I'm John Batchel. I welcome my colleague Andrea Stricker, the Deputy Director and Research Fellow for the

Non-Proliferation Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Not just nuclear, but chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction.

There are allegations about Iran and the conduct of the Islamic regime that are surprising but credible.

However, Andrea, a very good evening to you.

This is early reporting to my reading that the very large number of deaths in the recent protests

against the Islamic regime by Iranian citizens, mostly young people.

The number of deaths struck me as so high, how could it have been gunshot?

We were told that there were Hezbollah brigades from Iraq,

that there were Afghan, Shia, that there certainly were besiege, and that

the brutality was of many orders of magnitude. I've heard the number as high as 60,000. I've heard

the number 40,000 several times, of the dead, not just the wounded. I've heard stories of families buying back the remains of their children.

I've heard mass graves and burning of bodies. But chemical weapons, this is new to me. What do we

know? Good evening to you. Good evening, John. Thanks for having me. Well, the U.S. and Israel

have been concerned for some time that the

Islamic Republic has an illicit chemical weapons program, and that they're focused primarily on

debilitating chemicals that they could use during riots to subdue their populations,

and then also the pharmaceutical-based weaponization of these weapons

to sort of disperse through the air and debilitate protesters or potentially Israel or their

intended audiences of those. Iran International has done the most reporting about new allegations that the regime

used chemical weapons. So something that is allowed under the Chemical Weapons Convention is the

use of riot control agents like tear gas. But Iran is apparently allegedly using chemicals

...