It seems that John Bolton is mediocre in physics as much as
he is in the law. He just shot himself in the foot on both counts. Let me admit
at the outset that I am neither a lawyer nor a physicist – especially not in
nuclear matters – where I am about to challenge him. I also know that he is a
lawyer, one that may well be good in theory but is lousy when it comes to
arguing a case for his client. This is because he has consistently made the
mistake of saying anything to make a case for his client which is a strategy
that has always backfired. This is why he joins the likes of Alan Dershowitz at
consistently failing to argue a convincing case for Israel .
Bolton displays his deficiency in both those fields in an article
he wrote under the title: “What to Ask Chuck Hagel About Iran's Nuclear Threat”
and the subtitle: “Senators should probe if he endorses the dangerous step of
letting Iran
enrich uranium to reactor-grade levels.” It was published in the Wall Street Journal
on January 29, 2013.
So let me begin with the lawyering part of my argument. Here
is what he says in the article: “Materially breaching a treaty voids the entire
agreement, including “rights” found elsewhere in the deal. Iran has
readily exploited the West's bad lawyering.” If this is true and if everyone is
equal under the law, then the resolution to recognize Israel as a state has been voided by Israel 's breach
of its obligations under international law. And the consequence is not only
that Israel no longer has the “right” to defend itself; it has no right to
exist at all. This, my friend, is the consequence of the sort of lawyering that
Bolton and Dershowitz have been doing on behalf of Israel .
Now to the physics part of my argument. I never studied or
worked in the business of enriching uranium. But what is involved here are
science and technology; two things I spent a lifetime doing – along with a few
other things. What is usually done in research, often successfully, is that a
researcher would see the analogy between a newly observed phenomenon and one
that is understood. For example, the theory of light as being an
electromagnetic wave was understood and formulated by analogy with the dropping
of a stone in a pool of calm water.
Likewise, my argument about what it would take to enrich
uranium to different levels rests on my understanding of two phenomena I know
well because I studied them, worked in them and taught them. The first
phenomenon is electromagnetism; more specifically self-inductance. What applies
here is something called Lenz's Law. It says this: “The direction of the
induced current is such that its own magnetic field opposes the action that
produced the induced current.” If you want to know more about this, you will
find a book authored by yours truly under the title: “Fundamentals Of Circuit
Analysis” which, I was surprised to know, is still being circulated on the
internet.
When the students asked me what that Law meant, I explained
it this way: When you pump air in your tire, a lot of it goes into the tire in
a short period of time at the start. But the more air you have in the tire, the
more it pushes back against new air going in. That is, it becomes more
difficult to put a little bit of air in the tire towards the end than it takes
to put a lot of it at the start. The same applies when a current tries to
produce a magnetic field because the field will push back against the current
that produced it in the first place.
The second phenomenon that comes to mind is something I worked
on one Summer while attending college. It was a company that produced
components for other companies. One of those components had to be vacuumed to
better than 98% before sealing it. To do this, the company had a vacuum machine
with a gauge on it that indicated how much air was left in the chamber where
the component was held. Upon starting the machine, you could see that a large
amount of air was sucked out in the first few minutes. It then took several
hours to bring the vacuum level to 98%, and another 24 hours to do a little
better than that. I don't remember ever getting to the 99% level.
Thus, whether you pump air in a tire or you pump air out of
a component, you have an easy time at the start of the process, and a more
difficult one towards the end of it even if what you reap in terms of result is
mathematically inferior. Now, given that the “work” so liberally used by Bolton
in the article but never defined by him, actually has a definition in physics
which says it is equal to the force applied for the duration it is applied, he
better explain if he means to say it will take the Iranians less force to
attain the higher levels of purification, or if it will take them less time to
get there.
Where I take issue with John Bolton is this passage: “recent
efforts have added debilitating mistakes in basic physics.” He later says this:
“Mr. Obama's negotiators are playing with numbers they don't really understand.
Their crude physics is seriously flawed.” But then admits the following in the
paragraph that comes after that: “Here's the basic fact that puzzles us laymen,
but not nuclear physicists.” Note that he has physicists in the plural. Well, I
only know of one that attempted to make such argument but was shut down in
flames by a few others. Most other nuclear physicists did not bother getting
involved in this kind of silly talk.
Yet, John Bolton rests his argument on this sort of flimsy
approach to lawyering for the cause of Israel ,
and tells the senators who will be questioning Mr. Hagel to ask him what he
thinks of Iran 's
nuclear program. Before the senators do that, however, they better get expert
witnesses for both sides of the argument to give them a true picture of what is
going on here.
The truth is that Bolton
and Dershowitz are as useless when it comes to litigating this cause as a
monkey would be when it comes to giving a lecture on the legal implications of
Einstein's Theory of Relativity being used in the making of the GPS gizmos.