Fission expedition: nuclear-site attack in Iran

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Many of Europe's public service broadcasters are struggling to keep their places as go to sources of unbiased news. Populists all over are eager to grab the mic and to do so they're undermining the broadcaster's leadership and their funding. And we take a look at an effort to translate the prehistoric pagan poetry of Latvia. The verses take a rigid four line form, but those four lines are rich with meaning, with symbolism, and with perspectives that might go back to the Bronze Age. But first, Efforts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions just got a lot harder. On Saturday, the country announced that it had restarted advanced centrifuges for uranium enrichment at its Natanz nuclear facility. By Sunday, an apparent act of sabotage took out the site's power, grinding it to a halt. Iran has blamed the attack on Israel, which has made no official comment. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized his country's opposition to Iran's nuclear program.

Iran has never given up its quest for nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. And Iran consistently, consistently and outrageously calls for Israel's annihilation and works towards that goal.

The nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan OF Action, or JCPOA, is an international agreement signed into 2015 in which Iran agreed to limit its stocks and enrichment of fuel. President Donald Trump took America out of the deal in 2018, and talks for a re entry began in Vienna last week. But the escalating tensions between Iran and Israel have made that far trickier. It's not even clear if tomorrow's talks will proceed.

The attack seems to have been the result of an explosive device that was probably smuggled into the Natanz plant, most likely detonated remotely, and that took out the electrical systems and caused some of the centrifuges to fail.

Roger McShane is our middle east editor.

The exact details are unclear, but I think what we can be pretty sure about is that Israel was behind the attack, and that's because it's not being all that coy about it. It has officials out there who are speaking to reporters off the record, of course, but they are talking pretty openly about their role in this. And this is a site that Israel has probably attacked before, as recently as last summer. And it's in line with what we're sort of seeing between these two countries, this sort of shadow war that's taking place that involves sabotage, that involves attacking shipping, that involves using proxies to threaten the other countries. And it's been going on for some years.

So why do you think this attack happened there and at this point?

Well, one reason perhaps is in the attack last summer, a number of the centrifuges at Natanz were knocked offline. A day before this most recent attack, those centrifuges were brought back online, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani gave that order on live television. So that's sort of one immediate reason. These are machines that are used to enrich uranium, and that enriched uranium can then be used for energy or it can be used to make a bomb if it's enriched highly enough. And this all comes in the context of Iran breaching elements of the nuclear deal by stockpiling more enriched uranium than it was allowed and by enriching it to higher levels. So Israel, which for good reason views Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat, you know, Iran is constantly threatening to destroy Israel. Israel would argue that it had ample reason to attack now.

So Israel's actions here are just in response to that growing threat of enrichment.

I mean, if you wanted to take a more cynical view, you can note that Israel just had its fourth election in two years and that Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is currently struggling to form a government. Right now, and he's appealing to potential allies to show a sense of national duty, of national responsibility, which is essentially saying, get behind me so that we can face down the threats posed against Israel. And obviously, an attack like this would lend some urgency to that type of appeal.

And regardless of the immediate motive, what do you think this means for talks on the jcpoa, the Iran nuclear deal?

Yeah, well, the attack comes as these talks are taking place in Vienna that are aimed at getting America back into the deal and bringing Iran back into compliance with it. And both countries say they want to get back there, but both are being quite stubborn about who acts first. And then you have this attack, which has upset Iran for good reason. It was already skeptical about diplomacy, and it might be thinking sort of, what is the point of getting back into this deal if Israel is just going to keep blowing up our facilities? The talks are meant to resume tomorrow. American officials say they don't know whether the Iranians are actually going to show up. There's been talk in Tehran of suspending the talks if they do proceed. You could argue that the attack gives America leverage in the talks. You know, it can sort of say, this is what will happen to your nuclear program if there's no deal, and it nullifies Iran's threats to breach the agreement further. So one question is sort of, what are Israel's motivations? Was it working in concert with America to provide a leverage, or was it actually trying to scupper the talks altogether? I mean, we know that Benjamin Netanyahu is not a fan of the nuclear deal, and he wasn't a fan of this idea of Joe Biden jumping right back into it.

Well, to that end, what have American officials said about this attack in particular?

Yeah, so the US says it wasn't involved at all, but it hasn't really condemned the attack. And the most notable thing is that Lloyd Austin, America's Secretary of Defense, was in Israel when this happened. He didn't mention Iran during his time there.

And I wanted to reaffirm the administration's strong commitment to Israel and to the Israeli people. And that's why I thought it was important that we meet face to face and to express our earnest desire for close consultations with Israel as we address shared challenges in the region.

I'd say if he didn't know about this attack, then Israel and the US probably need to have a serious talk about openness. More likely, this is a sort of good cop, bad cop routine where Israel does the dirty work and the US does the diplomacy.

And as has happened before. Iran has vowed revenge for the attack. Do you see that happening? Do you see this situation escalating?

