Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Laura Holgate
Laura Holgate is a former U.S. Ambassador to the Vienna Office of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and explains how the IAEA works and why its supervision of nuclear technologies is essential.
Episode Summary
In this week’s episode of One Decision, Laura Holgate, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Vienna Office of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), joins host Christina Ruffini to break down the uncertain state of Iran’s nuclear program following recent U.S. strikes on Tehran's nuclear sites. Ambassador Holgate explains how the IAEA works, why its supervision of nuclear technologies is essential, and how Iran’s current posture puts the world at a dangerous crossroads. Plus, co-host and resident spymaster Sir Richard Dearlove shares insights on the possibility of North Korea sharing testing data with Iran and whether the regime might choose to restart its nuclear program.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
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Transcript
COLD OPEN
Holgate: Because we had no other real way to talk to the Iranians, they were using those enrichment levels as a communication tool. It was just a way to say, see, we're close. We're close. Pay attention to us. We're close. And now we've got more stuff that's close.
INTRODUCTION
Raffini: Welcome back to One Decision. I'm your host, Christina Ruffini, and I'm going to be joined a little bit later by our co-host, Sir Richard Dearlove. But first, we want to play you our interview with Ambassador Laura Holgate. She was the US Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. She was also Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction, Terrorism and Threat Reduction at the National Security Council from 2009 to 2016. We wanted to talk to her because she is such a nuclear expert and we thought she could break down some of the questions that a lot of us have been having but either haven't had time to chase down or haven't had an answer to other places. It's a really fascinating conversation and then at the end Sir Richard is going to jump in and talk about all the things that we talked about because he also took a lot of things away from it that he hadn't heard before. Without any more wait, here is Ambassador Laura Holgate.
INTERVIEW WITH AMBASSADOR LAURA HOLGATE
Raffini: Ambassador Holgate, thank you so much for making time. All of a sudden, everyone's a nuclear expert. Just like a little while ago, everyone was a munitions expert, and then everyone was a Ukraine expert. But you actually are a nuclear expert. So we wanted to talk to you a little bit today about, you know, the IAEA in general and international law, but especially, I wanted to get your take on Iran, of course. And just to start, we've heard a lot of mixed messaging about the status of Iran's nuclear program following these assaults, both from Israel and, of course, the big attack, from those US bombers. Whether the program is decimated as the president says, whether it's doing just fine as Iranian leaders have said. I'm assuming the truth is somewhere in the middle, but based on the open source information that you have, what is your take and what is the best bet of the status of that program right now?
Holgate: Well, I think the best bet of it is that we don't know. And that's the important thing to understand. And I would be surprised if even now if the Iranians themselves had a clear and complete understanding of the damage that was done at the facilities that were bombed, both the three that were bombed by the US and then a number of other smaller, perhaps not as central ones that were hit by Israel before the US did those three attacks. So I suspect the Iranians are still in assess mode trying to figure out what do they still have at the same time having a political conversation about where are we going. And I bet those two things are happening in parallel.
Raffini: Why would they not know? Is it because, you know, the entrances may have been bombed closed, but once they dig out, there may still be things that are functional, salvageable, especially at Fordow. Can you talk to us a little bit about why they may not know what they've got?
Holgate: It just takes time to dig in. And those tunnels were deep. The facilities were deep underground. It's not going to be just go in and look around and, oh, well, that's broken. That's fine. There's our spares. Let's grab it and go. We got an extra centrifuge in the back. Let's drag that one out. They probably do. And they may have them in other places that are either secret or did not sustain as heavy of damage. And so I think this is one of the key questions that the international community needs to understand and certainly the US and Iranian negotiators. And if you don't have a baseline, you can't do a negotiation. It's just not meaningful to be able to say, you know, we're going to cap capabilities at, you know, X or Y level of maturity or production or whatever if you don't understand where the current baseline is. And even before the bombings, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi was saying that there were areas where Iran had inadequately cooperated with the IAEA that were challenging his ability to give a good baseline against the types of things that the JCPOA, the Iran deal from 2015, was constraining. And so anything that wanted to go back to doing some of those constraints that went beyond Iran's current safeguards commitments, that that continuity of knowledge was at risk of being completely lost. And so now it's lost not only for things that had been controlled under the Iran deal, but it's lost for large chunks of the existing program and existing safeguards commitments. So it's going to be a while to figure out where things stand.
