Harvard Professor Answers Iran War Questions | Tech Support | WIRED

0:00 The victor in a war is not determined

0:02 by the side that has the longest list of kills.

0:05 It's determined by the side that achieves its strategic objectives.

0:09 I'm Professor Tarek Masoud from Harvard University.

0:11 Let's answer your questions from the internet.

0:13 This is Tech Support Iran.

0:18 [music]

0:21 iceberg.com asks, what are the chances that Iran already has nuclear weapons?

0:26 I think that the chances are fairly low.

0:28 First of all, there's no public information

0:30 that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon.

0:32 The United States government hasn't alleged

0:34 that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon.

0:36 Israel hasn't said that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon.

0:39 And critically, the Iranians themselves haven't said they have a nuclear weapon.

0:43 And if they had one,

0:44 you might expect them to say they had one because the main use of nuclear

0:48 weapons is to deter precisely the kind

0:50 of attack that the Iranians are suffering now.

0:53 Are they close to getting a nuclear weapon?

0:55 You often hear people say that Iran is two weeks away.

0:59 What are What are they talking about when they say that?

1:01 They don't mean that Iran is two weeks away from having a missile

1:04 that it could deliver a nuclear warhead to Tel Aviv or to New York.

1:09 What they mean is that Iran is two weeks away from having enough

1:13 enriched uranium for them to actually be able to build a nuclear bomb.

1:19 Uranium basically exists in nature in two forms.

1:24 One form is uranium 238, which is not good for building bombs.

1:29 But there's another form, which is a kind of unstable form, called uranium 235.

1:34 And that's what you want to use to make a nuclear weapon,

1:37 but it exists in nature in very small quantities.

1:40 So, the process of enriching uranium is

1:43 basically increasing the concentration of uranium 235.

1:48 And if you just want to run nuclear power plant,

1:51 you only need to get to about 3% of uranium 235.

1:56 If you want to build a nuclear bomb, you need to get to 90% enrichment.

2:01 The Iranians right now are at 60% enrichment,

2:04 and it's estimated that if they wanted to go to 90%,

2:07 it would take another couple of weeks.

2:09 Even then, once they have enough enriched uranium to build a bomb,

2:13 there's still a lot of steps between

2:15 that and actually having a deliverable weapon.

2:18 They have to develop an explosive core.

2:20 They have to figure out a way to trigger it.

2:22 They have to put it on a delivery system.

2:25 And all of those steps are ones that we can detect and potentially interrupt.

2:32 And so, Iranians are close to having enough nuclear material for a bomb,

2:37 but they're further away from having the bomb itself.

2:41 Here's a question from Binnie 21.

2:44 Was the Iran nuclear deal a good thing?

2:47 What Binnie 21 is referring to was something called

2:50 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or the JCPOA,

2:54 which was a deal that was signed by Iran, the United States,

2:58 the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, and Germany in 2015.

3:04 And this was basically a deal in which the Iranians agreed to essentially

3:09 give up or postpone their nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

3:13 They weren't going to enrich uranium to the much

3:15 higher level needed to build nuclear bombs.

3:18 They were going to limit the amount of that uranium that they stockpiled.

3:22 And on top of all of that, they agreed

3:24 to a very serious regime of inspections by the IAEA,

3:29 the International Atomic Energy Agency.

3:31 Now, was it a good thing?

3:34 It depends on who you ask.

3:35 People who think it was a good thing say, "Of course it was a good thing.

3:38 We got the Iranians to put their nuclear program on ice,

3:41 and we didn't have to go to war." People who think

3:43 it was a bad thing point out that first of all,

3:45 many of the provisions of the JCPOA were set

3:49 to sunset or to expire after about 15 years.

3:52 So, people felt, well,

3:54 this is just putting a pause on the Iranian nuclear program,

3:56 and after 15 years, they're going to race to a bomb.

3:59 The other reason that some people thought that this was not

4:01 a very good deal was they felt the inspections were not strong enough,

4:05 particularly with respect to some of Iran's military sites.