Yeah, I mean, first I think it's important to point out that the situation is already escalating. Not in a way that always makes headlines, but you've seen an uptick in airstrikes by Israel on Iranian targets. You've seen an uptick in attacks on Iranian shipping. And this is something that Israel calls a campaign between the wars and it's increasingly open about it. And Iran, of course, continues to antagonize Israel not just with threats, but by arming groups that call for its destruction. Having said all that, I don't think you'll see Iran respond in a big way, in part because it just hasn't done that in the past. It speaks a big game about revenge, but then it doesn't actually do much. But just as in Israel, there are political calculations going on in Tehran. The country has a presidential election coming up in June. Hassan Rouhani, the relatively moderate president can't run again. But a return to the nuclear deal would certainly help whoever wants to pick up his mantle. At the same time, you have the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who probably wants to see a hardline candidate succeed. So even if he did want to okay a return to the nuclear deal, that decision probably wouldn't be made until after the election. And all this just shows how complicated this dance is to renew the nuclear deal. Were it just a question of who moves first between America and Iran, that would be hard enough. But you have this low level conflict between Israel and Iran to consider. You have domestic Iranian politics, domestic Israeli politics, you have domestic US politics, and then you have efforts to negotiate extensions to the deal. So this is going to drag on for a bit. And the longer it drags on, the greater risk you have that some incident or some attack will derail the whole effort.

Roger, thank you very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

On the roof is an ordinary television aerial used for picking up the picture as rebroadcast from Alexandra Palace.

Every self respecting European country needs a public broadcaster. Modeled on Britain's BBC, the continent's public media were set up to anchor democracy by providing citizens with objective reporting. The Netherlands national broadcaster, the NOS was established as a reaction against Nazi propaganda during the Second World War. After Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, the the New government gave its broadcaster Radio Television of Slovenia a mandate to report independently after years of spreading communist propaganda. But in today's age of polarization and Disinformation. Europe's independent public broadcasters are under threat from populist movements and illiberal governments.

In Slovenia, for more than a year, the current Prime Minister, Janes Jansa, has been harassing journalists from the public broadcaster RTV SLO on Twitter who he thinks are too critical of his government. And this is part of a general campaign to get more control over that broadcaster.

Matt Steinglass is the Economist's Europe correspondent.

This is just one case of a number of cases of populist governments across Europe trying to get control of editorial content on their public broadcasters and use them for propaganda purposes. And it's not just in populist countries. In places like the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, populists who are out of power are also harassing the public broadcasters.

And that's the sort of thing that these broadcasters were essentially set up to avoid. Right. Why are we seeing this kind of pressure now?

State broadcasters are a very tempting tool for populists to take over because they can control them, often using appointments to their boards and using control over the budget. This sort of thing really got going in Russia in the early 2000s after Vladimir Putin took over. By the mid 2000s, the agenda of the state TV channels was being set basically in government run meetings. And Viktor Orban, when he won power in Hungary in 2010, followed the Russian model. He turned the Hungarian state broadcaster MTVA into a shell corporation which is exempted from the National Media law, and turned that into basically a mouthpiece for his government. Later on in Poland, when a populist government won power there, they did the same thing and very quickly turned the Polish public broadcaster into a propaganda organ.

And so how exactly though are they taking control? What levers are they grabbing?

The two levers that a government can use to get control of its public broadcaster usually are direct control over the budget and control over appointments to official positions and to the boards that govern those broadcasters. Broadcasters are usually set up with supposedly independent boards, but someone has to appoint them. So that's often parliament. A government that has a big majority in Parliament can just appoint cronies to run the boards and then get control of content. That way or otherwise, they can rejigger things so that board members are appointed directly by the government itself. Obviously, if the government has the purse strings, the more direct the government's control over the purse strings are, the more directly it can punish a broadcaster for airing views that are critical of it. In countries where you have strong populist parties that aren't in power, like Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, they typically call for the budget of the public broadcasters to be slashed by 90%. In some cases they demonize them as bastions of left wing influence controlled by urban elites. There's sometimes a bit of merit to that claim, but the goal of populist parties tends to be simply to get their reviews reflected on tv.

And what are the broadcasters themselves doing to sort of counter the forces upon them?

A lot of broadcasters have recognized that there actually is a problem in the way that they cover news in their countries. There does tend to be a bias to covering news in big urban metropolises and undercovering more rural areas. Some of them. For example, the German public broadcaster ZDF has started doing town halls in the more eastern areas of the country where people feel more resentful of the way that it covers issues. The Dutch public broadcaster has a built in safety valve. In the Netherlands, if you can get 50,000 paying subscribers for a new broadcaster, you get broadcast time on one of the state channels. And since 2009 there have been three new right leaning broadcasters set up explicitly to reflect what they perceived as a left wing bias in the reporting of the Dutch news. But if the mission of the public broadcaster is to set up an agreed upon zone of facts and reality that everybody in the polity can agree on, this system may not go that far to redressing that. The latest of these right wing broadcasters on public news is still attacking the main NOS public broadcaster as quote, fake news, unquote. And that still undermines the confidence that people have in the accuracy of what they're seeing on tv.

But there has been something of a countercurrent during the pandemic. I mean, certainly in Britain we've seen readership, viewership numbers for the public broadcast of the BBC go up and up.

