran’s stockpile of 60% enriched uranium (HEU) is tantamount to having a nuclear weapon within weeks is downright malefic. Indeed, this gross deception is so thoroughly fallacious and dangerously misleading that it needs be debunked lock, stock and barrel.

So we begin with the War Party’s hoary claim that the roughly 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium possessed by Iran as of May 2025, according to the IAEA, could have been further processed to weapons-grade levels (90 percent or higher) in a matter of a few days or weeks using existing centrifuge cascades.

And, then, poof, they would supposedly have had ten nukes.

Actually, they would not have had any nuclear bombs at all. Not even remotely.

That’s because producing fissile material is only the first – and in many respects the easiest—step on the long road to a reliable, deliverable nuclear weapon. If building the latter is akin to a grueling 20-mile journey across rugged terrain, acquiring 60 percent HEU gets you perhaps to the “mile-one” marker.

Metaphorically speaking, you would have cleared the initial foothills of uranium isotope separation. But the remaining 19 miles are chock-a-bloc with uncharted engineering valleys, sheer technical manufacturing cliffs and a final summit that no nation has ever scaled without extensive trial, error, and empirical proof that the wherewithal for successful weaponization of a nuclear reaction has been obtained.

Indeed, this crucial distinction – between producing fissile material and building a functional weapon – has been at the very center of U.S. National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) for nearly two decades. From the 2007 NIE (national intelligence estimate) on the matter right up to and including the March 2025 testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard before the US Congress, the intelligence agencies have attested to Iran’s proficiency in uranium enrichment but have also noted its complete lack of activity or capability with respect to bomb weaponization.

Moreover, it’s also the heart of the truth-telling that Joe Kent has been engaged in since scuppering his Deep State berth last week. Even as of February 28th, when the Donald launched the most reckless, stupid and unjustified war in American history (and there is a lot of competition for that title), nothing on the intelligence front had changed. Thus, even when the bombs and missiles started exploding over Tehran, Iran had not remotely closed the yawning gap between uranium enrichment to high levels of U-235 purity, on the one hand, and actual weaponization of a bomb, on the other.

To understand why enrichment alone falls short of weaponization by a country mile and then some, it is useful to separate the two processes clearly. Uranium enrichment is a straight-forward matter of isotope separation of the U-235 from the U-238 in natural uranium ore. This mixed-isotope uranium oxide is known as yellowcake, which gets converted through chemical processes in a conversion plant to uranium hexafluoride (UF6), which is a white crystalline solid at room temperature.

Cylinders of the latter are then sent to the enrichment plant where the UF6 solid is heated to achieve a gaseous state, which hexafluoride gas is then pumped into rotors spinning at extreme speeds (50,000 to 70,000 revolutions per minute). Inside the spinning rotor, centrifugal force pushes the slightly heavier molecules containing U-238 toward the outer wall, while the lighter U-235 molecules concentrate closer to the center. This separation process is crucially necessary, of course, because natural uranium contains only 0.7% of the U-235 isotope needed to make a bomb, while the 99.3% balance consists of U-238, which needs to be sorted out and discarded.

Accordingly, each centrifuge is equipped with scoops and baffles which collect two separate off-take streams. The first stream is enriched gas with a now slightly larger portion of the U-235 needed for a nuclear reaction. The second stream, by contrast, consists of a now slightly depleted hexafluoride gas with a larger portion of essentially useless U-238. Importantly, however, each single pass through a centrifuge only achieves a very small increase in U-235 enrichment levels, typically 0.1% to 0.5% per pass.

Accordingly, it takes a hell of a lot of passes through an enormous string of centrifuges to bring the enriched U-235 stream from 0.7% of the hexafluoride gas in it natural state up to even civilian reactor grade at typically 3.67%. And that’s to say nothing of medical grade at 20% or the current 400 Kg of Iranian material at 60% or, ultimately, weapons grade at 90%+.

Nevertheless, moving increasingly enriched hexafluoride gas through long cascades of centrifuges is actually a matter of brute mechanical effort, not a question of ascending technical and scientific difficulty. Essentially, if you can get to 4% reactor grade enrichment, you can get all the way up to the top of the U-235 purity scale. Thus, any country that can make reactor grade fuel – and there are ten NPT countries which already have that ability – can also get to 90% bomb-grade material if it strings up a long enough cascade of centrifuges.

As it happens, the effort required to move the UF6 gas up the enrichment scale is measured in something called “separative work units” (SWUs). This is a standard metric that quantifies the amount of energy and centrifuge work needed to achieve a given enrichment level.

Reaching 60 percent enrichment from natural uranium thus requires roughly 200–250 SWUs per kilogram of product. At the 400 Kg level held by Iran as of IAEA certification last May, it would have taken 80,000 to 100,000 SWUs to reach its current stockpile. Advancing from 60 percent to 90 percent or higher, however, demands far fewer additional SWUs – often only 40-60 SWUs per kilogram – or in this case about 16,000 to 24,000 additional SWUs in total.

Accordingly, since most of the unwanted U-238 has already been removed at the 60% U-235 purity stage of the material held by Iran, upwards of 85% of the SWUs needed to reach bomb grade material were already completed. And that’s why the final leap to weapons-grade material could occur in a matter of days or weeks once a large stockpile of 60 percent material exists: There are simply no science or technical hurdles in the way, while the process mechanics and economic costs get easier at the final rungs of the enrichment scale.

But, alas, now comes the skunk on the woodpile with respect to the hoary myth of a “breakout” to a bomb being just around the corner. To wit, fissile material (enriched U-235) is not a bomb, even at 90% purity. Nor is possession of centrifuges or actual enriched material evidence of either an ability or intention to make a bomb.

At the present time there are 11 other countries in the world that operate enrichment facilities: Five of these have nuclear weapons (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States) and have so declared; one of these (Israel) has both enrichment and bombs, but hasn’t declared; and five others (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan and Netherlands) do not have nukes and have not been accused of seeking them despite possessing  significant stockpiles of reactor grade materials and having the capacity to string up enough centrifuges to get to 90% U-235 purity in short order, if they chose to do so.

