Death of a salesman: Silvio Berlusconi

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Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Ora Ogumbiyi.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

When former President Donald Trump scrapped the nuclear deal with Iran, he was heavily criticized for his recklessness, and rightly so. Now the country is expanding its nuclear capabilities and there's little that America can do about it.

And the mid 20th century idea of releasing odors into a cinema for a multisensory experience just hasn't progressed into the 21st. We take a little sniff of the latest attempt at Smell o Vision. This time in the metaverse, it makes sense. First up, though, Silvio Berlusconi was above all a fighter, the prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, said yesterday in a video tribute on Twitter. He was a man who never had fear of defending his convictions, she said. He seems to be a man who had no fear at all. For many people, he's indelibly remembered as the man behind gaffe after gaffe, scandal after scandal, not least the Bunga Bunga sex parties accusations and an overturned conviction of sex with an underage prostitute. His fans defended him outside court in 2011 while his detractors convened to denounce him. And all the while, there he was, still smiling, still confident, impenitent, still flirting. Here he is handing out awards for young excellence that same year, telling the recipients, you're so good, I'd like to invite you to Bunga Bunga. He made himself so much a part of Italy, from media baron to longest serving prime minister to football club owner, and above all, a fighter of his enemies, real and perceived of endless allegations of dodgy dealings of the court proceedings yesterday, Vittorio Feltri, a journalist and newspaper boss and now politician, broke down live on air describing all of Mr. Berlusconi's achievements. But one of his achievements was to convince himself and the country that that global economic calamity wouldn't come to Italy during the financial crisis. A fiction that Italians are still paying for. And the pugilistic populism he pioneered and then put all over television is still making its mark.

Berlusconi was able to convince an entire nation that he held the secret to their prosperity.

John Hooper is our Italy and Vatican correspondent.

He himself had become, at one stage, one of the world's 20 richest men. And the sales pitch on the hustings was really implicitly that he could make the voters rich as well, something that he signally failed to do.

And what's the feeling on the ground in Italy right now in the wake of his death?

It very much depends on who you are. I would say that the attitude towards him has grown more tolerant with the years. Silvio Berlusconi came to be thought of as the non, or the grandfather, if you like, of Italian politics. He mellowed in later years. One of the many ways in which he was a forerunner of contemporary right wing populism was in his ability to build a personality cult around him, which reached its height before the 2008 general election, when there was actually a song modeled entirely around him, and it was called thank Goodness for Silvio. That kind of popped popularity, I think, ultimately went to Berlusconi's head. It gave him a sense of invulnerability and arguably also led into the sex scandals of the late 2000s. Unlike many right wing populists today, he exuded optimism and a sunny view of life. If Donald Trump, who in many ways is Silvio Berlusconi's successor, scowls, Berlusconi always grinned. He, like Donald Trump, started in business in real estate, and it was through that that he got into media, creating his company, mediaset, which to this day controls three of the seven main terrestrial TV channels in Italy.

And you mentioned that he had, at various points, been extremely loved by the electorate, but that wasn't universal. He was both loved and hated.

He always had his critics, and I won't shrink from saying that the Economist was very prominent among them, having published a lengthy dossier about his business dealings and the various mysteries surrounding it, including how he got his initial capital. There were the journalists who asked questions of his connections with organized crime. Prosecutors, too, endlessly probed at his business dealings. There were allegations that, for example, he had bribed judges, that he had perjured himself, and that he had encouraged others to perjure themselves. Quite an array of allegations that would have flattened the career of many another politician, perhaps in another society.

But in the fullness of time, it wasn't those dodgy dealings that really caught the world's attention. It was much more about the sex scandals.

Starting in 2009, a spotlight was turned on his dealings with the opposite sex. The so called papi parties that were held at his house in Rome, then the so called bunga bunga parties that were held at his mansion outside Milan, and his involvement with some very young women, including, and this led to a trial, a 17 year old Moroccan who styled herself as Ruby the Heart Stealer. That certainly eroded his popularity with women. But I don't think that ultimately it was enough to bring him down. It was essentially his economic failings and his refusal to acknowledge the seriousness specifically of the Euro crisis that hit the single currency zone in the early 210s that really put paid to Berlusconi, because after his many assurances that everything would be all right, Italy's GDP fell dramatically the following year and people realised that they had been taken in.

But you say that was his downfall. He was down, but not out. He remained active in politics.

Indeed, his party, Forzitalia, gradually lost support and his supporters drifted off, first primarily towards the Northern League and subsequently towards the Brothers of Italy, the dominant party in the current government. But that said, first of all, Berlusconi's party remained crucial for the right to win a majority in parliament. And it could be argued that he played the decisive role in ousting the last prime minister, Mario Draghi. So right up until the end, Berlusconi continued to exert a powerful influence over Italian politics.