Raffini: We're also getting some mixed messaging because, you know, you have Iran saying it's going to pull out of the NPT, which is the cooperation with the IAEA that allows inspectors. You know, inspectors have left the country. You also have them saying we're willing to get back to the table to get back to a nuclear agreement. But I was talking to a mutual friend we have in Vienna, and I was asking them why it matters that Iran is even in the NPT, that they even have inspectors if Grossi is saying, well, they're not living up to their obligations. And US Intel has been saying they're cheating. And if they're not playing by the rules, does it even matter that you have this kind of facade of cooperation? And I've heard overwhelmingly, everybody I've asked that question to has said, yes, it does matter. But can you explain why that's important if they're not following the rules?
Holgate: Well, the issue is that cooperation is not a binary. There's a range of cooperative activities. And what Iran has been doing up until this latest military campaign, it has been allowing inspectors to see the facilities, to see the centrifuges, to measure the equipment and the highly enriched uranium that is being produced. And those reports have been going out quarterly from the IAEA. That is how we know that there are 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium enriched up to 60%. If we didn't have that, we wouldn't know that. And that's the only way that we know in a collective legitimate way.
Raffini: That's because the IAEA inspectors are on the ground and nobody else is. I understand that. And I get that it gives you visibility into the facilities that you know about. But as you just said, when I was joking around, they can go get a centrifuge in the back. You said, well, they may have one. Does the inspections that you have, does it give you any hints or inclinations or insight is a better word into like, can you walk in and get the vibe that you know that there's something else somewhere else? Like, do you get knowledge by seeing what you don't see or what you can see in these facilities? Does that imply that they could have facilities other places and give you information even if it's not in front of your face?
Holgate: No, it's a really good question. And that is exactly what the IAEA inspectors are trained to do. That's why they don't just take the Iranian's word for it and measure there at that spot and come up with that answer. And then that's the answer. They take swipes and samples all over these facilities to see is there material that is somewhere in these facilities that it's not supposed to be. And that then tells you something about what might be happening. They have cameras that record activity from certain points 24/7. What they don't have is immediate access to those recordings. They have to go in, swap out the discs on the camera, and then they can inspect those recordings later. Although there are some places they do have livestream because that's more convenient. But the Iranians have not agreed to livestream cameras. But there's a whole range of techniques that the IAEA inspectors can use when they go to these facilities. And that is exactly why we've been talking about there's these three or four outstanding safeguards questions that date back to the 90s or the early 2000s where swipes were found that showed that there was material in places that it wasn't supposed to be. Those are historical things and are actually where Iran has been the least cooperative. When we talk about Iran being out of compliance, a lot of that has to do with those activities and Iran never really characterizing what they did that would be legitimate. And so that only leads to guesses that what they were doing was not legitimate. But in terms of their ongoing activities, they've been complying with the majority of their comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA. The one thing they are not consistently complying with is a very nerdy thing called modified code 3.1. And what that means is if you're going to do nuclear stuff in a place the IAEA doesn't know about, then you are obliged by your comprehensive safeguards agreement to tell the IAEA ahead of time and to give them plans for that facility so that they can then design a safeguards approach based on what's going to happen, what equipment is going to be there, what kind of material is going to be used and operated on there, what is the shape of it so they can figure out where do they want to put their cameras, where they want to do swipes, where do they want to put sensors and detectors and so on. The Iranians have not consistently complied with this. It's just what makes people nervous that there might be other facilities because there have been indications that they have. And in fact, after the last Board of Governors meeting in June where the Board of Governors essentially found Iran to be not in compliance.
Raffini: Which was the first time in like twenty years this had happened, right? This was a big deal.
Holgate: That's right. It is a very big deal. And it's something because everybody knew how sensitive the Iranians would be to that, it was something they wanted to like wait and try to use other tools to get the Iranians other types of pressure to get the Iranians to be more cooperative. And they just they ran out of runway and they just said, we have no choice. And the Iranian's response was, okay, we're going to start doing some enrichment in a facility that we've built but haven't declared to the IAEA. So that's that underground facility at Natanz. And so the IAEA had not been given the plans or the specifications for that. And that is definitely not consistent with what the Iranians have committed to do under their CSA.