4:09 And then, they also were concerned that the sanctions

4:12 relief that we gave to the Iranians just put a lot of money in their pocket

4:16 that they could spend on their proxies like Hezbollah,

4:20 and like Hamas, and like the Houthis in Yemen.

4:22 And so, when President Trump got elected, he said he was going to undo the deal,

4:26 and he did undo the deal,

4:28 and opted instead for something called the maximum pressure campaign,

4:31 which is really intended to squeeze the Iranians, to deprive them of money,

4:36 and also to make sure that they did not get to develop a nuclear program.

4:39 How did the Iranians respond?

4:40 They responded by basically enriching uranium,

4:43 and so now they've got about a thousand

4:45 pounds of uranium that are enriched to about 60%,

4:49 and they stopped all of the inspections.

4:51 When President Biden came back into office, he tried to get the JCPOA back,

4:56 but the Iranians didn't want to go back to the deal of 2015,

5:00 and they insisted that any deal that they made,

5:02 they wanted guarantees that no future president could renege on it

5:07 the same way that President Trump had reneged on the 2015 deal.

5:10 That was obviously something that President Biden couldn't promise.

5:14 So, was the Iranian deal a good thing?

5:16 My answer would be it was good, but it probably wasn't good enough.

5:20 Here's the problem.

5:22 Iran and the United States have many

5:24 deep disagreements about a whole range of things.

5:27 So, it seems kind of inevitable

5:29 that a limited deal on just Iran's nuclear program

5:33 was destined to collapse under the weight

5:36 of all of the other things we disagree on.

5:38 Here's a question from Quora.

5:40 Is Iran really that much of a threat to the United States of America?

5:43 There's really two views here.

5:45 One view, which is the view held by the president of the United States,

5:49 is that absolutely Iran is a threat to the US.

5:51 First of all, the Iranians have made no secret since

5:54 1979 about their very strong enmity to the United States.

5:59 They constantly chant, the regime at least, Marg bar America, death to America.

6:04 It's almost like a national anthem.

6:06 When that regime came into being,

6:08 one of the first acts with which it announced itself

6:11 was the taking of hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran.

6:16 These hostages, about 50 of them, were held for more than a year.

6:20 Since then, Iran has invested in proxies like Hezbollah,

6:24 which killed almost 250 Americans in a suicide

6:28 bombing at an American military base in Beirut.

6:31 And then, of course,

6:32 there is the fact that the Iranians have been developing a nuclear program,

6:36 and some people say also developing a missile program that was intended

6:41 to enable them to deliver whatever nuclear

6:43 weapons they develop to the American homeland.

6:46 So, that's the argument of those who say Iran is a threat.

6:50 Other people say, "Look, Iran was aspiring regional power at best.

6:55 If it represents a threat,

6:57 it's mainly to Israel and to the other countries in the Persian Gulf,

7:01 and it's eminently manageable." And then,

7:04 they also point to the fact that Iran is riven by a lot of internal conflict.

7:09 There are lots of people who are upset with the Iranian regime.

7:12 And if we would just stop rattling the Iranian cage,

7:15 maybe some of those people within the Iranian regime who

7:18 want to change it would have a chance of success,

7:22 as opposed to us constantly causing people

7:24 to rally around the flag in that country.

7:26 Today, now that we're at open war with the Iranians,

7:29 you've got to say they absolutely are a threat.

7:32 The aptly named Dangerous Costs 6367 asks,

7:36 "Why are people talking about the Strait of Hormuz,

7:39 and why does it matter so much?" Here is the Strait of Hormuz,

7:43 this very narrow waterway.

7:45 It's about 20 miles wide that is in the territorial

7:49 waters of Iran and the Sultanate of Oman.

7:53 Iran has about 12% of the world's proven oil reserves.

7:56 That's a lot of oil and through the Strait

7:59 of Hormuz passes about 20% of the world's oil.