And now that he's gone, what legacy does he leave? He leaves a party without a head.

For one thing, Silvio Berlusconi's ego always got in the way. He hinted at nominating a successor, but he never could bring himself to consummate the nomination. It's also fair to say that his other legacy, and it's a tragic one, is that Italy has failed to grow for so many years. His great promise to the electorate was not not only that they would be successful, but that he would introduce the kind of liberal revolution that Margaret Thatcher had introduced in Britain. He never did that. And he was the Prime Minister of Italy at a crucial period in the early 2000s, after Italy went into the euro when it really needed those structural reforms. Silvio Berlusconi was too busy passing laws in his own and his business interest for that to happen. And Italy today continues to pay the price for that.

John, thanks very much for your time.

My pleasure.

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Chaotic celebrations erupted in Tehran when the news broke the Shah had gone and.

Roving crowds chanted, the Shah is defeated.

Khomeini has won.

The west has long feared an Iran armed with nuclear weapons and has spent years trying to curb its enrichment efforts. During the Obama administration, a deal brokered by the UN Security Council in the EU went some way to achieving this. The hard fought Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or jcpoa, saw Tehran agree to constrain its nuclear program in exchange for economic sanctions relief. Five years ago, that agreement came to an abrupt end.

In a few moments, I will sign.

A presidential memorandum to begin reinstating U.S.

Nuclear sanctions on the Iranian regime.

Donald Trump called the JCPOA the worst deal ever and pulled America out of it. Since then, relations between the two nations have been on ice. On Sunday, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei signaled openness to a new deal, but only one that would allow the country's current infrastructure to be maintained. But this infrastructure is a growing cause of concern.

News has emerged and satellite pictures appear to confirm that Iran is building a nuclear facility in the Zagros Mountains.

Matthew Simmons is a defense and security writer for the Economist.

And what's different this time is it seems to be so deep under the ground that it will be invulnerable even to America's most powerful bunker busting bomb.

So tell us more about this facility. What do we know about it?

Well, if the analysis by various experts is correct, the facility is 80 to 100 metres deep inside the mountain. No human made facility is necessarily entirely safe from what other human beings want to do to it. But we do know that the Americans have developed a bomb known as the GBU 57, which was really specifically to provide for the possibility of destroying a previous Iranian underground enrichment facility called Fordo. And this 14,000 kg precision guided bomb can burrow its way through 60 meters of earth and rock before detonating. But now with this newer, much deeper enrichment site, it may no longer be possible to destroy it from the air.

And do we know what the facility is being used for?

Well, the Institute for Science and International Security, which is a Washington think tank that was set up by a former weapons inspector called David Albright. They reckon that the deepest part of the chamber could be used to house advanced centrifuges that could very rapidly produce enough weapons grade uranium to make Iran capable of producing nuclear weapons. And that is certainly a change for the worse, if all that is accurate. And, you know, whatever the criticisms of the nuclear deal of 2015, known as the JCPOA, it did at least ensure that it would take Iran about a year to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear device. Now, Iran could probably achieve that almost immediately.

So President Trump pulling out of that deal was a pretty bad move then?

Well, I certainly thought so at the time, and it's particularly hard not to see it that way now. Since he decided to trash the deal, Iran has, year after year, month after month, brought online new, faster centrifuges which have hugely expanded its enrichment capacity. And based on the quarterly inspection report in February of the International Atomic energy agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, David Albright estimates that Iran could produce enough weapons grade uranium for a nuclear weapon in just 12 days. More worrying still, if Iran were to use all its stock of highly enriched uranium, it could produce enough weapons grade uranium for four more nuclear weapons in a month. None of this actually means that Iran is about to break out and become a fully fledged nuclear weapon state, but it does mean, as Mr. Albright puts it, that it now is in a position where it can produce nuclear weapons pretty much on demand.

Okay, well, that sounds rather scary, but with Mr. Trump no longer in office, does President Biden have any plans to recreate some version of that previous deal?

Well, when Biden came in, there was a certain amount of optimism that the JCPOA could be resuscitated, and efforts were made to do that with indirect talks between America and Iran in Vienna, but they really got nowhere. An Iranian expert that I spoke to recently said that, in his view, the Iranians had already decided that they were beyond the deal by the time Biden came in. Nor has there really seemed to be much real enthusiasm within the State Department to sort of do the heavy lifting. But according to some experts that I spoke to, the real death knell for a revived nuclear deal with Iran was Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year. The war brought Russia and Iran into a much closer defense and strategic partnership. And that closer relationship with Russia, plus Russia's pariah status, really killed off any lingering hopes of restoring the P5 1 process, of which, of course, you know, Russia was a key part. Also, as energy prices have soared because of the war, Iran, as a large oil producer has found that some of the immediate economic pressures on it have significantly eased.