Raffini: So previously, had the IAEA only been inspecting the above ground facility at Natanz?
Holgate: They were inspecting all the declared facilities at Natanz. I don't remember exactly how many were where, but there was a new one that is underground that had kind of been common knowledge, but it hadn't been formally declared. How much damage was done to that one is another question mark that we don't yet know.
Raffini: So what is your take on kind of the breakout time? Because you had this argument from Israel, which frankly is an argument Netanyahu has been making since I've been covering foreign affairs, which is about ten, fifteen years now out of Israel, the Iranians are six months, a year, weeks, days away from being able to enrich that 90% mark and have a nuclear weapon. That is the justification according to the Israelis for why they struck. It is a little less clear. We've heard it a bit from this administration, but less assertively that that was also a reason that they struck these facilities, this direct action from the US because they were at a crunch time with the development of this nuclear weapon. Up until that point, I hadn't really heard that their breakout time had changed that much from when it had contracted maybe a year or two ago. What is your take on how close they were to not just the breakout time, but just because you have enriched uranium doesn't mean you have a functioning bomb. There's other parts involved. Can you talk us through that?
Holgate: Yeah, that's a hugely important point. And that's where people get confused when they start talking about how long to a bomb. From the material point of view, because of those 400 kilograms of 60% enriched, if you put that back into a functioning centrifuge cascade and you enriched it up to 90%, the judgment was between a week and ten days that they could get that up to 90% and that would give you enough material to make a weapon. That will make several weapons. I saw the number 10. But more than one, which is important. But then what you have is in a gaseous form. You need facilities like what they had at Isfahan for how do you turn gas into metal. So we don't know how damaged those facilities at Isfahan were in the attacks. They might have backup facilities that they had never used or never declared. So going from a gas to a metal is an essential phase. And then the metal has to be machined and turned into the shape of what they want to use for a weapon. Because Iran has never tested nuclear weapons, there's an issue about how expert are they at machining uranium.
Raffini: That's a really good point. I'd never thought about the fact that they're not North Korea. We haven't seen them test these weapons.
Holgate: No. And people have made guesses about what kind of designs they might be using. You know, there's some very simple designs that are sadly not behind a classified veil. So I'm not going to give anybody any more breadcrumbs for that, but they exist. And then the question is, how complex is this bomb that they would want to be making or these bombs? Because it's one thing to put it all together with all of the complex electronics and explosives and so on that compress the uranium metal.
Raffini: Right. A dirty bomb is fairly simple to make, but the delivery apparatus is you got to walk into somewhere. Right? Or am I wrong on that?
Holgate: Well, I'm sorry. I'm going to have to correct you on dirty bomb. Dirty bombs are not part of that's not on the spectrum. People toss that word around as if it is a shortcut or a quick and easy thing. Dirty bomb is something that you make with material that is very radioactive, like plutonium or cobalt or cesium, things that we use in our everyday lives. And you can mix it with explosives and then you distribute it and then you've created a mess and a bunch of scared people. Uranium is not very radioactive. So even if you did do that, it would be a waste because you can just wear just a bunny suit, a Tyvek bunny suit and you're protected. So it doesn't make any sense to use uranium for a dirty bomb. But there are simple bombs and there's complex bombs. And so one of the key questions is do they want to use an aircraft to deliver the bomb or do they want it to be able to be put on the tip of a missile and to be able to reliably know where that missile is going to go? Now, we know Iran has had a fairly sophisticated missile program for a while. We don't know how much experiments they may have done with dummies, dummy warheads to see how does that missile fly when you have something that simulates a nuclear warhead in it. That's a more sophisticated design. It has to be smaller and more compact. You have to be more confident in your design. And so that's why when we talk about a timeline from 90% enriched material to deliverable weapon, that's a very variable timeline. And it depends a lot on the kinds of choices that Iran would make about what kind of weapon they want and how they want to deliver it. It's fine for people to be confused because people are talking about it in a very confusing way. The thing that is not confusing is that once you have 60% it takes a very short period of time to enrich it up to 90%.
Raffini: That week to ten days has been kind of consistent, as you say, for a while. Once you have it at 60, is that kind of the difficult hump to get over and then the rest of it is a little faster?
