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ABC News
07-07-2025
- Health
- ABC News
Why are so many younger people getting cancer?
Sydney Pead: Cancer has traditionally been a disease of old age, but younger Australians in their 30s and 40s are increasingly being diagnosed with cancer and scientists are desperate to understand why. Today, Dr Norman Swan on his Four Corners investigation into what could be causing the sharp rise in cancer rates among younger people and what can be done about it. I'm Sydney Pead, on Gadigal land in Sydney, this is ABC News Daily. Sydney Pead: Norman, you've been looking into the alarming increase in cancer rates in younger people. As a millennial, I'm pretty personally invested in this story. It's pretty concerning. So what kind of increase are we seeing here? Norman Swan: It varies according to cancer. So a lot of publicity has been about bowel cancer, but in fact, the data given to Four Corners by Cancer Australia shows 10 cancers rising in the under 50s. It's called early onset cancer, but it's particularly marked in 30 to 39 year olds. If you take the statistics from 2000 to 2024, bowel cancer has gone up 173%, prostate cancer in this age group 500%, pancreatic cancer 200%, liver cancer 150%, kidney cancer 85%. Breast cancer is going up, but at a lower rate than the others. Sydney Pead: Oh my goodness, that is such a worry. And you've actually been talking to people who have been diagnosed with cancer at a relatively young age. Can you tell me a bit about Fiona? Norman Swan: Fiona So trained in accounting and finance. She's got three kids and her and her husband live in Sydney. And she was diagnosed eventually after about six months of odd symptoms, which were not ignored. Fiona So, cancer patient: I started getting like itch all over my body. And we thought it might be an allergy. We did blood tests, everything. And you don't think liver cancer would happen to someone who's like just turned 40. Norman Swan: By the time they actually investigated that, she had a huge liver tumour, which ruptured before it could be operated on. I mean, really quite dramatic. Fiona So, cancer patient: You straight away think, why me? What have I done? I don't smoke. I don't drink. I wasn't obese. I didn't have any of those symptoms. You know, I was being healthy. I was living, trying to, you know, do all the right things and it still happens. Sydney Pead: Mm, absolutely. It's so shocking, really. So in Fiona's case, what did her treatment plan look like? Norman Swan: Fiona had major surgery to remove the tumour and part of her liver. Unfortunately, not long after the surgery, it was clear that the cancer had spread, partly because it had ruptured. And now she's on a clinical trial of another treatment. And that is keeping things under control. But sadly, it's not a cure. I mean, this is hugely traumatic for her, her three kids and her husband, David. Fiona So, cancer patient: The first thought I had was, I'm not going to watch them grow up. I'm not going to see them go to university. And it's not something you ever thought. You thought you get to grow old with your husband. You get to watch your kids grow up. And then suddenly that was something that could be taken away from you. Sydney Pead: And Norman, sadly, this situation that Fiona finds herself in, it's becoming more common in young people who are juggling work commitments and family and medical appointments. So I want to turn now to some of the causes that might account for this spike in cancer rates, because we hear so many things. Is it air pollution or microplastics or too many meat cold cuts? You've been speaking to Dan Buchanan, who is one expert. He looks at bowel cancer and he says changes in our gut are a big concern. Norman Swan: What Dan Buchanan has found, and he studies what's called oncogenomics. This is the pattern of DNA mutations that you see in cancers. He can pretty much tell the age of somebody with bowel cancer from the genetic mutations in their bowel tumour. In other words, there's been a generational change. So older Australians who get bowel cancer and you look at their genetic mutation pattern, there was a change with Gen X and then with millennials. So something has happened. And he believes that that something is related to the microbiome, the guts. Associate Professor Dan Buchanan, bowel cancer researcher: We have lots of bacteria in our gut, and it's that balance between good and bad bacteria that creates a healthy state. So we think that exposures or environmental toxins may change that balance between good and bad bacteria, allowing some not so friendly bacteria to produce toxins or agents that may damage our DNA. Norman Swan: What he and others have found in a proportion of people, it looks as though early in life they were infected with a bug called E. coli. Now we've got lots of E. coli in our bowels and there's lots of different forms, but this was a toxic form of E. coli. And the toxin, the chemical that it produced, damaged the bowel and changed the DNA in the bowel, leading to bowel cancer in some people. The reality is cancer causation is a slow process. You get multiple mutations over time and it's unusual for that to gallop. Most of the time it's a fairly steady and slow process that can take 10, 20, 30 years. So if you're getting cancer when you're 30 or 40, you've got to go back to your childhood or your mum's pregnancy. That's likely when the changes occurred. So for example, if you look at the microbiome, caesarean section rates were going up during that time to quite high levels. And when you're born by caesarean section, at least for the first few months, you don't have a normal microbiome. When you're born vaginally, you ingest the microbiome of your mum. It doesn't happen when you're born by caesarean section. Antibiotic use in kids wasn't going up particularly at that time, but antibiotics certainly were being used. That was round about the time when ultra-processed foods started booming. So that makes your microbiome vulnerable. We also found in the course of researching the Four Corners in 1975, which looked as if it was made last week, because it talks about plastics, plastic ingestion and toxins in plastic that might be the source of cancer. And why hadn't we banned them? Four Corners 1975: Today, when they sell us our daily bread, it comes in a plastic bag. Now it emerges that when we eat food packed in plastic, we might unknowingly be eating some of the plastic as well. And no one knows the effects of that. Norman Swan: Microplastics are a possible cause, again, with no proof at this point. But they do get mashed down to very