Important WMD Reminder on Page 6

From Sea to Shining Sea ^ | 7/7/08 | Purple Mountains

[PurpleMountains]

It was on page 6 of my daily newspaper that an important reminder of Saddam’s capacity for WMD was published: the movement in secrecy of 550 tons of ‘yellowcake’ uranium from Iraq to Canada on July 5. 550 tons! Can they really continue their lies about no possibility of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Saddam’s Iraq? I know they will try to spin this, but can any honest person now still maintain that Saddam was not able to reconstitute his nuclear weapons’ capability left to his own devices? Can any honest person continue the nonsense of “Bush lied”? Although U.N. inspectors had previously documented and secured the material, are we supposed to forget that Saddam threw out all the U.N. inspectors in 1998, or that we found buried centrifuges after we went in there?

[KarlInOhio]

550 tons of yellowcake. Wikipedia says yellowcake is 70%-90% pure U₃O₈. Let's say 80%. So 550 tons of yellowcake would be 440 tons of U₃O₈. The uranium is about 85% of the U₃O₈ by weight. That leaves 374 tons of uranium. 0.711% of uranium is the U-235 which can be used in atomic bombs. That means they had 2.66 tons of U-235. That's enough for about 40 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. And a lot more if you start building reactors to create plutonium for bombs.

Nope, no WMDs there.

[Rca2000]

My own calculations figure that they COULD in THEORY, have produced enough PU239 for at LEAST 100, 20-50KT fission bombs..or use them as the primary for Thermonuclear devices.

This is assuming they had “acquired” the proper data needed to reduce the fuel mass and such, boosting and neutron enrichment.

[mouse1]

so tired of hearing dems spin there were no weapons in Iraq

if you come to my house and there are eggs, flour, baking powder, cocoa etc, I dont have cake but chances are I plan on baking one

case closed