Holgate: Exactly. It's not a linear effort or a linear amount of time. The hard work of enrichment is done between zero and twenty percent. And after that, it's very little additional spinning before you get to 60% or 90%. And the Iranians, back to your point about why does verification matter? Because we had no other real way to talk to the Iranians. They were using those enrichment levels as a communication tool. They don't need 60% for anything legitimate. Nobody stops at 60%. It was just a way to say, see, we're close. We're close. Pay attention to us. We're close. And now we've got more stuff that's close. And then when they get their hand slapped or something, they'll go back. They'll take some of that 60% and blend it down a little bit so that it's back at 20%. That enrichment level has been for the last, in my view, three years or so primarily about communicating their level of commitment and a tool with which they can react to Western efforts.
Raffini: You do know so much about the program and how it is viewed inside Iran. You know, at this point, it's more than just a stick in the eye to the United States, although it is also that. It is kind of this point of national pride. And for a while, Iran thought that having that 60% uranium would protect them from exactly what just happened. Right? The US is not gonna strike us if we have this enriched, you know, bomb making material. That did not hold true. So the two schools of thought from people I've been speaking with are Iran may decide that if the US is gonna strike these facilities over and over again directly, given all the time and money it takes to rebuild them, that it is simply not worth it. They are, their finances are in shambles. Their economy is suffering under sanctions. They may just decide it is not worth trying to rebuild this program if the US is just gonna bomb it into oblivion every time. That's school one. School two is they might decide the complete opposite, which is that, look, if this didn't protect us from an assault from the US, the only thing that will keep America out of our territory is a functioning nuclear bomb, and it could end up pushing them to pursue this more ardently, more secretly, more dangerously than they had in the past. Do either of those hold true to you, or do you think the reality is somewhere in the middle?
Holgate: Well, I think those are the two clear options that sit before the Iranians. And I think we hear voices, you know, to the degree we hear voices coming out of Iran, which is rare. But we hear advocates on both of those sides speaking out. And so I think that's part of this internal debate that's likely to be happening inside Iran. It's anyone's guess where that comes out. The problem is they have to be very worried about the capabilities of Israeli intelligence. If you remember, you know, some of those early bombing targets and how some of the ways that those were carried out with in-place drones that had been there for years. They're obviously undertaking a major scrub of their people who are part of sensitive things and, you know, on a hunt for spies. That usually kind of paralyzes programs like this. And it has to really give them pause as to whether they could have a covert program. And so if we go back to that point that we were talking about earlier about breakout time, they might be able to accumulate 90% in a covert facility before anybody knows about it. But if it's going to take months to take that material and turn it into a weapon, they have to have confidence in the covert character of that activity for months. That is going to be a challenge for them right now. And because that could actually attract the kind of follow-on attacks that they are suffering from right now. And so they are in a really tough position. They have played this ambiguity out as far as they could. And now they've been on the fence. They've enjoyed that fence. They've made gestures on either side of the fence. They know that fence is now broken. Which side are they gonna fall off or jump off? Is it going to be a negotiated path to preserving, you know, legitimately peaceful components of their nuclear program, plus sanctions relief, plus foreign investment, plus all the things that the leaders know they need for their people? Or are they going to take the North Korea path of isolation, more sanctions, autarky, self-sufficiency? That's not necessarily an attractive path either. So this is going to be a real challenge for them. I think it's going to be a little while before we know. So far they have not stepped away from the NPT, from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. They still are under that treaty. And when the IAEA inspectors left, it was as a result of a decision to pause the cooperation with the IAEA.
Raffini: Oh, it's a pause? Because some of the rhetoric had made it seem to me like they were on their way to pull out because I know they have to give notice, right? So they haven't officially triggered that process yet? They have to give notice.
