Victoria Coates on the Confusion in Natanz
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.6 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2021
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Saturday, December 4, 2021, an explosion occurred near Iran's nuclear facility outside the city of Natanz. Afterwards, two nearby villages were evacuated. Was the explosion the result of a weapons test? An accident? Sabotage? No one yet knows what took place in the mountains of northern Iran that day. And whereas civilians and observers can afford to wait for more information, national-security professionals are forced to act and react to events like this in real time without a lot of information. If there's an explosion near the nuclear compound of an adversarial nation, what do you do?
Natanz and its uncertainty is the point of departure for this week’s podcast. Victoria Coates, the former deputy national security adviser for Middle Eastern and North African affairs, shares her experience making decisions under pressure and with imperfect information.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Saturday, December 4th, there was an as-yet-unxplained blast in the vicinity of Iran's |
| 0:13.3 | Netanz nuclear facility. After it registered, officials proceeded to evacuate two nearby villages, |
| 0:19.8 | and that is more or less all we know. |
| 0:22.3 | Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. It's been publicly reported that |
| 0:27.1 | Israel's intelligence agency the Mossad was allegedly involved in attacks on this same facility |
| 0:32.3 | back in July of 2020 and April of 2021. But it's not clear if what happened last week was sabotage or an accident |
| 0:40.3 | or a test of a weapon of some kind, we still don't know. My guest today can help us think about |
| 0:44.9 | the known-nowns and the known unknowns surrounding the confusion at Natanz. Victoria Coates is a senior |
| 0:51.2 | fellow at the Center for Security Policy and a former Deputy National |
| 0:54.6 | Security Advisor for Middle Eastern and North African Affairs on the National Security Council. |
| 0:59.3 | She wrote about the Natanz explosion in a recent post on the corner online at National |
| 1:03.7 | Review. |
| 1:04.7 | What I most appreciated about her piece is how clearly it laid out what we do and don't know, |
| 1:09.1 | and moreover offered an example for how to reason |
| 1:11.8 | about what we do in light of that kind of uncertainty. It struck me as a good occasion to ask her |
| 1:16.6 | to bring us inside the experience of serving as a national security official. When the person |
| 1:21.7 | on the Middle East desk gets this information, who does she call, what happens next, and in what |
| 1:26.7 | sequence, and when? At what point? And in what sequence? And when? |
| 1:27.7 | At what point are more senior officials read into the situation? Who can give her the most |
| 1:32.3 | trustworthy information? Most of the time, when we consume the news and when we learn about |
| 1:37.2 | something like this, there's usually some coherent factual basis for the reporting. But when |
| 1:41.7 | you're acting and reacting to events in real time, you're making |
... |
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