The COVID 19 pandemic has been very good for public broadcasters. People turn to them in emergencies for news which is rapid and reliable. So overall in Europe, public broadcasters websites saw traffic double in the early months of the pandemic. Viewership of their regular evening news programs went up. They even started getting a large increase in the number of young viewers. It's not clear how long that will persist or whether it spreads beyond COVID 19, but it does show you that as much as people may say they don't trust the broadcast news, when it comes right down to it, in an emergency, that's where they turn for reliable information.

And to remind what's at stake here, if public broadcasters lose that trust, that sort of go to broadcaster status, we're.

Seeing a global problem of political polarization in which people on opposite sides of the political spectrum don't believe the same facts. Public broadcasters are a helpful tool in trying to redress that, but they still face an uphill battle.

Well, how to turn the tide, though? These political pressures are all unique to each market.

Well, the political pressures are sort of unique to each market, but they run along the same themes. I mean, it's basically people in government trying to take control of an easily available tool for propaganda. The best ways to do it are the same ways that people figured out in the beginning when they launched the BBC, the first public broadcast in the 1920s, which is make sure that there is an independent board, actually, in the best case, two different independent boards for oversight, and that those boards are appointed in such a way that no one government can quickly appoint the majority of their members in the course of one term in office. The second thing you need to do is to make sure they have budgetary independence, and you can do that either, as with the BBC, with a dedicated license fee. People complain about that, but the fact of the matter is that it insulates the public broadcaster from budgetary pressures from an individual government, and that's very important. Now, if you have a political party with authoritarian leanings that wins a massive constitutional majority in election, you are never going to be able to stop it from taking over the public broadcaster any more than you could stop it from taking over the courts. Ultimately, there's no structural, technical, legal fix that can perfectly insulate a broadcaster from political pressure, but you can make it very hard for a government to take them over, and that's the best you can do.

Matt, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

The midsummer festival of Ligua in Latvia might look like a group of naked people running and screaming in the dead of night, but it's one of the country's deepest rituals, inspired by a homegrown brand of paganism. So too are the hymns of this prehistoric faith, Dinahsdarma, many of which have recently been translated into English.

Dinah's are Latvian folk poems. They're typically four lines long.

Guy Kiddy writes for the Economist.

There are over a million of them on file at the National Library in Riga, and that's thanks to the work of a man called Christianis Baruns, who was a folklorist working in the 18th and 19th centuries, and he encouraged Latvians to note down these dinahs for posterity. Over the past 20 or so years, a woman called Eva Shantivani has been working to translate these Dinahs into English, and it's not without its difficulties.

How do you mean?

Well, Latvian is a language that's inflected. It's very different from English. A lot of the meaning, therefore, is communicated in prefixes and suffixes. The rhythm of the language is very different as well, and it doesn't tend to rhyme. Rhyme isn't really appreciated in Latvian. So Mrs. Czentivagni has allowed herself some poetic license, but she took on the challenge, and she did so because she felt that these Dina poems had an awful lot to offer the outside world. And when I spoke to Yevha Shantivani, she did tell me why it had taken so long to get these translations right.

Initially, when I was transposing them, I had terrible bad results. And I was criticizing other people's work as dead cats while I was producing my own dead cats. And I would throw them away and go away, and then I'd return. And this was many, many, many, many times. And this took many years.

And why were there so many, what she's calling dead cats?

Latvian is a language that makes very liberal use of the so called diminutive suffix. We have that in English, too. Booklet instead of book. A booklet is a small book, but in Latvian, that diminutive suffix conveys an awful lot more. It's like the dearest, sweetest, most beloved book. And clearly that's quite difficult to convey in translation, and particularly when you only have four lines to play with.

And in those four lines, what are the themes? What do you find in them?

Dinah's might be very short, but they're very rich, particularly in natural metaphor and symbolism. And they cover topics that are to do with the wit and wisdom of life, everything from finding a spouse to the importance of hard work to questions of spirituality and the nature of beauty. Mrs. Gentivani did read me the first poem that she successfully transposed.

As she puts it, sweetest sun, so soon is setting, Abandoned in the shade of my dearest mother, gone forever, none to set me in the sun.

And you mentioned that she thinks there's much for the outside world in translating all of these.

Absolutely. They're only four lines long, but they do cover all aspects of life and experience. Perhaps most interesting is an observation that Mrs. Santiovanni made, and that's that these poems are folk poems. They're like folk songs. They're written by the people. And as we all know, history tends to get written by the victors. So this is a very special insight into Latvian life over the centuries and possibly even millennia. There's one Diana that Mrs. Santivani told me about and which might date from the Bronze Age because it features a man who breaks his sword while dueling with another. And iron swords don't tend to break. Bronze ones are a bit more brittle. And indeed, Mrs. Santivani says that this is a canon of work that is broad enough and important enough to rival classical literature.

I hope I can get 2,000 diners done. I think that would be a good body of work.

And do you have a favorite among these that you'd like to share?

I do indeed. It goes like this Birch tree. Dear, thou art so ample all the way to the ground. Dearest wife, thou art so lovely all the way to deep old age.

Guy, thanks very much for joining us.

It's a pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com initiative intelligence offer. The link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.