Now, the truth is that Iran is like the latter five no-bomb enrichers, and has been running enrichment facilities for two and one-half decades since early 2006. Subsequently, it actually reached 20% medical grade at its Natanz facility in February 2010 and its Fordow plant in December 2011. Both of these facilities were under active IAEA inspection, however, and Iran’s stockpiles were regularly disclosed and its enrichment activities were in compliance with its Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations.

So all the while what was going on in Iran was not any kind of secret, illicit program to get the bomb. Instead, it was a transparent and internationally supervised effort to enrich uranium for its large scale civilian nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Effectively, after 2006 Iran joined the ranks of the five aforementioned nuclear power plant operators which had no bomb programs at all but had chosen to enrich their own uranium fuel for civilian power uses.

Needless to say, Bibi Netanyahu and his neocon fifth column on the banks of the Potomac have converted these prosaic facts of the nuclear fuel production process into a giant geopolitical Big Lie: Namely, that the transparent and internationally regulated process of operating uranium enrichment plants was actually a nefarious enterprise in getting the bomb.

No, it wasn’t anything of the kind. The claim that enriching uranium was proof that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons is just plain hogwash. It’s just a sleight-of-words trick equivalent to what magicians do with their hands.

Moreover, if large-scale enrichment capacity were the sum and substance of getting a bomb, Iran could have been there 15 years ago. But self-evidently they were not actually seeking to weaponize a bomb. And, more importantly, this forbearance was voluntary because they did not face any technical or economic limits at all in moving up the enrichment scale to 90% bomb grade material after their production of 20% material in 2010 and onwards.

Thus, a centrifuge is a centrifuge – you only need pipping and electrical harnesses to string them together. Likewise, once you are set up with the basic enrichment process infrastructure – cascade piping, electrical systems, vacuum pumps, control electronics and installation labor – the incremental cost of another centrifuge unit is comparatively meager: It ranges from $25,000 for an older, slower first generation IR-1 centrifuge to upwards of $70,000 for the current most advanced IR-6 models.

So to put it in practical dollars and cents terms, Iran could get the equivalent of 35 more centrifuges for the cost of one Tomahawk cruise missile, if it was buying on the global equipment market, which it can’t under sanctions. Yet since it obtains its centrifuges from homegrown suppliers, it has probably gotten even more additional centrifuges for the price of one Tomahawk.

In short, for most of the past 15 years Iran has never been constrained by a technical, scientific, engineering, equipment or cost barrier to accumulating enough centrifuges to enrich bomb-grade material. But they have generated neither 90% material nor an actual bomb – rudimentary or otherwise – because their policy has been to not seek nuclear weapons.

Moreover, it is quite evident that even the 400 Kg of 60% material was not about sneaking up to the nuclear bomb threshold, at all. Again, to recall the context: As a NPT (nonproliferation treaty) signatory and operator of the aforementioned large-scale civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr, Iran was allowed most of the May 2025 stockpile certified last spring by the IAEA and shown below. That is –

• the 7,582 kilograms of civilian reactor grade enriched uranium (<4%).
• the 1,257 kilograms of medical grade uranium (20%).

What was really up for debate was just the 409 kilograms of 60% enriched material, but it is goddamn obvious to anyone not looking for an excuse for war that Iran had produced this material as of last June as a bargaining chip. That is, in order to get a new nuke deal with Washington to replace the one the Donald himself unilaterally shit-canned in 2018, and to thereby pave the way for lifting the brutal and demented economic sanctions that Washington has again imposed on Iran.

IAEA Report On Iran’s Enriched Uranium Stockpiles As Of May 2025

Stockpile Component     |Amount (kg) |Enrichment
------------------------|------------|----------
60% Enriched            |409       |60%
20% Enriched (Est.)     |1257        |20%
Balance (Mostly 3.5–5%) |7582        |2–5%
Total                   |9247      |Mixed

The proof of the bargaining chip pudding could not be more evident in the graph below. During the 10-year run-up to the 2015 nuke deal with the Obama Administration, the Iranians increased their enriched uranium stockpiles to just slightly below the current level, to about 9,000 kilograms. But in an almost mirror image of the present, fully 96% of that amount was fuel-grade material at <4%, with about 350 kilograms of that material enriched to the 20% purity level for medical grade uses.

That is to say, most of the 2015 stockpile was generated as a bargaining chip, and that was exactly its fate. Upon activation of the JCPOA in 2015, all of the 20% material was destroyed as certified by the IAEA.

At the same time, the total stockpile of fuel-grade material was also reduced by 97% to de minimis working levels, as further certified by the IAEA. Indeed, Iran ended up retaining only 300 kilograms of its 9,000 kilogram stockpile. That is, an amount so small that it could have easily been stored in the Donald’s wine cellar are Mar-a-Lago.

But in recklessly canceling the deal in May 2018 on the grounds that it had to be a bad deal by definition because he didn’t negotiate it, the Donald only caused the Iranians to restart the stockpiling process yet again, as is so explicitly depicted by the green line in the graph below.

The irony, therefore, is that after the Donald’s feckless June 2025 bombing campaign the Iranians likely had close to 100% of the 9,248 kilograms (including the 409 Kg of 60% material) held before June still in tact.

That’s based on pretty convincing satellite photos showing that all of the Donald’s amateur “art of the deal” head fakery last June about “two weeks to decide” before the actual the bombing runs enabled the Iranians to drive trucks up to the Nantanz and Fordow facilities and remove the stockpiles to safe sites elsewhere.

Stated differently, Obama negotiated Iran’s enriched stockpile down by about 97%, while the Donald bombed roughly the same level of stockpile from 9,250+ kilograms to, well @ 9,250 kilograms!

In any event, the Iranian government’s adherence to the Ayatollah’s Fatwa against nuclear weapons is evidenced by the dog which didn’t bark within Iran’s nuclear activities complex. We are referring to what is called the “physics package” in the trade, which is the sine qua non to make a workable nuke.

