Recorded March 24, 2026. Subscribe at angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes first and commercial free.

Last week an article published in Al Jazeera by an academic at the University of Doha in Qatar proposed something that felt crazy to some western war watchers: America and Israel’s strategy in Iran is working.

On this episode of Angry Planet, author Muhanad Seloom is here to explain his position. Seloom is an assistant professor of international politics and security at the University of Doha. He’s also an Iraqi who lived through the Iran-Iraq war and both US invasions. From his perspective, the US has degraded Iran’s ability to hurt its neighbors in the long term and changed the regime.

What comes next is a more complicated question.

• Why did this war even start?
• Setting aside morality and legality to look at ground truths
• “Iran is much weaker”
• Missile production, missile range
• The highly enriched uranium is in one place
• “The regime has changed. Whether we like it or not, the regime has changed.”
• The case against the new Khamenei
• What is it like to live nextdoor to Iran?
• There’s a reason no one is standing up for Iran
• Why isn’t the GCC doing more?
• What happens if we pick up and leave?
• What’s the plan for what happens next?
• “It’s not easy to rise up.”
• Charging tolls on Hormuz
• “I have to say this: I am against the war in any way.”
• What about the JCPOA?
• A great unanswered question of history
• Air campaigns don’t win wars
• …did America really lose in Afghanistan and Iraq?
• “War is hell.”

Labelling Ethno-Political Groups as Terrorists

The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why

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America went to war in Iran, we’re told, because the idea of the country developing nuclear weapons was intolerable. Nukes are complicated and technical weapons that require scientists and experts to build, maintain, and manage. Highly enriched uranium (HEU) is core to the design and unless all of Iran’s HEU is accounted for the threat of it becoming a nuclear power will linger.

So what would it take to get rid of Iran’s stockpile HEU?

François Diaz-Maurin is on Angry Planet today to answer that question. Diaz-Maurin is editor for nuclear affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists where he recently published an article outlining what it would take for US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium.

• How a civil engineer becomes a nuclear journalist
• “You can’t bomb away nuclear material.”
• “Technically, it’s nearly Mission Impossible.”
• How much highly enriched uranium (HEU) was left after last year’s strikes?
• Moving HEU around Iran
• What we can learn from satellite photos and the International Atomic Energy Agency
• Why 60%?
• Managing scuba tanks full of gaseous toxins in a war zone
• Why blowing up the cylinders won’t work
• “Let me throw something weird at you.”
• Downblending versus exporting
• We’re living in the third nuclear age
• Deterrence works and that’s, maybe, not great?

Trump may send US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium. There are no good options

Netanyahu says Iran no longer has uranium enrichment capacity

Iran willing to dilute uranium stockpile as fresh protests erupt

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AI enthusiasts love to say that the technology is as revolutionary and important as nuclear weapons. Even the Trump administration has adopted the metaphor. The President and the Department of Energy have repeatedly referred to the development of AI in the US as “Manhattan Project 2.0.”

But is the buildout of LLMs and machine learning systems really as important as the development of the atom bomb? And what are the lessons from the atomic age that AI scientists should then learn? Do we need an AI Non Proliferation Treaty? An AI International Atomic Energy Agency?

On this episode of Angry Planet, Ankit Panda comes on to talk about the uses and limitations of the “AI as nuclear weapons” metaphor. Panda is an expert in nukes and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He’s been sharing his extended thoughts on the AI-nuclear connection at his Nukesletter Substack.

• Stanislav Petrov
• AI as nuclear weapons
• Why nuclear weapons resonate with people in the AI field
• The Strategic Air Command story
• That time we spilled nuclear material all over Greenland and Spain
• NNSA and Anthropic
• AI as the next Manhattan Project
• A massive infrastructure project
• Fissile material as silicon
• What’s the AI version of an NPT and IAEA?
• AI and nuclear are both dual use
• On AI winters
• What AI is actually being used for, what it might be used for
• The socialization around AI will change.

AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crisis

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