They could not agree whether Iran was building a bomb. They still wanted the same next move.

Lex Fridman records this debate on Tuesday, June 24, 2025, after a barely stable ceasefire between Iran and Israel. Scott Horton is editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of *The Scott Horton Show*, and for three decades a critic of U.S. military intervention. Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of the *Iran Breakdown* podcast, and has worked on Iran’s nuclear file for more than twenty years. Fridman asks for nuance, steel-manning, and a discussion that might even find agreement.

The first half hour does not cooperate. Dubowitz walks through Trump’s second-term maximum-pressure campaign, five rounds of talks in Oman, Israel’s twelve-day strike on nuclear sites and IRGC commanders, and the U.S. B-2 raid on Fordo with twelve 30,000-pound massive-ordnance penetrators. Horton cuts in that the Oman talks were “just a pretext for war,” that Khamenei will not surrender enrichment, and that Netanyahu has been selling a latent deterrent as an imminent bomb. When Dubowitz finishes a long technical history of buried sites and an AMAD warhead program, Horton does not pick a clause. “I have to refute virtually everything he just said, which is completely false.”

Dubowitz tries a joke: really everything, not one true thing, Iran is a nation over there somewhere? Horton grants him that. Asked for a population figure, Dubowitz says 92 million, and Fridman laughs them into a fist bump. It is the last cheap agreement for a long time. The rest of the night is two complete, mutually exclusive histories of the same country, the same centrifuges, and the same war.

Dubowitz’s opening is a sequence. Trump offers diplomacy, Steve Witkoff runs five Oman rounds, the United States puts a one-page offer on the table, Khamenei rejects it, and on the Thursday before a sixth Sunday round Israel strikes. Fordo, buried about eighty meters under rock and concrete, is the site Israel cannot finish. Trump then sends B-2s, forces a ceasefire on both sides, and invites Iran back to Oman. In this telling the president led, Netanyahu did not puppeteer him, and the military piece was limited on purpose.

Horton’s sequence is the opposite slope. Zero enrichment was always a red line Tehran would not cross, so the talks were a setup. Hitting Fordo does not erase the know-how; Iranians have been enriching uranium hexafluoride for roughly twenty years and are already talking about a deeper mountain site. “In for a penny, in for a pound, in for a ton,” he says: next comes Natanz again, then the new hall, then killing the Ayatollah, then a civil war with “Bin Ladenites in the catbird seat,” the pattern he assigns to Iraq, Libya, and Syria. He thinks the strikes make a real bomb *more* likely, because a latent bluff stops working once you have been bombed anyway.

Fridman tries to freeze the credentials before the pile of claims buries the show. On the cover of Horton’s book *Enough Already*, he reads “Devastating” from Daniel Ellsberg, “Outstanding” from Daniel L. Davis, “Essential” from Ron Paul. Dubowitz, he notes later, has been sanctioned by both Russia and Iran. Two large expert communities stand behind the two men. Almost none of the facts in between them match.

Dubowitz slows the show down for physics, because without it the rest is slogans. Enriching to 3.67 percent, the figure for civilian power fuel, already does about 70 percent of the separative work toward weapons grade. Twenty percent, useful for medical isotopes at the Tehran research reactor, is about 90 percent of the remaining work. Sixty percent, he says, is 99 percent of the way to 90 percent weapons-grade uranium, and a crude device has been built from 60 percent in the past. He puts Iran’s stockpile at roughly fifteen to seventeen bombs’ worth at 60 percent.

Horton calls the 99 percent figure “just meaningless.” The percentage, in his account, smuggles in mining, milling yellowcake, converting to uranium hexafluoride, trucking the gas, and only then spinning centrifuges. Under the 2015 JCPOA, Iran shipped its enriched stock out to be turned into fuel rods and shipped back; he says the 60 percent stockpile was a bargaining chip after Trump left the deal, after the 2020 killing of scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and after the April 2021 sabotage at Natanz. If 60 percent equals 99 percent, delay is intolerable. If 60 percent is one node on a long chain, there is still time to talk.