The latter requires a precisely engineered device that can achieve supercriticality in a fraction of a microsecond. That is what actually initiates an uncontrolled chain reaction.

In practical terms, this means the fissile material (90% enriched U-235) must be compressed so rapidly, powerfully and uniformly that the number of neutrons produced by fission exceeds those lost to escape or absorption, causing the chain reaction to multiply exponentially in an uncontrollable burst. The entire nuclear explosion unfolds in roughly one millionth of a second – releasing energy equivalent to thousands of tons of TNT before the device physically blows itself apart.

Historically, there have been two basic designs for the physics package: The simpler gun-type device (used only once, on Hiroshima) and the far more efficient implosion-type design (used on Nagasaki and in virtually all modern weapons). According to American intelligence, Iran has never demonstrated mastery of either approach in a deliverable configuration. And that is something anyone can look up via Grok 4 or any similar AI.

In any event, the implosion design favored by all proliferators to date is excruciatingly demanding. It can be envisioned as having a hollow sphere or “pit” of weapons-grade uranium, roughly the size of a grapefruit, at the center of the device. This “pit” is then surrounded by a tamper/reflector and finally around the outside of the latter lies a precisely synchronized shell of conventional high explosives.

The functions of each of these two outer layers, which wrap around the U-235 “pit” of the bomb, are crucial to actually triggering a nuclear chain reaction explosion. And they also involve no mean feats of physics-based engineering and extreme precision during the manufacturing and assembly process.

In this context, the tamper/reflector is made of heavy metal (usually beryllium or depleted uranium) and consists of a precisely machined spherical shell typically 5–10 cm thick, surrounding the uranium pit like an eggshell. It thus sits directly between the high-explosive lenses grafted to the inside of the bomb’s outer wall and the U-235 pit at the center.

The tamper/reflector therefore essentially encases the fissile core and performs two vital roles. First, when the high explosives on the outside shell detonate (see below), the tamper’s mass and inertia resist the outward expansion of the exploding pit for a few crucial microseconds. This “holds the pit together” long enough for many more generations of fission to occur before the entire device blows itself apart. Without a perfectly functioning tamper, the pit would expand too quickly and the chain reaction would fizzle out prematurely.

Secondly, this layer also operates as a reflector much like a basketball backboard, causing any neutrons escaping from the pit to rebound back into the hoop, so to speak. This happens because the beryllium or depleted uranium in this layer is very effective at reflecting neutrons back into the pit rather than allowing them to escape. By bouncing neutrons back into the fissile material, it greatly increases the efficiency of the explosion, meaning less uranium is needed to achieve a full yield.

Finally, the bomb’s outer shell is comprised of a steel, aluminum or plastic sphere, which houses the “high-explosive lens” that are fused to the inside of this outer case. These so-called explosive lenses are essentially the ignition propellants that initially slam into the pit at incredible speeds, pressures and uniformity of impact. So in order for the bomb to work, these high-explosive lenses must be machined to tolerances measured in fractions of a millimeter.

These propellant lenses are manufactured from two different types of conventional military grade explosives with deliberately different detonation velocities. The faster explosive is typically HMX and TNT-based, while the slower explosive is usually Baratol. These two explosives are cast and machined into complex lens-shaped components. The precise difference in their detonation speeds allows the lenses to reshape multiple detonation waves into a single, perfectly symmetrical spherical shock wave that compresses the uranium pit uniformly.

Again, precision design and manufacturing are of the essence. Accordingly, the high-explosive lenses are carefully bonded and fastened to the inside surface of the outer shell. They are not loose but form a precise, three-dimensional mosaic that completely fills the space between the rigid outer case and the tamper layer.

The entire purpose of these precision-engineered components and the manner in which they are configured within the device is to facilitate incredible levels of simultaneity. That is, at the instant of detonation, these explosives must ignite simultaneously to within nanoseconds, generating a perfectly spherical shock wave that compresses the pit of weapons grade uranium inward. Indeed, the necessary implosion needs to be so powerful that the uranium is squeezed to densities two to three times that of lead.

In turn, squeezing the pit to the requisite densities requires pressures reaching tens of millions of atmospheres. For purposes of comprehension these extreme pressures might be compared to the pressures in a standard automobile tire, which are generally at 2 to 3 atmospheres, not millions.

At the same time, the material is heated to millions of degrees in a fleeting instant. Yet any asymmetry in either the pressures or heating, even on the scale of a human hair, can distort the shock wave, thereby causing the “pit” to squirt out unevenly, and the device to “fizzle,” producing at best a low-yield dud or nothing at all.

The entire process must be timed with sub-microsecond precision, while the device must also remain safe and stable during transport, storage, and launch.

Moreover, even if Iran possessed the necessary high-explosive components and pit metallurgy today, it would still face yet another weaponization hurdle: To wit, the neutron-initiator problem.

The latter sits inside the hollow center of the spherical fissile pit. It is completely surrounded by the weapons-grade uranium. A reliable neutron initiator must flood the compressed pit with neutrons at the precise moment of maximum compression.

Producing and integrating these components at industrial scale while maintaining safety and reliability is a non-trivial enterprise, obviously. In this context, US intelligence believes that Iran has conducted some modeling and small-scale experiments, but scaling to a functional warhead requires years of iterative design, subcritical hydrodynamic testing, and computer simulation validated against real data.

Miniaturization and survivability add another layer of difficulty. A crude device weighing hundreds of kilograms might be transportable by truck or ship. But a deliverable weapon that can be mated to a ballistic missile, survive re-entry heating and vibration, and detonate reliably at the intended altitude – usually 1,500 to 2,500 feet for anti-city applications – requires dramatic size and weight reduction and configuration.

And lest there be any confusion here – we are talking about an anti-city weapon designed to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. After all, that’s what the supposed Iranian nuke threat is all about. In this regard, the only other nuclear attacks on cities were –

• the Little Boy bomb detonated at Hiroshima at 1,900 feet.
• the Fat Man bomb detonated at Nagasaki at 1,650 feet.