tiny, almost molecular sizes, which then can penetrate into our bloodstream and cause inflammation, maybe affect our brains and our heart, maybe related to cancer. We just don't know. Sydney Pead: So concerning. Let's just stay on this topic of microplastics, because that is such a big concern. And unfortunately, plastic is something that's virtually impossible to avoid. So many of us get our takeaways in plastic containers or heat up leftovers in plastic in the microwave. So can we blame plastic for rising cancer rates? Norman Swan: The answer is we don't know. I spoke to Dr Christos Symeonides, who works for the Minderoo Foundation. He's a paediatrician and he studies chemical and plastics. And he argues that this is an area that we don't really like to confront. Dr Christos Symeonides, Paediatrician: We're exposed to a broad universe of synthetic chemicals that our biology isn't familiar with. And that has left a great deal of uncertainty. Within the universe of plastic chemicals, we're looking at the last academic count at about 16,000 chemicals that are used or present in plastics. Norman Swan: When you look at the chemicals in plastics, there are thousands and thousands of chemicals, only a few of which have actually been properly studied for their hazards in humans. Dr Christos Symeonides, Paediatrician: Of those 16,000 chemicals, only one third appear to have been evaluated for potential hazard. If we look back at that one third that have been evaluated, the substantial majority, around 75%, are identified to be hazardous from those assessments. But there's a limit to which that tells us about what they'll do in our full, complex biology of the human body. Norman Swan: But we assume that the ones that haven't been tested are safe and we allow them to be used, but they might not be. Sydney Pead: Yeah, that's right. And as you say, it's not a new problem. We've been talking about this even here at the ABC since 1975. Just a little more on that. What have we learned about these plastics and the other chemicals that we're exposed to in our environment because PFAS, for example, is just a huge concern. Norman Swan: With PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals, which are in non-stick frying pans, they're in cosmetics, they're in a lot of different products. They do persist and when they persist, you do worry about their long-term effects. There's a lot of doubt about whether they as a group do cause cancer. There's not a huge amount of evidence for that. There is one called PFOA, which is just being regulated for and banned for industrial use in Australia, but that's linked to kidney cancer and probably breast cancer as well. Now, it may be that some of the others are, but yet to be proven. Sydney Pead: So, Norman, for young Australians, these numbers are so worrying. Yes, we can throw away our plastic utensils or our non-stick frying pans or avoid bacon, but it's going to take a lot more than that. So does the government have a long-term strategy to tackle these increasing cancer numbers? Norman Swan: We still really haven't got an anticipatory strategy for chemicals anywhere in the world, really, not just Australia. And there's something called the precautionary principle. We talked about that a lot during COVID. The precautionary principle is if something looks as though it's causing a problem or could be causing a problem and there's no harm in removing it, then you should remove it. Or you should not introduce it until it's proven to be safe. In other words, you should not wait until a hazard has been found. And the problem here is 30-year-olds today could well be paying the price of things that happened 30 years ago in the environment, and we only find the hazards out when it's too late. Sydney Pead: So in the meantime, is there a stopgap solution like expanding the age range of cancer screening programs to catch these diagnoses earlier? Because too often these diagnoses are coming really late for younger patients. Norman Swan: First thing to say is we only screen for four cancers. Cervical cancer screening, which starts at the age of 25. Breast cancer screening, which starts at 50, despite the fact that 20% of breast cancers and probably a growing percentage occur in people who are under 50. Bowel cancer screening, which starts at the age of 50, but it's moved down to 45. But again, you've got to opt in rather than you automatically being in the screening program. And then finally, there's lung cancer, and that's for heavy smokers, either current heavy smokers or past heavy smokers with no symptoms. Now the thing with screening is screening is of a healthy population with no symptoms. You do not want a screening program to make people sick or worse. Cancer is still a disease of aging. The older you are, the more likely there is to be damage to your DNA, and you're more likely to have cancer. Therefore, in a screening program, if you are older and you find an abnormality, that abnormality is more likely to be serious than it is if you're young, despite this increase. And therefore, you're discovering in a screening program, more people who have abnormalities that may not matter or may not turn into cancer. But the risk is that people have invasive investigations and sometimes invasive treatments, which they might not have needed. So you've got to work that one out. Then it's a question of economics for government. Can they afford to make these screening programs younger? It's likely to save lives, but there are economic costs involved. The main strategy that's left is early detection of people with symptoms. In addition to us all doing what we know does work for a lot of cancers, which is a decent amount of physical activity, a Mediterranean-style diet, where you're eating a lot of different vegetables, not eating a lot of red meat, and certainly not smoking burnt plants, whatever plants they may be, whether it's cannabis or tobacco. Sydney Pead: So certainly being made aware of the symptoms and to know what to be on the lookout for is going to be a huge part of this. Norman Swan: I have maybe three messages here. One is get yourself a general practitioner that you like, who gets to know you. A lot of younger people don't have a GP. It's important to find a GP and a practice. And sometimes that's a bit of a search to find a GP who's right for you. The second thing is, if something new happens to you, you've never had before, a headache, a lump, bleeding, bruising, anything virtually that you've just never had before, don't sit on it. Go and see your GP. Probably nothing, but it might not be. And thirdly, don't let it go. If it hasn't gone away, if it comes back, go back. It's your body and be assertive. Sydney Pead: Dr Norman Swan is a reporter for ABC's Four Corners and host of the Health Report podcast. You can watch Norman's Four Corners report on ABC iView. This episode was produced by Kara Jensen-McKinnon. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sydney Pead. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