They do agree, more or less, on the three legs of a deliverable weapon: material, missiles, warhead. Dubowitz cites a Middle East-leading missile inventory, some 2,000 ballistic missiles able to reach Israel before the war, plus an ICBM effort aimed past the Gulf. He cites estimates of four to six months for a crude device and about a year and a half for a warhead on a missile. Horton adds a distinction he says he had oversimplified on other shows: the easy uranium bomb is a Hiroshima-style gun-type, useless on a missile; an implosion warhead takes years of testing. The week before the strikes, he says, CIA language still had Iran a year from enough material and three years from a finished warhead.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is the one file they can argue from a shared document. Obama’s team, with the other UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany, let Iran keep enrichment under tight limits: low-enriched stock shipped out, Natanz and Fordo restricted rather than razed, advanced-centrifuge research capped, heavy sanctions relief in return. Dubowitz wants listeners to hear the sunsets. Serious limits begin falling away around 2025 and are effectively gone by 2031, at which point Iran could run an industrial enrichment program, install advanced machines, and, on his reading, even go to 90 percent because the text does not forever forbid it.

That is why he opposed the deal’s design and still opposed ripping it up. The left, he says, hammered him for naming two fatal flaws: recognizing enrichment at all, and sunsets that would mint a threshold state. The right hammered him for wanting to stay, line up Europe, and trade more sanctions relief for longer sunsets. “I got hammered by the left and I got hammered by the right.” Horton asks for a screenshot and a fist bump. For a minute they are on the same side of 2018: do not walk out; try to improve it.

Horton’s addendum is Russiagate. He says the FBI and CIA “framing Trump for treason” wrecked first-term diplomacy with Moscow, which might have helped lean on Tehran over sunsets. Dubowitz agrees the Russian-agent charge was a “travesty” that paralyzed the presidency for two and a half years. Then he turns the blade around: he had just heard Horton, on another podcast, call Trump an agent of Netanyahu. Accusing an American president of working for the FSB or for Mossad, he says, should be retired. Horton calls his own line hyperbole and points at hundreds of millions from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. Fridman tries to haul them back to decisions rather than donors.

Dubowitz will not let 1983 be the whole ledger. He lists hostage-taking, Khobar Towers, and years of attacks, and he says explosively formed penetrators that killed Americans in Iraq were supplied and trained by Qasem Soleimani’s Quds Force. U.S. after-action reporting, he insists, is clear that Iran provided technology, training, and money to the militias. Hezbollah, financed by Iran, sits in the middle of that story. For him the Islamic Republic has been at war with the United States since 1979, and “Death to America” is not only a chant.

Horton’s Iraq chapter is a systematic-error story. He cites *New York Times* reporter Alissa Rubin and others who found EFP factories in Shiite Iraq, staffed by Iraqi Arabs, with parts stamped made in the UAE or in Haditha. David Petraeus, he says, canceled a press conference when reporters noticed the labels; Stephen Hadley admitted the evidence was not presentable. The copper-core technique, in Horton’s telling, came to Lebanese Hezbollah from the IRA, not from a Persian design shop. The 2007 campaign, he argues, was Dick Cheney and Petraeus hunting a pretext to hit IRGC bases, stopped by CENTCOM’s Admiral Fallon and then by a National Intelligence Estimate that said there was no active nuclear-weapons program.

Khobar Towers, 1996, nineteen U.S. airmen dead, splits the same way. Dubowitz says U.S. findings pointed at Hezbollah working with al-Qaeda. Horton says Osama bin Laden bragged about the operation to journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, that Michael Scheuer of the CIA’s bin Laden unit agreed, and that FBI counterterror chief John O’Neill told Louis Freeh the Saudis were “blowing smoke” with a Hezbollah story. Dubowitz’s meta-point is the pattern he hears: Washington lies, Jerusalem lies, Riyadh lies, and Horton’s villains somehow do not. Horton says he cited bin Laden’s own boast and a CIA officer, not Hezbollah’s press office. Fridman has to police interruptions more than substance.