In any event, the problems of bomb/missile mating and sufficient miniaturization of the former are not trivial. North Korea’s first nuclear devices were too large for its missiles. So it took them years of additional work to miniaturize and compact their warheads to usable scale.

In this context, even Iran’s best current missiles are not fit for purpose. Thus, Iran’s Shahab-3 and Sejjil missiles have significant payload limitations that make them poorly suited for delivering a nuclear weapon. The Shahab-3, Iran’s longest-range operational ballistic missile, has a payload capacity of only about 700–1,000 kg, while the more advanced solid-fueled Sejjil offers roughly 700–1,200 kg.

By contrast, a first-generation nuclear warhead – including the heavy physics package, tamper, explosives, arming and fuzing systems, and re-entry vehicle protection – would likely weigh upwards of 1,500 kg. This means Iran would need to significantly miniaturize any nuclear device before it could be realistically mated to these missiles, a complex engineering challenge that has so far eluded them, as well.

In addition, the re-entry vehicle must protect delicate electronics and explosives from extreme thermal and mechanical stresses. Integrating the physics package into such a vehicle while preserving the precise timing required for an implosion is a separate engineering discipline that Iran has never demonstrated, either.

Perhaps the greatest single barrier, however, is testing and confidence. No nuclear weapon state has ever fielded an operational arsenal without some form of full-yield or near-full-yield testing.

That’s because the empirical data from actual detonations are irreplaceable. Computer models and subcritical experiments can only approximate reality. Accordingly, here is the applicable historical record:

• United States: 1,054 nuclear tests (1945–1992)
• Soviet Union/Russia: 715 nuclear tests (1949–1990)
• France: 210 nuclear tests (1960–1996)
• United Kingdom: 45 nuclear tests (1952–1991)
• China: 45 nuclear tests (1964–1996)
• India: 6 announced tests (1974 and 1998)
• Pakistan: 6 announced tests (1998)
• North Korea: 6 announced tests (2006–2017)
• South Africa: 0 tests (it built six gun-type devices in the 1980s but dismantled the program without ever detonating one).

Iran, by contrast, has perforce conducted zero nuclear tests because it has never even weaponized a bomb!

The alternative of proxy testing – using conventional explosives to mimic implosion dynamics – can provide useful data, but it cannot replicate the extreme pressures and neutron fluxes of an actual nuclear detonation.

Needless to say, therefore, the absence of any detected full-scale test or credible proxy program since 2003 remains a central pillar of the U.S. intelligence community’s long-standing judgment that Iran has conducted no weaponization activities.

Tulsi Gabbard’s March 25–26, 2025, testimony to the House and Senate intelligence committees reaffirmed this crucial consensus in explicit terms. As Director of National Intelligence, she stated that

“the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”

She noted the unprecedented size of Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile but drew a clear line between material production and weaponization. Gabbard’s remarks aligned with the unclassified 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, which highlighted Iran’s enrichment progress while underscoring the absence of resumed weapons-design activities.

Even after the 2025–2026 military strikes that damaged Iran’s declared enrichment facilities, subsequent assessments continued to separate the enrichment pathway from the weaponization pathway. The intelligence community has repeatedly emphasized that a political decision by the Supreme Leader would still be required to restart structured weaponization, and no such decision has been detected.

Historical precedents reinforce the yawning gap between having HEU and possessing a bomb. South Africa produced HEU in the 1980s and built six gun-type devices but never tested them and ultimately dismantled the program. Accordingly, it never got the “nuke”.

Likewise, Libya acquired centrifuge technology and some HEU feedstock but never came close to a workable weapon before abandoning the effort in 2003.

Pakistan, often cited as a rapid proliferator, benefited from extensive Chinese assistance in both design and testing infrastructure. Even then, it required multiple underground tests in 1998 before declaring a credible deterrent.

Iran, by contrast, has operated under intense international scrutiny, with no equivalent foreign patron providing proven warhead blueprints or test data.

In this context, it also needs be noted that engineering and organizational demands of weaponization generate detectable signatures. For instance, high-explosive lens casting and machining require specialized facilities, which leave detectable environmental footprints.

Neutron-generator production also involves detectable radioactive materials and precision electronics. Warhead integration demands secure, instrumented test ranges and telemetry systems. All of these activities are far harder to conceal than centrifuge cascades, which can be dispersed and hidden in underground tunnels.

The U.S. intelligence community’s ability to monitor such telltale signatures—through human sources, signals intelligence and environmental sampling—has been a key reason for its consistent assessment that Iran has not crossed the weaponization threshold.

Indeed, this is precisely why Trump’s May 2018 cancellation of the JCPOA was so extremely foolish. The latter was designed precisely around the crucial distinction between enrichment and weaponization.

The JCPOA’s strict but reasonable limits on enrichment appropriately left open the option of reactor grade fuel production for Iran’s large civilian reactor at Bushehr. But the depth and rigor of the inspection regime which accompanied the enrichment arrangements virtually precluded the possibility that the complex, expansive and challenging work on weaponization described above could go on undetected—even if the 2003 decision to abandon those efforts were ever reversed.

In short, the 400 kilograms of 60 percent material that has so alarmed the warmongers because it could be upgraded to weapons-grade in weeks was the Ultimate False Flag.

There was never, ever any prospect of an “imminent” nuclear attack on US territory. Full Stop.

The truth is, Iran had no weaponized nuclear device; it had no long-range missile with a heavy payload (over 1,000 Kg) that could get even one-fifth of the way to Washington DC; and no capability to marry a bomb, which it didn’t have, to a 5,000 kilometer range ICBM, which it didn’t have, either.

The implications of this discussion are uncomfortable in the extreme. They mean that Bibi, the Donald and his war cabinet of neocons, know-nothings and gym rats are operating on the basis of a blatant False Flag that makes all others that have gone before pale in significance.

At the end of the day, the conflation of enrichment processes with bomb-making capacity defies even  the working knowledge of the Washington War Machine itself.