ABC News
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Grab your loudest shirt, we're taking Science with Dr Karl live for the first time
He's been your weekly brain-busting buff, your mind-melding master, and your slick science sorcerer for years and now we're going large. Get ready for Science with Dr Karl LIVE! That's right doctors, our long-running Thursday morning science hour where Dr Karl Kruszelnicki answers all of your weirdest, wildest and most wonderful questions is leaving the studio for the very first time. For one night only in Science Week to celebrate 50 years of triple j and 48 years (!!!) of Dr Karl on triple j, we'll be taking your questions live on stage at Eora/Sydney's Enmore Theatre. So what can you expect from a live Dr Karl show? We'll have music, quizzes, live questions and more information than you'd ever thought possible as we delve into the brilliant mind of Dr Karl. Wanna come down and pitch your head-scratcher to the man himself? You gotta get yourself a ticket! Tickets are on sale from 10am Thursday 3 July (today!) and will set you back $20 + booking fee. Grab your tickets right here and start thinking of what you want Dr Karl to put his mind to. Check out all the crucial information below, and we'll see you at the big science show, doctor! Science with Dr Karl Live Monday 11 August - Enmore Theatre, Gadigal Land, Sydney NSW
ABC News
29-06-2025
- Business
- ABC News
Why your AI questions are a power and water drain
Sam Hawley: How often do you use AI? It's becoming part of our everyday lives. But when you pump in a question into something like ChatGPT, do you ever think about the energy it uses? Today, Gordon Noble from the Institute of Sustainable Futures at UTS on the data centres driving AI and what they're doing to the climate. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. So Gordon, Googling something or typing a question into ChatGPT, it is so easy and simple for us and very, very useful, of course. But we don't really stop to think about where all that information is coming from, do we? Gordon Noble: Yeah, that's right. And I think this is crept up on us. When you do a search now with all these AI tools, ChatGPT being one of them, they can be 10 times more energy consuming than, for instance, doing a Google search. And what sits behind that is this massive investment that we've seen in data centres globally. So it's absolutely exploded. Sam Hawley: Yeah, okay. So we're not thinking about these data centres when we're typing in what we want to know from ChatGPT. And most of us would never have seen one or been in one. What do they look like? Where are they? Gordon Noble: Yeah, it's a really good question. So data centres, just to put it in visual terms, so the average size of what they call these hyperscale data centres, so they're around about 10,000 square feet. To give you an indication, a Bunnings store is about 8,000 square feet. So they're kind of just big sheds, right? Huge. But what we're seeing now is that we're moving to not just these Bunnings-like sheds, if you like, but we're moving to these massive million square data centres, almost campuses of data centres. Around the world, there are around about 1,100 of these hyperscale data centres. In Sydney, for instance, Sydney is a big centre for data centres here in Australia. We have over 85 data centres. One of the reasons Sydney is such an attractive place for data centres is we have 12 submarine cables that come out of Sydney and basically connect us to the rest of the world. So data centres globally are now around about 1.5% of global energy consumption. The question is what's going to happen in the future? Sam Hawley: Okay, so Gordon, let's delve a bit further into how these data centres actually work, because while they're enabling us to inform ourselves at lightning speed, they're also using a huge amount of power, massive amount. Gordon Noble: So roughly at the moment, global energy consumption coming out of data centres is around 1.5% of all the global electricity. The issue is that data centres are highly concentrated. So it's in places in the world, the US, parts of Europe, Ireland is a massive data centre hub, where they're actually causing strain on the energy grid because of how much the energy growth has been. So to give you an idea in Australia, so a research report from Morgan and Stanley, they were projecting that roughly at the moment, data centre energy consumption from the grid is around about 5% of all of our energy consumption. But what they're projecting is that this could grow to between 8% and 15% of all of our electricity consumption here in Australia, depending on some of the decisions that are made as in how much we use AI tools. So what the International Energy Agency is now saying is that by 2030, the energy consumption from data centres will be the size of Japan. So we're talking massive amounts of increase in energy consumption. That's placing strains on the grid, but it's also placing a shift in terms of how the energies come from. So for instance, in the US, we're seeing providers like Microsoft, who are big data centre operators because of the tools that they've got. They're looking to shift to nuclear. And one of the things they're looking to do is to reopen Three Mile Island, which is the nuclear plant that had been mothballed to basically take all that energy from a reopened Three Mile Island. So lots and lots of decisions as a result of this. Sam Hawley: Why is it, Gordon, that AI takes so much more energy than just Googling? Gordon Noble: These large language models are effectively trained to look at the whole of the internet, right? So when they're developing these models, they're actually looking at everything in the internet. And then when we ask it to do something, it's churning away from all that work that it's done. Lots and lots of different applications, but I think that common common thread is that it's aggregating across a lot of data rather than just that single data search where it goes to a single source. Sam Hawley: Do we have a sense already about the sort of strain that it's putting on electricity grids in Australia? Gordon Noble: Yeah, so at the moment, that's one of the questions. And we don't really