Dubowitz’s hardest question is about a warehouse. In 2018, he says, Mossad removed a vast nuclear archive from Tehran—thousands of pages, blueprints, test data—and shared it with the IAEA and the U.S. government. Physicist David Albright got full access and wrote a detailed book concluding that Iran ran an active program called AMAD to build five atomic weapons. Dubowitz has seen many of the documents. He asks Horton, slowly, whether he is claiming Mossad fabricated the entire archive.

Horton says yes, in substance. He argues that nothing important in 2018 was new compared with the “smoking laptop” of the mid-2000s, a file he says was funneled by the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a group he calls a cult with a record of hoaxes, including a satellite-site scare weeks before this taping that went nowhere. Gareth Porter’s *Manufactured Crisis*, he says, shows the 2007 NIE’s pre-2003 weapons finding rested on Defense Intelligence Agency misreads of dual-use invoices—specialty magnets later tied to civilian use—and on that laptop. He has not read Albright’s book. He will not take Netanyahu’s word for what was in the warehouse.

They get stuck on the word “active.” For Dubowitz, AMAD plus a covert Natanz plus A.Q. Khan centrifuges is a weapons enterprise, paused in 2003 when the U.S. took Baghdad in a hundred days, then dispersed under Mohsen Fakhrizadeh into universities and research centers so the option survived without a formal program. For Horton, even granting paper plans, Natanz was empty of spinning centrifuges until 2006, so “active program” inflates a file. Seymour Hersh, he notes, reported that the 2003 halt followed Saddam’s fall. Dubowitz says Hersh is not a nuclear-weapons expert and Albright saw the pages. Fridman summarizes: one guest thinks Iran was building a weapon before 2003; the other thinks it was not.

Fridman finally drags them to this week. Dubowitz’s best case is Iran returning to Oman for a one-page deal: remaining facilities shut, centrifuges and enriched material given up, IAEA in the building, the United States helping with civilian plants the way it does with twenty-three other countries that generate nuclear electricity without enrichment or reprocessing. He no longer wants the pre-war Oman terms that allowed temporary above-ground enrichment. Worst case is intransigence, a rebuilt option after Trump leaves, more strikes, or a breakout. Asked about U.S. troops on the ground, he will not rule out a nightmare in which the regime collapses and someone has to sit on loose nuclear material. He does not advocate decapitation. That, he says, is a lesson of Iraq.

Horton’s best case is “quit right now” and climb back toward something like the JCPOA, which he calls pretty good and improvable on sunsets. Zero enrichment, in his mouth, is a poison pill designed to fail, because the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s civilian rights are read in Tehran as including the fuel cycle. Battle-damage assessment is still mush: some Israeli and American officials told the *New York Times* the damage looked incomplete; Dubowitz notes a later IAEA lean toward destroyed centrifuges. Horton’s fear is the logic of unfinished bombing: mines, smelters, the next hall, then Netanyahu’s line that killing the Ayatollah solves it, then the Shah’s son as restoration theater.

The deal they both say they want still splits on one verb: enrich. Dubowitz’s gold standard is the UAE model—buy fuel rods, send spent fuel out, no enrichment, no reprocessing. Five countries, he lists, have those capabilities without bombs: Argentina, Brazil, Holland, Germany, Japan. Horton asks whether, as national security adviser under a still-functioning JCPOA, Dubowitz would have accepted any enrichment if stock still left the country. “Enrichment capability is a red line. It has to be a red line.” Horton says the NPT protects peaceful technology; Dubowitz says even the Obama team would not recognize a *right* to enrich, only a fact. If enrichment is non-negotiable in Tehran and non-negotiable in Dubowitz’s Washington, the “best case” they share is two different pieces of paper.

The worst ten minutes are not about centrifuges. Horton, answering a ground-war hypothetical, says American lives mean nothing to “Israel Firsters,” that Israel “motivated September 11th,” and that some lobby voices celebrated an al-Qaeda-linked takeover in Damascus because it hurt the Shiite crescent. Then he says he is “from the United States of America, unlike him,” and that Dubowitz is “here to serve a foreign power and make their case at our expense.” Fridman explodes. The implication, he says, is that someone is un-American because of where they are from. “I’ve been attacked just like the Russian hoax for being a Putin show. I’m an American.”