Given the military mayhem it has already engendered and the far worse impending catastrophes of the ground force invasion just around the corner, it can therefore be well and truly said: Donald Trump is fixing to blow-up the global economy based on a Big Lie that anyone actually capable of making a nuclear bomb would recognize as utterly bogus, and instantly so.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

Soon Comes The Mother of All Supply Shocks

by David Stockman | May 1, 2026 | 

It’s getting pretty hard to tell who is more delusional: The Donald or the noisy boy band of school-yard incompetents that surround him.

Either way, it’s not surprising that Trump posted this missive earlier today. He apparently actually thinks that his cockamamie Iranian War, which is on the edge of stalemate or actually being lost, is nearly all over except for the shouting.

Of course, it’s no mystery as to where the Donald is getting his utterly misplaced optimism. To wit, almost every POTUS of modern times – financially challenged or solid in his own right – has had a strong Secy of the Treasury to keep him tethered to reality.

After all, Herbert Hoover had the outstanding Andrew Mellon. FDR finally got himself anchored down by the capable Henry Morganthau. And General Eisenhower, who was himself no slouch on fiscal matters, had the rock solid midwestern banker, George Humphreys.

Likewise, economics were not JFK’s strong suit, but all matters financial were second nature to his Treasury Secretary, Douglas Dillon. And even after his screw-ups at Camp David, Nixon turned to the brilliant Bill Simon, while the peanut farmer from Georgia had the world class industrial CEO, Michael Blumenthal at the Treasury post.

Contrary to the main stream stereotype, Ronald Reagan was actually deeply learned on economic matters, but even then he had the exceedingly capable Jim Baker at the Treasury during this second term. Similarly, Clinton had Wall Street titan Bob Rubin and G. Dubya Bush had the exceedingly capable Paul O’Neill.

Not the Donald. The first time around he had a Goldman Sachs nepo baby, Steven Mnuchin, whose economic policy grounding was as razor thin as the Donald’s. And now he’s got former George Soros, trainee, Scott Bessent, who apparently fancies himself to be a big think strategist, who actually doesn’t know shit from shinola on most matters within his brief.

So in even more declarative terms than the Donald, Bessent now tells us that the Iranian’s are literally days away from waving the white flag of surrender because he and the Donald have constipated their oil wells with the naval blockade.

While the surviving IRGC Leaders are trapped like drowning rats in a sewage pipe, Iran’s creaking oil industry is starting to shut in production thanks to the U.S. BLOCKADE. Pumping will soon collapse. GASOLINE SHORTAGES IN IRAN NEXT!

Sorry, Scottie. We don’t think so. Not even remotely so, as we amplify below.

To be sure, the US naval blockade is supposed to be a clever alternative to the dreaded “boots on the ground” moment. That occurred a few weeks ago when it became clear that bombing them to the stone age for six weeks hadn’t done the trick between February 28 and April 13th.

The claim was that the US naval blockade was one of the Donald’s patented 4-D chess moves. It would first dry up their cash inflow. And then shortly thereafter hit them with a double-tap, causing Iran’s limited storage tanks to be topped-up to the brim.

In turn, this would allegedly force the Iranian’s to either surrender or run the risk of literally blowing up their oilfields and causing catastrophic damage to their reservoirs owing to hasty well shutdowns.

Alas, the Donald’s genius boy band including Pete Hegseth and Little Marco Rubio forget the elephant in the room. To wit, it was always a question of which of the dual blockades – Iran’s at the Strait or the US Navy’s outside on the Gulf of Oman – would would run out of time first.

The fact is, since February 28th the only meaningful amount of oil, LNG, naphtha/petrochemical feed-stocks, LPGs, ammonia, sulfur, aluminum, helium and sundry others that have passed thru the SOH is Iranian product in vessels hugging the coastline along the Iran/Pakistan/India route to the Indian ocean and beyond.

This means, in turn, that the greatest bow-wave of missing physical shipments will soon be lapping up on the ports in India and the Pacific east-wise and Rotterdam and the European ports to the west. As a practical matter of vessel time on the water, it takes VLCCs roughly 20 days to get from SOH to Japan, 30 days from SOH to Rotterdam thru Suez and 40-days if the Houthis shutdown the Red Sea Route and force tankers around the Cape of Africa, which is likely as the war winds on.

Accordingly, and as we have previously noted, nearly 900 million barrels of oil, or roughly 55% of the normal 1.7 billion barrels of seaborne oil shipments are now missing from the global tanker traffic heading to ports. So even if a complete peace deal and return to open-ended free navigation were to be agreed to by mid-May, there would be no new tankers coming into Rotterdam until July at the earliest.

So the “blockade” is about to cause mayhem alright, but that would be the Iranian blockade doing the thundering damage to European and Asian economies.

Needless to say, the longer the SOH remains closed, the more the bow wave of missing vessels will compound and extend through the summer and beyond. And that’s why the strategy of waiting for Iran’s cash to run out and storage tanks to get constipated is just plain nuts. Time is on their side, not the Donald’s.

To wit, contrary to Bessent’s school boy trolling, Iran is not close to running out of either cash inflows or storage tank capacity. It’s actually not even close.

In the first place, the Donald geniuses forgot about the massive Iranian dark fleet that was already on the blue water heading for deliveries in India, southeast Asia, China, South Korea and Japan; and also that under the typical international payment terms upon deliveries of 60 days there was also in the pipeline a large floating batch of receivables coming due.

In a word, Grok 4 estimates that there were about 70 million barrels of already delivered oil in the 60-day receivables pipeline for cash payment, and another 130 million barrels of undeliveredIranian oil in transit on the blue water.

In all, that amounts to 200 million barrels of oil on the far side of the blockade. In dollar value that’s equal to upwards of $20 billion of cash collections over the next several months.

Likewise, the table below provides Grok 4’s best estimates of current mid-point values relative to the storage tank constipation gambit. As of late April, Iran has already reduced it daily petroleum liquids production pace to about 2.75 million barrels per day (mb/d), down from about 3.5 mb/d prior to Feb. 28th.