have, I think, a good picture of the national demand, right? So the issue at the moment is a lot of the training of these AI tools, they've taken place in the US principally. So they haven't yet really been here in Australia. So that's going to be one of the questions as we increase the size of our data centre industry. Where is it going to start to have implications in terms of energy demand? Will it be, for instance, in Sydney, which is really our data centre capital? What would the impact, if you like, in terms of energy consumption in New South Wales in particular? Other states have the same issue, but because Sydney really is that capital of data centres in Australia, that's where some of the key issues will emerge. Sam Hawley: And Gordon, every time we use an AI site like ChatGPT, it uses a lot of water, doesn't it? Gordon Noble: Yeah, look, this is a real sleeper issue, and it's one that we're very concerned with. There's recent research, for instance, that since 2022, all the new data centres that have been developed, you know, two thirds of them are in areas where there's water stress. So it's becoming a big issue. But the way to think about data centres is that they're like the human body, they like to be kept cool, operate efficiently. And one of the ways that that happens is using water. So they consume literally billions of litres of water. The issue as we go forward is how do we actually, in Australia, build a data centre industry that is sustainable, given that we're an arid continent, given that we're going to have challenges from our climate in terms of water. At the moment, one of the opportunities is that both in Sydney and Melbourne, where data centres are going to likely be established, is we actually have surplus water in the form of recycled water. We tip 97% of our recycled water out in Sydney and Melbourne, we actually tip it out into our oceans and bays. So this is an asset, for instance, that could be used if we're smart enough to say, well, how can we actually build, say pipelines of recycled water to use this water, so we're not actually putting stress, environmental stress, on our rivers and creeks and streams, etc. So there's opportunities around this that we could solve. Sam Hawley: This is all making me start to feel rather bad for using ChatGPT for that recipe last night. I must go back to the old book, the cookbook lives on. Anyway, just tell me about emissions then, because we're meant to be bringing them down and I'm gathering this is not helping. Even the tech companies admit that, don't they? Gordon Noble: Yeah, this is what happened last year. So I think the surprise to the market is we started having the sustainability reports of the big tech companies and they all started to actually reveal how much their emissions had started to increase over the last four or five years. Each one of them, there are different increases in emissions depending on the way they've structured their operations, whether they build data centres, whether they outsource them, etc. But the picture that was emerging was a very consistent increase in their energy consumption. I think that really woke up a lot of the market in terms of, yeah, this is actually an energy intensive industry. Up until at that time, I think there was a little bit of a lack of understanding of how much energy data centres were creating because it wasn't really being aggregated in a single spot. So as we've been getting what we call these climate related financial disclosures and companies are starting to report on what we call the scope one, two and three emissions, we're starting to get a bigger picture. We're expecting to get more reporting in the next month or so. So what we'll start to see is what's happened since 2024 and 2025 and then we'll start to really have a good understanding of where things go forward. But what the clear picture at the moment is emissions arising in the big tech companies driven by their investments in AI. Sam Hawley: Gosh, all right. So Gordon, how worried do you think we should be then about this massive energy use and who should actually be taking responsibility for this? Gordon Noble: You know, I think it's as you mentioned, there's a lot of potential benefits around AI tools. You know, we can use these, for instance, for whether it's the recipe, a lot of environmental applications, a lot of benefits here if we get this right. At the moment from an Australian perspective, what really we haven't seen is a national approach being taken on this. We have, I think, in the Australian government an approach to communications that goes back to the, you know, the days in the early Federation we had a postmaster general. At the moment we need to start to think of, you know, the digital economy as actually moving across a range of different portfolios in the federal government, for instance. So we need a strategy around this to recognise that this has potentially got massive benefits, but also we really need to manage that. What we're seeing in other jurisdictions, for instance, Singapore, have gone down the pathway of establishing a green data centre roadmap. We need something like that in Australia. Sam Hawley: But what do you think without a new approach, can we keep pumping these questions into ChatGPT and still reach our environmental goals? And can our energy system actually cope with demand that is just going to keep growing? Gordon Noble: This is the big question. So the reality is if we do have at the higher end of expectations of the growth of AI, the energy that's demanded here just in Australia will actually crowd out other investments that we're making in renewable energy. So whilst we're making progress in decarbonising our grid, you know, there's an assumption that's based on, you know, a certain level of growth of energy demand. If that increases significantly, you start to put pressure on how much we can actually invest in more renewables, in more solar, for instance, more battery technology. It starts to then have that question, do we keep coal-fired power stations longer than we need? So I think there's a broader set of issues that we really need to get our heads around. Sam Hawley: Gordon Noble is a Research Director with the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Adair Sheppard. Audio production by Cinnamon Nippard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. I'm going to take some leave from now for a couple of weeks. Sydney Pead will be with you from tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
ABC News
24-06-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Did Trump just end the Israel-Iran war?