8:04 If you want to get oil out of what's called the Persian or Arabian Gulf,

8:08 it mainly has to go through the Strait of Hormuz.

8:10 Now, Saudi Arabia has a pipeline that lets it

8:13 send some of its oil across to the Red Sea.

8:17 The Emiratis have a pipeline that also allows

8:19 them to bypass some of the Strait of Hormuz, but it's not enough.

8:23 And when there is riskier,

8:25 when it looks like there's going to be a supply disruption,

8:28 that gets priced into energy markets and you

8:31 and I pay higher prices at the pump.

8:34 Now, in addition to the Strait of Hormuz,

8:36 there are two other places that you might have heard people talk about.

8:40 One is Kharg Island, which is right there.

8:43 And that's a major Iranian facility for loading tankers and for storing oil.

8:49 And there is now a proposal on the table

8:52 for the United States to actually seize Kharg Island.

8:56 And that would deal a really crippling blow to the Iranians.

8:59 The second is actually on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula,

9:03 and that's right here.

9:04 That's called the Bab el Mandeb Strait,

9:06 and that separates Yemen from Africa on the Red Sea.

9:11 Practically everything that goes through the Suez Canal

9:14 has to ultimately go through Bab el Mandeb.

9:16 We're talking there about 10 to 15% of world trade.

9:20 And guess who operates right here in Bab el Mandeb?

9:23 An organization called Ansar Allah, known popularly as the Houthis.

9:28 They are an Iranian client and they have the capacity

9:32 to really disrupt and interdict shipping through the Bab el Mandeb Strait.

9:36 And so, between the Strait of Hormuz and Babel Mandeb,

9:39 the Iranians have the ability to put a major hurt on the global economy.

9:44 Nude 8991 asks, "What would a realistic win

9:48 for the US even look like in the Iran war?" Well,

9:51 if you listen to President Trump, we've already won.

9:53 In fact, we've won more than anyone's ever won in the history of winning.

9:58 He often points to the tremendous battlefield achievements of the American

10:03 and Israeli military that we are taking out their air force,

10:07 that we're taking out missile sites, and all of those things are true.

10:10 But, here's the thing.

10:11 The victor in a war is not determined

10:14 by the side that has the longest list of kills.

10:17 It's determined by the side that achieves its strategic objectives.

10:21 If our objective is just to end the Iranian nuclear program, well,

10:25 first of all, President said we'd ended the Iranian nuclear program last summer.

10:29 So, it's a question as to what we need to do this time around to really,

10:32 really end the Iranian nuclear program.

10:35 That's still a pretty high bar because we

10:38 will never be assured that Iran's nuclear program

10:42 is completely obliterated until we have figured out

10:46 where that 1,000 lb of enriched uranium has gone.

10:49 And so, that might indeed require some ground presence to try to find it.

10:53 Other people say that we will have achieved victory when we've

10:57 replaced the Islamic Republic with a democratic

11:00 or at least America-friendly regime.

11:03 That's a very high bar that might require a very sustained military engagement.

11:09 The really interesting thing here, though,

11:11 is that though the bar for victory for us might be high,

11:14 it's pretty low for the Iranians.

11:16 All they need to do is survive.

11:19 Mike Thorson asks, "Why is Iran bombing seemingly

11:23 completely unrelated countries?" It definitely looks that way, right?

11:27 Let's look at a map here.

11:28 So, the Iranians have been launching missiles and drones obviously at Israel,

11:32 but they've also been launching at Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE.

11:39 They even launched an attack on Oman and uh Saudi Arabia.

11:43 Now, the Iranians say, "We're not hitting random countries.

11:47 We're not even hitting those countries.

11:49 We're targeting American facilities in those countries,

11:53 like American bases or as they did in Saudi Arabia,

11:56 the American embassy." And the reason that the Iranians are doing that is

12:01 because what they want to do is they want to raise the cost

12:04 of this war in the hope of getting the Americans to conclude it's not

12:09 worth it to continue and we need to make a deal with the Iranians.

