Peter Thiel and Palantir Are at the Heart of the Iran Nuclear Deal

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.

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.

> 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.