Holgate: So, yes, this latest decision by the Majlis was not to break out of the NPT. That's like when you know what they're going to. They're going for that weapon. And that's another thing that gives warning. But what they've said is we're going to pause until we have confidence that our facilities are secured. And what that means is not only that they have figured out and done whatever they want to do, maybe sanitizing these facilities to hide things, you know, that they didn't want to show or whatever. But that also means no further attacks or that they have confidence that there's no further attacks on those facilities and that Iran is going to be the judge of when they're adequately secure. And that's the point at which the IAEA will come back. Prima facie, that's not a terrible position. They don't know what's in those facilities. They're not going to let inspectors in. I mean, for now, in many cases, it's probably just unsafe to be walking around inside these facilities just because of rubble or whatever. So to a point, that's a legitimate position. But the longer that pause lasts, the less we collectively know, the less continuity of knowledge the IAEA has, the more difficult it will be to create a baseline against which a negotiated drawdown of that program can be based. And that's the real challenge that lies ahead.
Raffini: Do organizations like the IAEA, like the UN, like NATO, do they still matter or do they have to change in order to become relevant and effective in this new climate?
Holgate: Well, organizations have no power of their own. They only have the power that member states are willing to give them or that member states are willing to act on the basis of information that they have created these institutions to gather and present. The IAEA has no armed force. They have no ability to go and do anything. The one thing the IAEA and its member states can do is report things to the Security Council and then the Security Council is to act on them. Even that hasn't happened yet. So I think when we talk about institutions not being able to act or whatever, it is because member states have either made decisions to keep them weak or because the differences of opinion among member states is making it impossible to come to a collective decision about how to proceed. That is not the fault of the institutions. That is under the control of the member states who make them up. If member states do not want to cooperate, and I include Iran in this context, of course. If US, Russia, UK, France, China can't get on the same page about some of these big issues, then yeah, it's not surprising that the institutions built on the basis that they can get on the same page would not be operating at peak efficiency for sure. But we have had those moments. And the 2015 JCPOA, the original Iran deal, was one of those moments. And Russia was a huge contributor to pushing Iran to a place that you could find a shared agreement. And so that's not going to happen now. The Russian-Iranian position has changed. And so I think we're going to see Russia continuing to protect Iran through whatever IAEA and UN processes happen. And that's a failure of member states, not a failure of the institutions.
Raffini: Ambassador Holgate, thank you. This was absolutely fascinating. Thank you for being with us.
Holgate: I really enjoyed it too.
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Raffini: Hi, Sir Richard. How are you?
Dearlove: I'm very well, Christina. Nice to be talking to you again.
Raffini: I was sad that you weren't able to join us for our interview that we just listened to with Ambassador Holgate, but she was really excellent. I've been asking over and over again, why does it matter if they're in the NPT, which is the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? Why does it matter if they play games or play along with the IAEA? Do we need inspectors if they're lying anyway? And she's the first person who was able to explain why it does matter. And it is important to just have those eyes on the ground, even if they're not being completely honest with regulators. It lets regulators have visibility into places. You can't hide everything always. And there's things that they can see just from being on the ground there. A degree of visibility is important.
Dearlove: Once you have access, you can assume that there's material that you can collect, which may point in the direction of things that you're not being able to see. The fact is that if you take Iran, the teams of nuclear scientists are common to installations which you don't know about and the ones that you do know about. So the mere fact that you've got people moving between possibly two sets of installations, you can pick up evidence from the ones that you do visit if the same people are using both. And she talks about taking swipes and taking swabs. I won't go into the technical issues, but you can, as it were, detect molecules in the swabs, which indicate that there's something else that you haven't seen that exists somewhere else. It's highly technical. It's a game of cat and mouse. It's not much understood, except by the people who are, as it were, directly involved. And I can say a certain amount about it. I recognize all of this, and I retired in 2004 from dealing with the issue of inspections in Iran. And quite frankly, the game hasn't changed very much from the way that she described it.
Raffini: The other thing she pointed out, because the other discussion I've been having with a lot of people and everyone's been having is, first of all, how damaged is it? And she said the Iranians probably don't even know that yet, which I think is probably true. And then do they rebuild? Because there's these two schools of thought. Right? You could have Khamenei who's reaching the end of his time on Earth and in charge say, well, if an almost nuclear weapon didn't protect us, we need a nuke. We're gonna double down. We're gonna pursue a weapon. Give the middle finger to the international community and go for it. The detractors to that say they may do the calculation that if the US is just gonna keep bombing it into oblivion, it's not worth spending the money. And the other thing that she said that I thought was really interesting I hadn't heard before is rebuilding is easier to track than not. So if they start rebuilding it, that requires trucks, that requires roads, that requires heavy equipment, and those are things that the Israelis who are so deeply embedded in Tehran and all of these other places are gonna be able to track, find out, and blow up again with pretty good ease. I thought the intel part of that was really interesting because I hadn't thought of that before.