12:13 One interesting fact is that the United

12:15 Arab Emirates has taken more fire than Israel.

12:19 In fact, they may have taken more fire than all of the other countries combined.

12:23 And part of the reason for that is

12:25 because the UAE is such an important economic hub.

12:29 So far, those countries have been calling for restraint.

12:33 They've wanted an end to the war and they

12:36 haven't joined the US and Israeli war effort, although that might change.

12:41 But regardless of whether they they join the war or they just

12:45 sit it out and root for the US and Israel from the sidelines,

12:49 when the history of this war is written,

12:51 people are going to ask why the Iranians turned

12:55 the Gulf countries forced them from neutrality into open hostility.

13:00 It's almost like they were reading from a book

13:03 called how to lose friends and alienate people.

13:06 Tidewatcher7819 asks, "If President Trump ordered a ground invasion of Iran,

13:12 would it be a long war or an easy

13:14 victory?" If the United States has a more limited aim,

13:19 like seizing the enriched uranium or taking Kharg Island,

13:25 those things would be hard,

13:27 but there's no reason to expect that they would create multi-year commitments

13:32 if the US remained focused on task and mission creep didn't take place.

13:37 But if the ground invasion took place with the aim

13:41 of replacing the regime with one that's more friendly to us,

13:45 then there's lots of reasons to expect that that would be a very

13:49 long war of the kind that we experienced in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

13:55 The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is very adept at war-fighting,

14:00 and they would absolutely put up a major

14:03 fight should we try to invade the Iranian homeland.

14:08 And these are the people after all

14:10 who trained Hezbollah and who trained the Houthis,

14:12 so they know what they're doing.

14:13 Another big question is, how would the Iranian people themselves greet us?

14:18 Would they support us, or would they see us as replaying

14:23 a century-long script of foreign intervention and domination?

14:28 There's definitely those who say that we could go

14:31 into Iran and make short work of this regime.

14:34 My sense though is that the people who say

14:36 that, who say that this would be an easy victory, aren't thinking hard enough.

14:40 Here's a question from Quora.

14:42 Do Saudi Arabia and Iran hate each other?

14:44 Prior to this conflict, Saudi Arabia and Iran had a pretty decent relationship.

14:47 They'd kind of buried the hatchet with Chinese

14:49 mediation in 2023 and restored a full diplomatic relations.

14:55 That said, there absolutely are tensions

14:58 beneath the surface for these countries, and they're long-standing.

15:01 On one level, it's just they both happen to be two big

15:04 countries that want to have hegemony in this part of the world.

15:08 One thing you'll often find is that Saudis and Iranians often

15:11 argue about what to call the body of water that separates them.

15:15 Saudis like to call it the Arabian Gulf.

15:17 Iranians get really upset when you call it

15:18 that, and they like to call it the Persian Gulf.

15:20 So that speaks to the degree to which both of these countries

15:23 want to be seen as the leaders of the region.

15:27 There's also a kind of economic competition.

15:30 They're both major oil producers,

15:31 and they don't always see eye to eye on prices.

15:33 And then, there's ideological differences.

15:36 On the one hand, Saudi Arabia adheres to a brand of Sunni Islam

15:41 that sees the Shia Islam that Iranians practice as a form of heresy.

15:47 And that has absolutely been a source of conflict.

15:50 And by the way, Saudi Arabia has

15:52 a population of Shiites in its eastern province,

15:55 and it's always worried that Iran is going to instigate them

15:59 and turn them into a fifth column against the Saudi state.

16:02 The Iranian state is based on a revolutionary ideology.

16:07 After all, 1979, they came to power,

16:09 and they promised to export an Islamic revolution.

16:12 While Saudi Arabia is a conservative monarchy.

16:14 They're not so interested in Islamic revolution.

16:18 And then, finally, the Saudis are typically pro-American.

16:21 They've had a good relationship with the United

16:23 States ever since the World War II era.