So are we destined to see Iran develop nuclear weapons? Where does all this leave us?

It certainly leaves the whole situation rather less in America's hands and perhaps a little more to the influence of Iran's Gulf neighbors. And I think what we're seeing now is a kind of weary but dangerous equilibrium. The regional Arab powers, they're trying to gain sort of leverage over Iran by investing in its economy and deferring to China. And China is really the one major international actor who has some real influence on Iran. Then there's a question of what Israel does. It has used all sorts of methods of sabotage to delay and harm Iran's nuclear power in the past. And there has been an open debate for years in Israel about a direct attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, something which could, of course, trigger huge escalatory consequences all around. Nobody really wants this thing to escalate. However, there's no possibility of a formal new nuclear agreement to constrain Iran happening anytime soon.

Matthew, thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's been a pleasure.

In 1960, during the film Scent of Mystery, Hollywood tested this new contraption, and it was called Smell O Vision.

Abby Bertitz is a science correspondent for the Economist.

So what this thing did is that it was mounted underneath the cinema seats. It was kind of this array of pipes and tubes, and it pumped out 30 different scents. It could be salty, ocean breezes, whiffs of wine, and it pumped out those smells at crucial moments in the plot. So Hollywood got a little bit excited. They had sound, they had sight, and they wanted to also introduce smell into the cinematic experience. But the problem was it didn't work very well. Those that were in the balcony high up complained that the smells reached them seconds or minutes too Late, when they weren't really relevant anymore. Others found the scents to be kind of faint. They weren't really sure what was going on. Others found them to last too long. Basically the technology wasn't there, but the idea was, and people today are still trying to bring that main idea back, people are really interested in the sense of smell and the power that that can, can bring to an experience.

Interesting. And how are people trying to do that today?

There was a paper recently published in Nature Communications that describes a so called olfaction interface. There were two of them. One was smaller, which was kind of the size of a band aid and you put it under your nose and the other one was a little larger, the size of a mask. And these were meant to be hooked up to kind of a virtual reality headset. And they let you introduce the sense of smell.

Abi, tell us how this technology works.

Both of them rely on the same underlying technology. They rely on tiny tiles of wax which have various liquid perfumes inside of them. And when the computer tells this mask or the band aid under your nose to generate a smell like green tea, there's kind of this metal coil underneath the wax that heats up. And when the wax heats up, the smell is released. And the researchers claim that from the computer signal to the smell being released can happen in as little as one second. And the mask can produce hundreds of possible odors.

And is this company the only one on the market?

Definitely not. So there's a bunch of people who are interested in smell. One of them is a startup called ovr. It's based in Vermont. Rather than having a wax based mask or smaller thing to put under your nose, this startup uses a headset that has refillable liquid cartridges, each of which can make thousands of cents. So the startup's technology is kind of clunkier, it's larger, may not be something that you'd be able to walk around with, but this startup, they have a new product in three which will be released later this year.

And how has the reception been so far?

The technology described in the paper, it's still in research, so it's not like there's much popular appeal. Smell is very, very difficult to get a handle on. Scientists aren't sure how smell works. There can be molecules that are literally an atom or a bond apart and they smell super differently. There's a lot of potential, but there's still a lot of ironing out to do before anything takes off.

Abi this literally sounds like something out of a sci fi movie or like a Cartoon or something.

Yeah, it definitely does. We haven't really seen convincing smell anywhere but pop culture. It kind of reminds me of the scene from Futurama.

Did you build the smell Scope?

No, I remembered that I built one last year. You will find that every heavenly body has its own particular scent. Here, I'll point it at.

Jupiter smells like strawberries.

Exactly. And now Saturn.

Pine needles. Oh, man, this is great.

Hey, as long as you don't make me smell your anus.

Odors are famously evocative. They can be good, they can be really, really bad. And part of the reason why we react so strongly to them is that the part of the brain that processes smell is really closely linked to the part of the brain that processes emotions and memory. But smell is also really tricky. We don't really understand yet. Science doesn't understand what the building blocks of smell are. With vision, you have light waves, you have red, green and blue pixels. With sound, you have sound waves, you have frequencies. With smell, we're honestly not sure. There are atoms, there are molecules that you're smelling. But if you change one single chemical bond, a scent can shift from sweet to rancid. And honestly, if you have a smelly virtual reality device and you're trying to smell something sweet and something rancid accidentally comes out, that doesn't seem like a particularly good user experience. Maybe at some point, if we're able to fix these issues and if we understand how smell works and researchers are working on this, like this paper was a huge step forward, then maybe one day users will be able to stop, swipe and smell the roses, the virtual roses.

Abby, thank you so much for coming in the show.

Thank you, Orey.

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