Sam Hawley: Donald Trump has announced a ceasefire in the Israel-Iran conflict, declaring it should be called the 12-Day War. It came not long after Iran fired missiles at an American military base in Qatar, retaliating against the US bombing of its key nuclear sites. News report: As evening crept across Qatar, the night sky lit up. Iran firing upon the Gulf state, sending ballistic and short-range missiles towards the Al Udeid base run by the United States. News report: Qatar says its own missiles successfully intercepted the attack and no one was injured, as the base had already been evacuated. News report: Flights have been suspended and airspace closed across the Middle East amid fears the situation could escalate further. News report: Breaking news: It's just been announced by Donald Trump that he has brokered a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Iran, a complete and total ceasefire. Sam Hawley: But there was confusion over whether Iran and Israel had agreed to Trump's ceasefire in the hours following the social media post. Today, Jonathan Panikoff from the Atlantic Council's Middle East program on whether peace will hold. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal Land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Jonathan, let's come to the details of this apparent ceasefire in a moment, announced, of course, by Donald Trump on his social media account. But first, a quick look at what led up to it. Incredibly, an attack on a US air base was a catalyst for peace in Donald Trump's eyes. Wasn't it? Jonathan Panikoff: It absolutely was. I think this was always going to come down to a fairly binary choice by Iran in terms of how it responded. Choice one was to, frankly, undertake a major attack, escalate the potential of conflict, bring US retaliation in a way that would really threaten the regime. But the regime's number one goal has always been survival. And I think tonight we saw that play out. So what you saw instead was the Iranian regime undertake a pragmatic attack that, frankly, followed a playbook we've seen from Iran before, a largely symbolic attack, one intended not to cause any casualties, but one that they could then at least have some bit of saving face and go back to the Iranian people and say: Look, we attacked the US, we stood up, now we're happy to de-escalate on our terms. Even if it's really not. Sam Hawley: Yeah, so Iran's calculation was it must spare US lives or the consequences for it would be enormous. Is that the calculation there? Jonathan Panikoff: I think that's the bottom line calculation. I think if you've seen US casualties as part of Iran's response, it would have been pretty hard for President Trump to make the decision that he wasn't going to respond and then risk, frankly, an escalatory spiral in which this engulfed the broader region potentially. Sam Hawley: Regardless, of course, it did cause quite a bit of chaos, including for international travellers with Qatar closing its airspace. Jonathan Panikoff: Absolutely. Look, obviously airspace being closed not only in Qatar but throughout the Gulf was going to cause some significant inconveniences and some real challenges, but I think in the end, if it also brings us to a ceasefire and a resolution, that's something that ultimately the region as a whole will breathe easier over, and my sense is a lot of folks in the region disappointed for travellers, but will take that trade-off. Sam Hawley: So, Jonathan, more broadly, what do we read into this action from Iran? It must be incredibly weakened. It also looks like it's not going to try and block the Strait of Hormuz, which was another big worry, which would have caused a major escalation, of course, because it's a major shipping route for oil. Jonathan Panikoff: That's right. It would have caused a real escalation and been hugely problematic. I think not having that, I think a little bit of a downturn, I think was probably what Iran wanted. The reality is Iran has had historically three parts of its power projections in the region, a triad, if you will. One has been its proxies throughout the region, like Hezbollah and Hamas. A second part has been its ballistic missiles program. And the third part was its nuclear program. And regardless of whether you believe that this was the right thing for Israel to do, the wrong thing for Israel to do, not just about the nuclear program, but Israel's actions throughout the region over the last 20 months, vis-a-vis Iran and its proxies, Iran has been significantly diminished in all three of those areas. And so now I think the question is, OK, does it portend new opportunities with a diminished Iranian power, which it could, or does Iran look to go and align closer with Russia in a way that long-term could be dangerous? Does it look to quickly try to rebuild, which would be problematic, but certainly is an option. Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Jonathan, of course, while this was all unfolding, Israel was continuing to strike Iran. It launched wide-ranging strikes on Tehran. It was winning this war, I assume. Jonathan Panikoff: I think it was winning the war, but Israel had two overall initial objectives. One was to diminish Iran's nuclear program, especially with the U.S. help at Fordow. That was certainly accomplished. The second was to diminish Iran's ballistic missile capabilities. And Israel didn't actually target the ballistic missiles. It targeted the launchers, and it targeted Iran's production facilities for those. There was concern in Israel from their estimates that Iran could have double or triple the amount of ballistic missiles it does today within the next five years. This was about slowing that and trying to undermine it as much as possible. But Israel also faced a challenge. While it's true that Iranian ballistic missile attacks into Israel have been diminished significantly thanks to Israeli strikes, at the same time there was real concern about the number of interceptors that Israel had left. There was some reporting that the numbers were critically low. That could have meant that Israel had to rely on the U.S. or others. I think that certainly might have happened for a time. But Israel was probably also running out of key targets and concerned about its own defence capabilities. And so I think Israel's going to look at this quite happily with the end result, even if it's not perfect. Sam Hawley: All right, well, as we mentioned, Donald Trump has now announced this ceasefire, a complete and total ceasefire, he says. News report: "Congratulations to everyone," it says in capital letters, with an exclamation mark, of course. "It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a complete and total ceasefire when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in-progress final