Now it happens that Iran has upwards of 2.8 mb/d of domestic refinery capacity designed to meet the needs of a 90 million person population, as well as provide some small product export volumes. However, as of the present time its refinery runs are averaging about 1.75 mb/d according to Kpler and other tracking publishers, but another 150,000 b/d or so is being brought on line to process its now abundant crude oil.

Kpler and others also estimate that the US naval blockade has been quite leaky at up to 1.0 mb/d in the early weeks of the US blockade, but that conservatively speaking upwards of 150,000 b/d are still finding an exit via the dark fleet ships hugging the coastlines of Iran, Pakistan and India on the way to STS (ship-to-ship) transfer and end markets.

In all, Grok 4 therefore estimates that at current production rates – with no further well shut-ins or reserve damage – Iran would need to store about 700,000 b/d. That is, in order to avoid backing up the system into the Donald’s imaginary oilfield blow-up.

At the same time, Iran is estimated to have about 41 million barrels of available storage between above ground tanks and floating storage on Iranian controlled tankers still in Iranian waters. And that’s before any longer term solutions such as salt dome storage are brought on line.

In short, Iran is appears to be very, very far from topping the tank in the next week or two. It may have upwards of 59 days of absorption from current domestic production after allowing for enhanced refinery runs and a modest level of export leakage through the US Navy blockade.

¹ Footnote on the 41 mbbl storage estimate (Kpler April 27-28 report):
Total assessed onshore capacity: 86-95 mbbl. less current onshore stocks of ~49 mbbl less practical operation limits= 26 mb of available tank storage. In addition, floating storage available in Iranian waters is estimated at 15 mbbl (7 VLCCs + 2 Aframaxes + reactivated VLCC M/T Nasha). Combined effective buffer: ~41 mbbl.

So here’s the thing. If you don’t think an ill wind is blowing in the global economy, take a gander at the graph below, which compares the price for delivered Dubai crude with the WTI cash spot price in Cushing OKLA. Never, ever has the spread at today’s $35 per barrel been remotely this wide. Actually, it has been negative for much of the time since 1990 because US sweet crudes have inherently higher value than the Brent benchmark crude.

So, yes, the parabolic rise of the line on the right margin of the graph is far from a stable condition. To wit, the massive bow wave of missing vessels coming out of the SOH means that the global oil, energy and other commodity markets are more out of balance and dislocated than at any time since the original oil embargos in 1973.

What will be unfolding at unprecedented scale during the months ahead is dislocations, screaming imbalances, severe bottlenecks and absolute physical shortages in global markets for upwards of 200 million BOE of liquid petroleum, LNG, LPGs and hydrocarbon processing by-products – fertilizer, sulfur, helium, aluminum etc. These unfolding dislocations will be roiling the global economy like never before.

On the one hand, “demand destruction” will be pulling global output lower as production is curtailed either by swelling costs or availability. On the other hand, soaring premium prices will be attempting to bring drastically dislocated supply/demand relationships back into balance via arbitrage all around the globe.

Once the adjustment process gets a full head of steam, the Mother of all Supply Shocks will hardly do justice to describing the carnage, as we will further amplify in Part 2.

Needless to say, the Donald’s penchant for lying and making up shit as he slides by the seat of his amble britches is about to catch up with him. Big time.

After all, Iran did not actually write the proposal he rejected in the above quote. Nor has Iran called the White House. And it did not send a distress note by email, fax, or carrier pigeon.

What actually happened is that Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and told the world that Iran is “begging for a deal,” that his phone is “ringing off the hook,” and that foreign leaders are “saying things to me that you wouldn’t believe.”

Bibi’s Big Lie and Why Pluto Didn’t Bark In Tehran

by David Stockman | Apr 29, 2026 

Well, it bears repeating. Again. The Iranians never had a nuke, had no near-term prospect of weaponizing their enriched uranium stockpiles, were not hell-bent on blowing up the world and were not two weeks from anything other than still another wolf-crying episode from the one actual “crazy” leader in the middle east. That would be Bibi Netanyahu. Hands down.

But those truths did not stop the Donald from blatant lying and fear-mongering yet again today. And to even go so far as to imply that he has the mullahs by the short hairs.

Trump: “Iran, they are not going to have a nuclear weapon. They are not going to blow up the world. They are crazy. And therefore, they are not happy.

The truth is, however, the Donald surely does not have anyone who is crazy up against any kind of negotiating wall. They Iranians are never going to give up their nukes because by the lights of his own DNI (Director of National Intelligence), Tulsi Gabbard, they don’t have anything to give up—including even scribbled plans on how to make a homemade nuke:

“The IC [U.S. Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”

The only thing that has been terminated, therefore, is the Supreme Leader who ixnayed the whole nuke scare story 23 years ago! Indeed the result of Israel’s sweeping assassination attack on the entire leadership of the Iranian regime on February 28th was to simply ensconce the remaining hard line leaders more completely in power.

In any event, what is actually getting nuked is the world economy, as illustrated by the graphs for aluminum, nitrogen fertilizer and #2 diesel fuel below. And this is just the beginning of the mayhem yet to follow.

Meanwhile, the Big Lie about Iran’s nuke becomes more and more preposterous with every passing day. Still, the true history needs be told because Washington’s War Machine has been turned loose on the basis of a narrative about the Iranian bomb that doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

So we start with what might be called the curious incident of the dog that didn’t bark in the night, which, of course, remains one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous deductions: The absence of expected action was itself the clue. So apply that logic to Iran’s so-called mad dash to get a nuke, and the silence is deafening.

That is to say, if the mullahs in Tehran were the “mad men”caricatured by Bibi Netanyahu and lip-synced by the Donald, and were single-mindedly obsessed with acquiring a nuclear weapon at any cost, indifferent to sanctions, inspections, or international legitimacy – then one thing is abundantly clear: To wit, the most rational, lowest-tech, and fastest route to a nuke lay not in the labyrinth of uranium enrichment they actually pursued, but in the plutonium path that had already been demonstrated and proven by North Korea.

Call it the “Pluto Route” based on a small, natural-uranium-fueled, graphite-moderated plutonium reactor paired with a simple reprocessing plant. This is the route North Korea choose purely to attain a “deterrence” bomb.

