
Peter Thiel and Palantir Are at the Heart of the Iran Nuclear Deal - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-08/peter-thiel-in-eye-of-iran-storm-as-deadline-looms-for-trump
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tptacek
Be a little careful about pieces in Bloomberg about the JCPOA. I read
Bloomberg about as much as I read stuff like Slate, and the sense I have is
that Bloomberg's editorial stance has been anti-JCPOA for a long time.

As it stands, this article is basically saying "$DATABASE is at the heart of
the Iran nuclear deal", which is about as interesting as saying "Excel is at
the heart of such-and-such a merger deal". Like, yes, you do use databases to
track stuff, indeedly-do.

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olliej
JCPOA = justified comma partitioned ordinal .. um .. array? :)

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wrigby
I think it's the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action" [1], which seems to be
the official name of the Iran nuclear deal.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action)

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tribune
This is only tangentially related to the article, but...

I'm all for preventing nuclear proliferation, but how long do we realistically
think we can maintain a world order where only a few states have nuclear
weapons? This technology has been around for nearly 75 years. It's still a
dangerous frontier, but far from a new one.

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SiempreViernes
I'm not sure what you mean, it's not like we are in a world were we've
successfully prevented most countries that desire nuclear weapons to get them;
Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, India, South Africa all wanted nukes and (more
or less) secretly got them.

The current "world order" is certainly not an ideal to uphold, or even moving
in the right direction with regards for nuclear proliferation.

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NoGravitas
> Whatever Trump decides, the “dirty” or unstructured data obtained by Mossad,
> which prides itself on deception, could serve as a stress test for
> Palantir’s nuclear analytics. Even a small amount of false information could
> trigger a flurry of unnecessary snap inspections and derail an agreement
> that took years to reach, Vaez said.

This smells very strongly of policy laundering. The Trump administration
doesn't like the Iran nuclear deal, and they don't like the IAEA, but they
can't directly act against either of them. But one Trump ally (Thiel) controls
a tool that the IAEA depends on, and another Trump ally (Israel) controls the
inputs to that tool.

So given the desired policy outcome, Palantir and Mossad wash the decision-
making process so that the outcome appears to be arrived at independently and
objectively.

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SiempreViernes
The intel haul Mossad released was interesting in that it fills out the
details of the background to the treaty itself, but as the data is about
activities up to 2003 it just doesn't impact verification of current
activities.

Most of appears to have been known in the intelligence community, this was
just publication of it. Here is a podcast with some experts discussing the
release and having a general good time with all the nerdy details:
[https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1205128/netanyahu-
an...](https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1205128/netanyahu-and-the-
atomic-archive/)