missions!" Sam Hawley: Although initially that was read, of course, with caution, because, well, Donald Trump can be an unreliable source, can't he? Jonathan Panikoff: Yeah look, I think it's not unreasonable to be cautious about, you know, agreement on true social before it comes out from the Iranians and the Israelis themselves. I think it would be hard to imagine the Israelis would defy this after the amount of, frankly, leverage President Trump has built up with them by taking the decision to strike Fordow. But I also think that there's going to be a bit of a question here. You would not be surprised to still see some additional last strikes as Israel tries to get in a few last targets destroyed. The question now is, will it hold? I think certainly Iran would like it to. Israel, I think, will probably say yes. But there's real concerns about, has all of Iran's highly enriched uranium been destroyed because of the strike at Fordow, or was it moved beforehand? That could invite questions about, OK, are there follow-on strikes in the weeks or months to come that are required, or can there be a diplomatic solution to any remaining components of Iran's nuclear program? Sam Hawley: I was going to ask, is Israel really confident at this point that it has destroyed or severely, severely damaged Iran's nuclear program? That is what it set out to do. Jonathan Panikoff: I think Israel is confident that it's significantly set back Iran's nuclear program such that it's not an existential threat in the way that it was concerned it would be, that Iran could be weeks away from actually having a nuclear weapon. And whether or not that assessment was accurate, and obviously there's been some consideration that the US assessment may be different, Israel truly believe that, it seems. That probably is no longer a concern. But that's different from saying that Iran's nuclear program is completely obliterated and gone. And I'm not sure that that's nearly as true, and so there still may be real requirement for diplomacy or for future strikes. Sam Hawley: Mm, all right. This declaration of a ceasefire also came just a day after Donald Trump had hinted that regime change was really what's needed in Iran. So has he now abandoned that idea, has he? Jonathan Panikoff: I don't know if President Trump ever held that idea sincerely or it was something that he was throwing out to simply gain leverage. I don't know that those are mutually exclusive either. We've seen that the President sometimes has ideas that are initially about trying to gain some sort of leverage and then he actually ends up fulfilling them. But I think what has been clear is President Trump clearly wanted to get back to some level of diplomacy. I think there is concern within the US political system among President Trump's supporters from his MAGA base about how this issue was dividing the base. He had said he wanted to keep this narrow, that it was about the nuclear program only. If he went further toward regime change, I think it really could have split his base in a way that would have been problematic given the number of contentious and challenging domestic issues the President is facing. My sense is this gives him an off-ramp as well to not have to really face that type of divide. Sam Hawley: Well, as you indicated, Jonathan, ceasefires can be broken, of course, and they have been broken many times in the past. It's a very fluid time still, isn't it? Jonathan Panikoff: It is. I think this is a fragile ceasefire. I think we'll have to see, frankly, what agreement ends up coming to in the end and what is required of Iran, what they're willing to do, and what is required of Israel in order to keep it. Sam Hawley: Just tell me, how do you think now the world will view Donald Trump's decision to join this conflict, to bomb Iran? Jonathan Panikoff: I think even though we have a ceasefire today, it's still too early to know. Look, I think publicly there was a lot of condemnation. There was support from Australia, from some European quarters, but even privately, a lot of Arab governments, the message being sent privately were different than the message being sent publicly. They've lived with the threat of Iran for a lot of years, of an Iranian nuclear program. In one way, there's real opportunity here, because if this is extended, and it doesn't just end now, but there actually is a broader diplomatic agreement to limit any future Iranian nuclear program as well, then it means you really could have a more peaceful region. That Gulf states, for instance, wouldn't have the threat of an Iranian nuclear program hanging over their heads, and that would mean we'd have less proliferation. We've already known that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, has been very clear, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, so too will Saudi Arabia. They would not have been alone. Turkiye, UAE, others may have been in that mix. And so I think history may look favourably upon that. At the same time, sometimes you don't know how these things are going to go. And there's also another avenue in which the Russians, who are also significantly isolated, say, look, we're going to actually increase our strategic alignment with the Iranians, and we're going to work together to try to repair some of their power projections in the region. And that may mean working with them eventually on a nuclear program. I don't think that would be first, but it wouldn't be a surprise too to see Russia decide it wants to put back air defences into Iran, that it's going to help Iran rebuild its ballistic missile program. And then it's not a far step to deciding also, if it really feels under threat, that it's going to contribute to helping Iran rebuild a nuclear program. Of course, it'll be for civilian purposes will be the claim. That won't make the region any calmer about it. Sam Hawley: Presumably Donald Trump will take this as a victory for the United States and for himself. Jonathan Panikoff: Certainly, I think Donald Trump was going to take this as a victory, no matter how it came out, to be totally honest. That's just the nature of President Trump. But given that you have a ceasefire, so long as it holds, given that the U.S. role was limited, given the war was 12 days, and given that Iran's nuclear program is significantly, significantly set back, and the U.S. has demonstrated now, it's no longer theoretical, a willingness to use force that'll have to be in the back of Iran's mind, but also China's mind in terms of the strategic steps it takes in the future. Donald Trump will see this as a victory. Sam Hawley: Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council's Middle East Program. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Adair Sheppard. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.