Dubowitz answers as an immigrant. He came to the country twenty-two years ago, became a citizen ten years ago, and treats the charge as an insult to him and to Fridman. He then does the policy reply Fridman wanted: a 500,000-troop invasion would be a disaster; the Reagan model is maximum pressure on the regime and maximum support for the people, plus arms control; decapitation is the scenario that could create the chaos Horton fears. Later, when Dubowitz says “we” about U.S. strikes on Fordo, Horton hears a royal we for Israel. Fridman shuts that down again: criticize FDD’s record if you want, “don’t do the un-American bullshit, not here.”

Under the wreckage they still share a civil-liberties exhibit. Both think the Russia-agent campaign against Trump was a smear that froze diplomacy. Dubowitz adds that a strong U.S.–Israel relationship is not a conspiracy of dual loyalty but millions of Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims pushing on an open door because counterterrorism and counterproliferation interests overlap. Horton will not drop the money-and-lobby account, or his reading of 1996 Qana and the 9/11 hijackers’ motives in Lawrence Wright and Terry McDermott. Fridman’s rule for the rest of the night is case by case, ideas not blood, America first as a shared premise rather than a weapon.

Fridman asks whether Operation Midnight Hammer raised or lowered the chance of an Iranian bomb. Horton’s honest answer is that nobody knows. Early battle-damage stories go both ways: a new hall somewhere, centrifuges that survived, or a program rolled back years. What he wants noticed is Khamenei’s pattern when cornered. After Soleimani’s killing, Iran hit an empty corner of a U.S. base. After the U.S. struck nuclear sites, Iran fired on Al Udeid in Qatar and bases in Iraq, with zero casualties reported so far. Trump thanked them, Horton notes, for the warning that let U.S. defenses prepare, then said it was time for peace. That is not the apocalyptic mullah of AM-radio lore. It is a cautious autocrat who knows B-52s can wreck a civilization he cannot wreck in return.

Dubowitz agrees on the caution and still scores the raid as real damage. He lists Natanz, Isfahan’s conversion lines—including the plant that turns highly enriched uranium into metal, which you need for a device—and Fordo. Reports of trucks at Fordo before the strike, he says, should be treated as unverified; some stories claim most material stayed because Tehran bet Trump would not go. Israel, in his account, also killed about fifteen top weapons scientists, some from the old AMAD generation, a blow he analogizes to erasing Oppenheimer’s core team months before Trinity. His public line during the twelve days was “curb your enthusiasm.” Capabilities remain. A wounded regime is dangerous. Unconditional surrender, for him, means no enrichment and full dismantlement, not occupation.

The poisoned-chalice story is the frame Dubowitz wants for Khamenei’s choice. In 1988, after the U.S. shot down an Iranian airliner and Tehran feared American entry on Saddam’s side, Khomeini accepted a bitter ceasefire. Khamenei, now eighty-six, has to decide whether Trump’s zero-enrichment page is that chalice. Closing Hormuz would be economically suicidal, Dubowitz says, including for Iran’s own oil; terror attacks and assassination plots, including against Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad, are the more likely pressure valves. Horton’s counter is incentive, not capability: if you bomb a threshold state, every hawk will deny responsibility when it sprints. Previously Dubowitz described Japan, Germany, and Brazil as masters of the fuel cycle who do not bomb; Horton says that *was* Iran’s pose—don’t make me—until the pose was hit.

Dubowitz offers the thought experiment he thinks is sitting in Khamenei’s bunker. Libya dismantled what Washington called a nuclear program; seven years later NATO took Gaddafi down. Ukraine inherited Soviet weapons, gave them up under political promises of territorial respect, and was invaded twice. If regime survival beats the nuclear file, the rational move is a bomb, ICBMs, and the Kim Jong Un model: nuclear cover for conventional coercion. Horton will not let the facts of the parables slide. Libya, he says, had A.Q. Khan crates in a warehouse, not engineers. The Budapest memorandum was a promise to *respect* borders, not a U.S. defense treaty, and the codes sat in Moscow. He still does not knock down the inference. Iraq and Libya without weapons, North Korea with them, is why a latent deterrent existed in the first place. Bombing, for him, stamps the lesson harder.