This path was far simpler, far less expensive, far less demanding scientifically and engineering-wise than the 90%+ highly enriched uranium (HEU) route that Iran has allegedly been pursuing. The former required no isotope separation, no thousands of precision centrifuges, no gigawatts of electricity—just natural state domestic uranium, basic chemical engineering, and a straightforward path to weapons-grade plutonium, not 90%+ highly enriched uranium (HEU).

Two structural realities make the plutonium route objectively far easier for a bomb-only proliferator. First, acquiring the fissile material itself is far less demanding. A small, dedicated 5 to 30 megawatt (MW) graphite reactor operating on natural uranium (0.7 % U-235) produces plutonium-239 as a byproduct when fuel is irradiated at low burn-up.

No enrichment infrastructure is required; the reactor and a basic PUREX-style reprocessing line suffice. In contrast, the highly enriched uranium (HEU, >90 % U-235) route demands cascades of thousands of high-speed centrifuges, exotic materials, vacuum systems, and massive electrical power – precisely the industrial-scale apparatus Iran built at Natanz and Fordow.

Second, once the bomb-grade material is in hand, machining and fabricating the bomb core clearly favors plutonium. A plutonium implosion device can function with as little as 4-6 kg of weapons-grade metal; the core is smaller, the explosive lenses are more compact, and the overall package lighter and easier to miniaturize for missile delivery.

An HEU-based implosion weapon typically requires 15–25 kg or more of HEU. In turn, this demands a larger, heavier “physics package”, more exacting spherical machining tolerances on a bigger metallic pit (core), and greater challenges in achieving uniform compression in fractions of a second when the bomb is detonated by the outer ring of explosive material.

Thus, the engineering burden for a deliverable HEU implosion device is demonstrably far higher. That is to say, a regime fixated solely on the bomb would have barked for Pluto(nium) and followed the path already pioneered by North Korea, as amplified below.

In Tehran, of course, Pluto never barked. Accordingly, since North Korea’s plutonium program is the textbook case of how to get a bomb efficiently, its history is worthy of amplification.

North Korea’s ambitions date to the 1950s, when Soviet assistance supplied basic training and the IRT-2000 research reactor at Yongbyon. By the late 1970s, Pyongyang had begun indigenous design work on a small-scale dedicated production reactor.

Construction of the 5 MW gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor – modeled on early British Magnox designs – began around 1984, alongside a radiochemical reprocessing laboratory. The reactor achieved criticality in 1986, and was fueled entirely with domestically fabricated natural uranium. No enrichment was ever needed.

The design deliberately permitted short irradiation cycles to maximize nearly pure Pu-239 while minimizing Pu-240 contamination. Spent fuel was transferred to the adjacent reprocessing facility, where a straightforward chemical separation process extracted weapons-usable plutonium metal.

By 1990 the reprocessing line had been hot-tested, and small quantities of plutonium were being separated. U.S. intelligence later estimated that between 1986 and 1994 the 5 MW reactor produced enough material for one or two crude devices.

The entire fuel cycle – uranium mining at Pyongsan, milling, fuel fabrication, irradiation, and reprocessing – was kept indigenous and low-profile.

Still, North Korea did joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985, and under International pressure agreed to the 1994 Agreed Framework, which froze the 5 MW reactor (and larger planned projects) in exchange for light-water reactors and heavy fuel oil promised by the Clinton Administration.

Pyongyang largely complied on the surface until the framework collapsed in late 2002 because the Washington never supplied the promised fuel oil and light water reactors. In January 2003, therefore, North Korea withdrew from the NPT, restarted the 5 MW plutonium reactor and resumed operations at the reprocessing plant. By mid-2005 officials privately informed U.S. visitors that they had finished extracting plutonium and now possessed weapons-usable material.

On 9 October 2006 came the first underground test – an implosion-type plutonium device yielding a very small 0.5-1 kiloton explosion, widely assessed as at best only a partial success, owing to imperfect high-explosive lenses rather than material failure.

A higher-yield plutonium test followed in May 2009.The timeline is telling: Serious weapons-oriented infrastructure began in the early-to-mid 1980s. Plutonium production was under way by the early 1990s. After an eight-year freeze, the program restarted in 2003 and delivered a testable device by 2006 – roughly 20-25 years from dedicated construction to first detonation, with the final sprint requiring still another three years once reprocessing resumed.

In this context, a single small reactor could yield roughly 6 kg of weapons-grade plutonium annually – enough for one bomb per year. Thus, the plutonium process was chosen precisely because it was the path of least resistance. No exotic vacuum technology, no cascade engineering, no power-hungry centrifuges. Just a reactor, a reprocessing line, and single-minded focus.

For a regime that wanted only the bomb, this was the rational choice. Iran, by contrast, built its program around the very infrastructure a bomb-only proliferator would have avoided: That is, a large light-water power reactor at Bushehr, which demanded low-enriched uranium fuel and therefore require a full-scale industrial enrichment apparatus.

Iran’s very different nuclear story, therefore, begins in the 1970s under the Shah, who signed contracts for 23 reactors and full fuel-cycle facilities. Construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant started in 1975 with two 1,300 MW pressurized light-water reactors supplied by West Germany’s Kraftwerk Union.

The project was 80-90 percent complete when the 1979 Islamic Revolution halted everything. Iraqi bombing during the 1980-1988 war further damaged the site. After the war, Siemens refused to resume work under U.S. sanctions pressure.

In 1995 Russia’s Atomstroyexport agreed to complete a single VVER-1000 (1,000 MW) reactor fitted into the existing German containment. Fuel loading began in 2010 and the reactor reached criticality in 2011. It was grid-connected in September 2011 and formally commissioned in 2013.

Bushehr remains Iran’s only operating commercial nuclear power plant, supplying a modest fraction of national electricity.The critical constraint is that light-water reactors like Bushehr require low-enriched uranium (typically 3-5% U-235). Natural uranium as used in North Korea’s bomb-purposed reactor cannot sustain a chain reaction in light water – so enrichment is thus mandatory.