ABC News
23-06-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Iran's three options after Trump's strikes
Sam Hawley: After the US bombing of key Iranian nuclear facilities, Donald Trump is now openly advocating for regime change to make Iran great again, he says. But is that really a possibility? Today, Ali Vaez from the International Crisis Group on the three options now open to Iran and why surrender is not the one it'll go for. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Ali, we're going to unpack what we should expect next in this Israel-Iran war. But first, I just want to discuss the messaging out of Washington, which is really quite mixed. Donald Trump and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, say the American bombing does not mean the United States has joined the war, but it's also warning Iran it could very well go further. Pete Hegseth, United States Secretary of Defense: The United States does not seek war. But let me be clear, we will act swiftly and decisively when our people, our partners or our interests are threatened. Donald Trump, President of the United States: There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. If peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. Sam Hawley: What do you make of that? Ali Vaez: Well, this is one of the problems with President Trump, isn't it, that he constantly moves the goalposts. And this is one of the reasons I think that the Iranians are extremely reluctant to re-engage him in negotiations. He started negotiations with the Iranians in his second term based on the goal of Iran having no nuclear weapons. Then during the course of the negotiations, that shifted to zero enrichment, meaning that Iran should completely dismantle its nuclear program. And during the war, it basically asked Iran to completely surrender and now is asking for regime change. So it is very difficult for the Iranians to look at him as a reliable negotiating partner. Sam Hawley: Because, yes, Donald Trump is now openly saying this is not just about Iran's nuclear program. On his social media site, Truth Social, he said it's time to make Iran great again, hinting at regime change. Ali Vaez: Yes, that's right. It's very interesting because in May, the president was in the region visiting Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. And during his trip, he had a major speech in which he basically said that he believed that past regime change policies of the United States in the region were misguided and had always backfired. And the region is a better place to determine his own fate rather than it being imposed from the outside. In Donald Trump, President of the United States: In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. Ali Vaez: But now he seems to be back in the regime change business, which, of course, is also something that his MAGA base, America First isolationist base, does not like to see. But I do believe that also President Trump has this approach that is based on threatening in order to get what he wants. And he might be considering that threatening Iran with regime change at a time of extreme vulnerability for the Iranian regime might actually force them to come back to the negotiating table. But it would produce the exact opposite of what he has in mind. Sam Hawley: And Ali, interesting to note that Trump opening the door to regime change actually came on the same day that his vice president, J.D. Vance, and the Defense Secretary were insisting that that was not the goal of the United States. J.D. Vance, Vice President of the United States: We don't want a regime change. We do not want to protract this or build this out any more than it's already been built out. We want to end their nuclear program. Pete Hegseth, United States Secretary of Defense: This mission was not and has not been about regime change. The president authorised a precision operation to neutralise the threats to our national interests. Sam Hawley: All right, well, Ali, of course, I want to discuss with you what could actually happen next and what Iran's response will be and the world's response to this. Can I just start briefly with the US's Western allies? Before the strikes, they were concerned, but they're now backing Donald Trump in, aren't they? Ali Vaez: That is right. The Western countries, especially European countries, they were still thinking that there is a diplomatic option that the US is interested in. And yet once the US took military action, they all supported it without condemning something that in international norms is considered a war of aggression. Sam Hawley: All right. Well, our response from our foreign minister, Penny Wong, has also shifted in this way, shifted behind Donald Trump. Speaker 3: The world has agreed Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. So, yes, we support action to prevent that. And that is what this is. Sam Hawley: Let's turn now to what Iran might do and what support it actually has in the region, which is very limited, isn't it? Just explain that. Ali Vaez: Yeah, look, Iran is alone. It doesn't have any outside security guarantors. It's not like North Korea that can count on China. It's not a member of any kind of security alliance. It doesn't have anyone who's rushing to its rescue. It has close relations with Russia and with China. It has strategic partnerships with both of those countries. But none of it includes a security partnership that they would actually rush to Iranian defence. And I think the Russians are even secretly happy because these tensions have increased global energy prices. And that's beneficial to Russia. And anything that bugs down the United States and prevents it from pivoting to focus on China is beneficial to China, even though China, unlike Russia, doesn't benefit from high oil prices. But overall, there is no one who's standing by Iran and its non-state allies have been really decimated and are on their back foot as a result of Israel decapitating Hezbollah, degrading Hamas and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Sam Hawley: Yes. So the so-called axis of resistance, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, they're not in a position to actually help Iran at this point. Is that what you're saying? Ali Vaez: They are weakened. They can come to Iran's rescue to a certain extent. But the question is, when should that happen? At this stage, I think it is unlikely, especially for a group like Hezbollah, which has really been on its knees since last September, October, when Israel significantly