Zoom out to the map and they reverse the dominoes. Dubowitz thinks a successful stop on Iran *reduces* future weapons states. Saudis, Turks, Algerians have said that an Iranian bomb, or even an “Iran standard” of enrichment, means they want the same; South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan might doubt the U.S. umbrella if Washington is seen to fail. If Trump gets zero enrichment and the program stays dead, the message is you do not need it and you will not be allowed it. Horton thinks the raid teaches North Korea, Iraq, and Libya in reverse: get a bomb before America arrives. He also worries for the NPT itself—an Israeli non-signatory, aided by a nuclear-weapon state, striking an NPT member he says was not building a weapon. Dubowitz answers that the IAEA has spent twenty years documenting Iranian violations, and that “Iran is not attacking Israel” erases decades of proxy war and the direct missile salvos of 2024.

Practical lists, for Dubowitz, are Oman; a live military threat; the same gold standard for friends and foes in the region; an Israeli–Palestinian predicate that lets Saudi Arabia normalize; and a fanciful “Cyrus Accords” among the United States, Israel, and Iran. He agrees with Horton that betting Syria on a former al-Qaeda figure is a huge wager Trump made on MBS’s advice. Horton’s list is older and colder: China already midwifed a Saudi–Iran thaw; in 1993 Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexander Haig wanted an oil pipeline across a normalized Iran; Clinton instead bought Martin Indyk’s dual-containment, which Horton traces to Israeli fear that a crushed Iraq could no longer balance Persia. Same region, two theories of how you get a cold peace.

Fridman asks Horton to name the libertarian pillars. Non-aggression, he says: no force, theft, or fraud, applied to the state. Murray Rothbard’s line, in his telling, is that war is the key to the whole business, because a world empire makes limited government at home impossible. Isolationism is a smear invented by people who wanted the wars; Jefferson’s first inaugural, peace and commerce with all, entangling alliances with none, is the actual tradition. Ron Paul’s defense sketch is “a couple of good submarines.” One Trident, Horton says, could in theory kill every Russian city and military base. Reagan and Gorbachev came “within a hair” of full nuclear disarmament at Reykjavík in 1986; staff and Star Wars, he thinks, blocked the luckiest near-miss in the nuclear age.

Dubowitz likes some of the instinct and rejects the strategy. America, for him, is the indispensable power that backstopped the post-1945 order, Europe’s recovery, and Asia’s. Enemies do not obey the non-aggression principle. Deterrence is peace; one submarine and a conference circuit are a fantasy. FDD, he notes, is not the Foundation for *Promotion* of Democracies: he does not think it is America’s job to midwife democracy in the Middle East, a project he says has failed. Use force the way Trump just did—selective, narrow, overwhelming, one day, three sites—and resist a military-industrial complex that will always want more. Horton’s rebuttal is the last twenty-five years: Iraq bombed for decades, Afghanistan lost to the Taliban, Libya shattered into slave markets, Syria wrecked until an Iraq War III against the caliphate. He is “not seeing the peace through strength.” He is seeing permanent war through strength.

Even here they overlap more than the shouting suggests. Dubowitz calls the military-industrial complex a serious problem: more inventory, more temptation, more money. He credits Horton’s ledger of mistakes, then says Trump has learned Iraq without being paralyzed by it—Soleimani and Baghdadi dead, a downed drone left unanswered, a short Houthi campaign, then a one-day nuclear raid. Fridman asks the seventy-five-year question: if civilization dies, it will probably be world war or nuclear war; how do you not. Horton returns to non-aggression and a tiny deterrent. Dubowitz returns to “learn but not overlearn,” deter when you can, strike when you must. Then, almost as an apology for five hours of facilities, Dubowitz notes they have barely talked about eighty million Iranians. He says 80 percent despise the regime, and that Iranians succeed everywhere except inside the Islamic Republic. Horton does not fight the sentence. He only adds: then do not bomb their country to rubble.