In short, Iran embarked in the uranium enrichment path not as some kind of sinister route to a bomb, but because its civilian power facilities forced it down the centrifuge path. There wasn’t anything sinister or untoward about it – and most especially because Washington actually forced it.

That is to say, by the time Iran’s Bushehr civilian power plant was commissioned, it had already been subjected to every kind of sanction and embargo known to man. While the Shah’s original plan for massive nuclear power generation had been based on out-sourcing the enrichment process to France, Washington sanctions had long since foreclosed that route and had made domestic enrichment a necessity if the Bushehr plant was to be operated.

That is to say, the fact that Iran was forced into building large scale enrichment facilities was another case of the Washington neocons and Bibi’s Fifth Column on the banks of the Potomac scoring an own goal.

In any event, the Natanz pilot fuel-enrichment plant (revealed in 2002) and the Fordow facility (revealed in 2009) were publicly justified as necessary to supply Bushehr and any future reactors. Thousands of centrifuges were installed in cascades, consuming enormous electricity and requiring precision manufacturing.

Even today Iran’s enrichment program is calibrated to produce LEU (low enriched uranium) for power reactors while retaining the latent capacity to surge to weapons-grade levels. This is the opposite of a bomb-only strategy: Enrichment is the hard, detectable, power-intensive step that North Korea largely skipped.

Moreover, Iran’s brief flirtation with plutonium via the Arak heavy-water research reactor (IR-40) was marginal by comparison. Arak was never optimized for low-burn-up weapons-grade plutonium production, and under the 2015 JCPOA it was redesigned with international assistance to minimize plutonium output. No reprocessing plant was ever constructed similar to the North Korean set-up and the reactor core at Arak with filled with cement under IAEA supervision.

Throughout this HEU-centric journey, therefore, the U.S. Intelligence Community has delivered a remarkably consistent assessment: Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Full stop.

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) judged with high confidence that Tehran halted its structured nuclear-weapons program in fall 2003. Subsequent assessments – through 2010, 2011, and into the 2020s – reaffirmed that no decision had been made to restart weaponization.

The IC repeatedly noted that Iran was keeping open the option by advancing enrichment and other dual-use capabilities, but Supreme Leader Khamenei had not authorized resumption of the Amad Plan-style (pre-2003) warhead work. Nevertheless, even pre-2003 weaponization studies had focused exclusively on implosion designs using HEU, not plutonium.

Furthermore, even after the Donald recklessly shit-canned the JCPOA in May 2018, causing the Iranians to expand their enriched-uranium stockpile to much higher levels, the core judgment of the 17-US intelligence agencies held: Namely, that Iran had no active bomb program.

That consistency had actually been extended into Trump’s second term, as per Tulsi Gabbard’s above quoted March 2025 testimony before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

While she noted an erosion of the decades-long taboo on public discussion of nuclear weapons and the unprecedented size of Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile, the bottom line remained unchanged: No weaponization decision had been made and there was no restart of the structured program halted in 2003.

Even after the 2025 U.S.-Israeli strikes that damaged Iranian nuclear infrastructure, subsequent assessments reiterated that Iran had made no efforts to rebuild enrichment capability after the Donald’s B-2 bunker buster strikes in June 2025. The regime appeared intact but largely degraded, but the intelligence community detected no move toward active bomb construction.

By choosing the HEU route required by its civilian light-water reactor at Bushehr, Iran not only lengthened the material-acquisition timeline but also raised the downstream engineering, machining, and fabrication challenges for any eventual weapon.

That’s because a plutonium implosion device, as North Korea demonstrated, allows a smaller, lighter, more missile-compatible “physics package” once the material is available. So by committing to the HEU route meant either accepting a bulkier, heavier warhead or investing additional R&D to optimize compression and reflection for a larger HEU mass.

Machining a bigger metallic HEU pit to the exact spherical tolerances demanded by symmetric implosion is more demanding in terms of precision tooling, contamination control, and handling. The explosive assembly must still achieve microsecond simultaneity, but now across a much larger volume.

In short, even at the bomb construction and assembly phase, North Korea’s plutonium path cleared the material hurdle with minimal technology; Iran’s HEU path compounded it. A true bomb-obsessed regime would have avoided this self-imposed escalation.The absence of a Yongbyon-style plutonium program in Iran is therefore the dog that did not bark

A “mad man” leadership indifferent to global opinion and focused solely on the fastest possible bomb would have copied North Korea’s 1980s blueprint decades ago: One small graphite reactor, one reprocessing line, domestic natural uranium, and a single-minded sprint to plutonium.

Iran instead invested in Bushehr and the enrichment infrastructure it demands – an approach that makes sense only if the regime wanted both a civilian nuclear power program and the latent option of a future bomb, or if it sought the political and economic benefits of a dual-use program under international scrutiny. The multi-decade North Korean timeline – from 1980s construction to 2006 test—proves the plutonium route is viable even for an isolated state.

Iran’s civilian reactor basis at Bushehr locked it into a slower, more visible, and technically more demanding enrichment path. The consistent intelligence-community judgment since the 2007 NIE through Gabbard’s 2025 testimony – that weaponization remains suspended and no bomb is under construction – reinforces the point. In Tehran, Pluto never barked. The silence suggests the regime’s ambitions, whatever they may have been, have never been those of a North Korean-style bomb-only proliferator.

Moreover, it was also a path that never got them even close to the rudimentary but difficult steps of fabricating the components, machining the parts, assembling the engineered clockwork and testing even a small scale device – to say nothing of a life size bomb that could have sustained the immense heat and pounding percussion of re-entry when launched from an ICBM.

In short, the entire “weeks” or “months” to a bomb was Bibi’s Big Lie of the 21st century to date.

Soon or latter every previous POTUS figured that out including Sleepy Joe, Obama and Dubya Bush. But Netanyahu outlasted them all, and finally got an Oval Office occupant dumb enough to believe the lie and act upon it with what is sure to be devastating implications for the entire world

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.No. They aren’t. He made it up. Every damn bit of it.