diminished its offensive capabilities. But if Iran is facing an existential peril, then it is possible that these groups would also conclude that if the mothership goes down, that they will go down eventually as well. And they would decide as a last ditch effort aimed at survival to try to join the battle. There are still members of the axis of resistance that are standing, like the Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. But again, I think they're keeping their powder dry for now until later stages if this conflict escalates and expands. Sam Hawley: What could they do if that does happen? Ali Vaez: Well, the Houthis have demonstrated that they can reach Israel. They just targeted Ben Gurion airport about two weeks ago. They have also effectively managed to shut down free flow of trade and energy out of the Red Sea. They can target U.S. warships in and around the region. They can shut down the key waterway of Bab al-Mandab. The Hashd al-Shaabi militias in Iraq, they can target U.S. bases and U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq. And there's also enormous U.S. economic interests in Iraq as well in the form of investments in the energy sector. So there are still things that they can do. But again, I think the time for that has not yet arrived. Sam Hawley: And there are 30,000 U.S. troops, of course, based in the region. So a lot of U.S. bases. A big concern, of course, Ali, as well, is the Strait of Hormuz that Iran could disrupt that, disrupt the flow of oil around the world, which could have a devastating impact. What's your view? Can it actually do that? Ali Vaez: I doubt that they would actually physically block the Strait of Hormuz because that would invite a massive U.S. military intervention that would be very devastating for the Iranians. And they have options short of blocking the strait, which is exactly what the Houthis have done in the Red Sea, which is to target shipping lanes and target tankers. That in and of itself will further rattle energy markets and would externalise the cost of this conflict, which the Iranians believe is one way of putting pressure on President Trump to pull the plug on further escalation. Sam Hawley: Hmm, all right. Well, Ali, Donald Trump says Iran's nuclear sites have been obliterated, although the Pentagon says that could be too soon to say. How is the world to know how much damage has been done? How can we be sure? Because there are reports as well that the Iranians, knowing that this could be coming, moved some of the material from these sites. Ali Vaez: That is a fantastic question and in fact, the most important question, because if we are to believe Prime Minister Netanyahu's justification for the strikes, it was primarily to prevent Iran from being able to weaponise its nuclear capabilities. Now, the two main ingredients you need for that are advanced centrifuges and a stockpile of highly enriched uranium. We know that in the past four years, Iran has produced hundreds of advanced centrifuges and probably has stockpiles of advanced centrifuges somewhere in the country. The only way of knowing where the material and the machinery are is through either having boots underground, which no one is considering at this point, or inspectors. And the UN inspectors, because these nuclear sites are war zones now, have not been able to access them in the past 10 days. And I do believe that even if the war stops tomorrow, Iran is very unlikely to allow the inspectors back in. So in the process of trying to advance the cause of non-proliferation, in fact, Israel and the United States have blinded us to the ability of having oversight over Iran's nuclear program. Sam Hawley: What about this idea of regime change? Will the Iranian people rise up, do you think, against what is a brutal theocracy? Or will they really rally around the flag and the regime while they're under attack? Ali Vaez: Look, the Iranian regime is very much de-legitimised and hated within the country. It's only a very small segment of the society, maybe 10 to 15 per cent, that has, for ideological or financial reasons, still vested interest in it. But the problem is that there is no viable, unified, organised, disciplined, united alternative available to this regime inside or outside of the country. This is not like Syria in 2024, when you had a militant group ready to march into the capital and take over power. So in a scenario of regime implosion, the likeliest alternatives to the Islamic Republic is either a military takeover of the Revolutionary Guards, which I'm not sure would be any better, or the possibility of civil strife. Iran has the same fault lines that exist in countries in the region that have descended into internal conflict, like Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon. And the Islamic Republic has mistreated Iranian minorities, ethnic and sectarian, more than other segments of the society. So the risks of that kind of instability is very high. And I do believe that even if Israel thinks that destabilising a country of 90 million is in its short-term interest, that is not something that is in the medium to long-term interest of anyone, including the United States. Sam Hawley: All right, well Ali, in your mind, Iran has three options here, fold, check or raise. Which one do you think they'll go for at this point? Ali Vaez: So I don't think surrendering is really an option, because I think the only thing that the Iranian regime sees as more perilous than suffering from Israeli and American bombs is surrendering to American terms, because then that would basically signal that this is a regime that is on the ropes and there's no reason for the US to throw it a lifeline or try to give it sanctions relief and rescue it. They would actually ask for more and they would push it over the edge. Now, the option of having some sort of controlled escalation, response, retaliation against the US, maybe sequentially after the war with Israel has ended or they have reached a balance of devastation with Israel, I think is probably their option of choice. But it is also possible that they would double down either by trying to dash towards nuclear weapons, and as I said, that pathway is still open to them, or that they would try to put the entire region ablaze as means of deterring the US and Israel from going any further. Sam Hawley: Ali Vaez is the director of the Iran Project at International Crisis Group. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Adair Sheppard. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.