16:26 And obviously, Iran sees itself as the leader

16:30 of an axis of resistance against the United States.

16:34 And so, it's inclined to see Saudi Arabia as kind of an American puppet.

16:38 Now, that the war has commenced

16:40 and that the Iranians have hit targets in Saudi Arabia,

16:44 the reporting is that the Saudis are urging the United States to finish the job

16:49 and to finally rid the region of this irritant that has caused so much damage.

16:56 This one is from the Explain Like I'm Five subreddit.

16:58 Explain Like I'm Five, who is Hezbollah?

17:01 Hezbollah is a militia and political party that operates in Lebanon.

17:07 Hezbollah means Party of God,

17:09 and it was established in 1982 with serious Iranian support for two reasons.

17:17 The first was to protect Lebanon's Shiites.

17:20 They are about 30% of the population and they weren't always treated so well.

17:25 But, the second purpose was to push

17:27 Israel out after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

17:32 Hezbollah has developed into probably one of the most

17:36 capable military forces in the Middle East.

17:39 They have waged war against Israel.

17:42 They were a major part of Iran's attempt to shore up

17:47 the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria after popular uprising in 2011.

17:54 There are reports that they trained Hamas and helped Hamas prepare

17:59 for the October 7th attacks against Israel that killed more than 700 civilians.

18:06 One of the things that Hezbollah did

18:08 after October 7th is they would launch rockets

18:11 into northern Israel resulting in a serious evacuation

18:14 of Israelis from that part of the territory.

18:18 And with the war with Iran,

18:20 Hezbollah started launching rockets again at Israeli targets.

18:24 They really are the key organization that people talk

18:28 about when they talk about Iran's proxies around the world.

18:32 Now, today Hezbollah has suffered some serious blows.

18:37 September of 2024, the Israelis basically decapitated the organization.

18:43 First, they planted a bunch of exploding pagers

18:46 that killed and maimed several hundred Hezbollah leaders.

18:50 And then that same month,

18:51 they actually killed the secretary general of Hezbollah,

18:54 a cleric named Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike.

18:57 And so, Hezbollah today is a much diminished organization.

19:02 The Israelis are now saying that they need

19:05 to finish the job and eliminate Hezbollah entirely.

19:09 And so, they have actually invaded Lebanon and moved all the way

19:13 up to the Litani River with the express aim of completely ending Hezbollah.

19:18 Here's a question from Quora.

19:19 Why does Iran hate the USA and Israel?

19:22 One of the big reasons that Iran hates the United States is

19:25 that they still hold a grudge against the US for supporting the Shah

19:30 and for helping orchestrate a coup against more or less democratic prime

19:35 minister in 1953 whose only sin was trying to nationalize Iran's oil assets.

19:41 Another reason they hate us though is because we support Israel and they

19:45 hate Israel because they see it

19:47 as having stolen Muslim land and oppressing Palestinians.

19:51 In fact, this is something that really matters to the Iranian regime.

19:55 They named the special forces of the IRGC

19:58 the Quds Force which means the Jerusalem Force.

20:01 On the last day of Ramadan they hold

20:03 a rally called Quds Day which means Jerusalem Day.

20:06 You might be asking why would the Iranians care so much about Israel?

20:11 It's so far away.

20:12 And there's really two explanations.

20:14 One explanation is that Iran is based on a pan-Islamic ideology and so

20:20 naturally they're going to have deep sympathy with Muslims around the world.

20:26 And Muslims do care about the fact that Jerusalem is no

20:30 longer under Muslim control and that Palestinians are oppressed by the Israelis.

20:36 Another argument is that it's totally cynical.

20:39 That what the Iranians want to do is they

20:40 want to appeal to the Arab street in their campaign

20:44 for gaining influence around the region and they know that playing

20:48 the anti-Israeli card is a sure way of doing that.

20:52 So, those are all the questions we have for today.

20:55 Thank you for watching Tech Support Iran.

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