Dearlove: Yep. I think she's exactly right. The rebuild implies massive logistical support above ground. And given what we know or what we've seen, the evidence of Israeli intelligence coverage, I think it would be very difficult for them to continue the program in a different place without there being clear evidence that that was going on. I think it was a pretty stark choice for the Iranians. If they don't want to be attacked, they've got to abandon the program altogether. And she explained clearly that there's no need for them to go to 60% purity. It's got no purpose other than moving towards higher purity for a weapons program. It's not required for anything else. So you can see the sort of dilemma that's created when the IAEA realized that there was purification to 60%. I absolutely agree with that. The other thing that came up, which I think is interesting, is the question of testing and whether the Iranians could test. Of course, there's no evidence that they had tested, but I would speculate that there might be a linkage between the Iranian and the North Korean program, which has been tested. I'm not saying I know that. I'm just speculating because the technologies are all derived from one source, which is Pakistan and the A.Q. Khan, the KRL laboratories, and the sort of centrifuge technologies and development from that, similarly in North Korea. And it may well be, I would speculate, that if the North Koreans had tested, they would share those results or might have shared those results with the Iranians. I'm not saying I know. I'm just saying that that's a possibility that the strategic planners in Israel and the United States are thinking about, this must realize.
Raffini: Well, and there's also, of course, there's a very straight line from Iran to Russia, and then you've also got a line from Russia to North Korea. So it doesn't require leaps of logic to think that that line could go all the way through with some sort of support. She did also say having the enriched uranium does not mean you have a functional bomb. And I think that is true as well. It's unclear even if they have enough material to salvage if the machines, the facility to turn that into a weapon is in any kind of state of functionality at this time. That's a high degree of engineering.
Dearlove: The irony is that the uranium, once it's in the solid state, isn't that radioactive. There are complexities here. I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I have a certain amount of, let's say, derived knowledge. What she's saying is true. The final stages of weaponization, once you have the uranium, are quite complex. But we know that the North Koreans have reached that stage. We know that the Pakistanis have reached that stage, and one can speculate as to what those linkages might be. The Iranians wouldn't be working in a complete vacuum.
Raffini: I'm curious which way you think this goes. If you think they double down and pursue the weapon, if you think Khamenei tries to redeem himself by going out as a Shia martyr and looking at everything he's built or wanted falling apart around him if that's how he thinks he cements his legacy, or if you think there is some sort of self-preservation gene within this group of mullahs that causes them to truly come back to the table and reevaluate.
Dearlove: I think back to the table and reevaluate. I think if they were to double down and renew or let's say try to restart the program, they're on a hiding to nothing. They probably know that. I think the regime, probably the theocrats are in a very fragile position. I think there's the possibility probably of a different type of leadership, which wouldn't be pro-Western, but could push them out. They could easily turn around tomorrow and say, look, the Supreme Leader's lost his marbles. He's in a medical facility. He's being cared for. And we find that we're dealing with a different group of people, which might be based on the Iranian military, which are still not fully integrated with the IRGC or the Praetorian Guard. I think that's a much, much more likely outcome. And I think Iran is probably being pushed into a place where it says, okay, no nuclear program, but we're not gonna be best friends with the West. And we'll see how that relationship would evolve. But if the nuclear program's gone, then I think that's the bottom line. We're into a different era in the Middle East. And, of course, we have this extraordinary situation where Israel is the master of the Middle East, and this small country of great sophistication has pretty much floored, or is in the process of flooring all of its enemies.
Raffini: Well, it worked out really well for the 300. So what could possibly go wrong? Alright. We're gonna leave it there for this week. Sir Richard, thank you so much. And to our listeners, thanks everybody for joining us. That'll do it for today's episode of One Decision. Thanks to Sir Richard Dearlove and Ambassador Laura Holgate. For more conversations and interviews with world leaders and leading decision makers be sure to check out our website onedecision.com and our YouTube page. Of course you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Christina Ruffini, thanks for listening.





