The Resilience of Iraqis (Great Story Showing Good Guys are Winning)

This week saw yet another car (this time tanker) bombing and a mortar attack directed toward Iraqi police stations here in Baghdad. I continue to think that this strategy by the terrorists of attacking expressly Iraqi targets is a losing one. The Iraqi people are backing increasingly strong measures to root out the foreign fighters and extreme elements in their midst, and attacks like this only strengthen that impulse. Furthermore, the attacks do not seem to be having a substantial effect on recruitment in the security forces, which continues at a brisk clip. In an interview I conducted over the weekend with Deputy Commanding General Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British General who is the second in command of the Multi-National Force's efforts to train the Iraqi security forces, he noted that "[t]he Iraqi people are extraordinarily resilient and the American people should understand this. On a daily basis, there are more Iraqis dying than Coalition and they just keep going." This brought to mind a press release I received from Multi-National Forces Public Affairs, written by U.S. Army Sgt. Jared Zabaldo, which describes the courage and resilience of one particular Iraqi soldier. It is worth quoting at length: April 9, 2003," [Iraqi Army Lt. Col. Ahmed Lutfi] Ahmed [Raheem] said. "I don't forget this day."

"I was on my way home to Baghdad after my brigadier boss had told me the war was over and to go home," Ahmed said, describing his last moments as a major in the old Iraqi Army air defense unit he had been with for nine years. "He said it was an order," he added.

"So I walked home from our station in Al Hillah, south of Baghdad, but I didn't change my clothes," Ahmed said, "And I came to a Marine checkpoint on a bridge in Baghdad. And I still had my uniform on and the Marine sergeant stopped me ..."

"'Where are you going?' he asked me," Ahmed said in his accented but surprisingly good English.

"And I tell him, 'I am a major in the Iraqi Army and I was ordered to go to my house'" Ahmed said, finishing the backdrop to a life-defining moment he had not seen coming; and on what was supposed to be just a long 50-plus mile walk home to his wife and five children.

The encounter would prove to be a pivotal one for the military veteran because for the next two anxious minutes, Ahmed went through what must be emotions impossible to describe to someone who has never known he was about to die. It was more the result of the 33-year-old's lifetime of experience with the ways of Saddam Hussein.

Ahmed, though, was actually two minutes away from a rebirth of sorts. "He looked at me for a while and I thought he was going to kill me," Ahmed said. "But he didn't kill me," he added. "Instead he came to the position of attention and saluted me as an officer," Ahmed said, "And said, 'Sir you can go.'"

"I took a few steps and began to cry," he said, "Because I think, 'Why do I fight these people for ten years?['"]

"This moment changed me from the inside," Ahmed said. "What he did was kill me without pistol. He killed the old major in the Iraqi Army who fought America from 1993 to 2003."

Ahmed was advised by a U.S. Army officer to apply at the recruiting center in Baghdad and was ushered into the army a short time later as an "officer candidate." After training, he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the new army having made the cut for promotion from his former rank in the old army.

Ahmed's story, though, doesn't end there. The now 34-year-old engineering graduate from the University of Baghdad and career Iraqi Army officer has since endured great personal tests in his first year of service in the new Iraqi Army that have reaffirmed his commitment to serving his country. In February 2004, Ahmed, a Soldier whose face belies his real age with the tell-tale signs of a man who has lived a hard life, was at the Baghdad Recruiting Center when a blast killed more than 47 earlier in the year. The psychological toll was great, but he came back. Several weeks ago, he saw the aftermath of the latest blast at the center only minutes after the attack that left another 35 dead. The wounds were re-opened, but he came back.

And a little more than a month-and-a-half ago on May 15, he was kidnapped by members of the Shiite Muslim Cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army on a bridge in Baghdad when a vehicle filled with five armed men forced his truck to the side of the road before forcing him into the front seat of their car for transport to a hidden safe-house. Ahmed was beaten and pistol-whipped before being knocked unconscious only to be interrogated later by the insurgent terrorists for his association with the new Iraqi Army and the Coalition. Ultimately he was told not to work with the Coalition anymore and released by the militiamen, but not before they stripped him of his uniform, weapon, cell phone and the vehicle that had been issued to him by the Coalition.

"I said, 'Sir I lost my pistol, my mobile, my uniform and my vehicle,'" Ahmed said, describing the humiliating moment he faced upon returning to the OST headquarters later that day to report the catastrophe. He had begged the militiamen to kill him thinking the loss of equipment was the end of his military career. But when the Coalition officer Ahmed worked with found out that everything he had been issued had been lost that morning, the officer's response surprised Ahmed. "And when he saw me crying," Ahmed said, "He stood up and gave me another key to a vehicle. And gave me another pistol and another mobile phone."

"'Don't worry, we trust you,' he said," Ahmed said. "I really love America for this," Ahmed said. "This is what I wish I could tell every Iraqi."

Ahmed, like so many others in the Iraqi Security Forces that show up for work everyday, knows that security and protection from the individuals bent on denying Iraq its chance at freedom is paramount to his country's future. "I want to provide security to my country," Ahmed said. "Saddam Hussein didn't just destroy the buildings and the streets," Ahmed said. "He destroyed something inside of all Iraqis. He destroyed the truth and something inside us. "You know what Saddam Hussein did inside us from 1979 to 2003?" asks Ahmed. "He was president of Iraq for 25 years. In this period of time what did he teach Iraq? What did Saddam teach Iraq? Fight. Take your rifle. Take your pistol and fight. Fight, fight. Fight for what? Eight years with Iran - fight for nothing. And he told us to go to Kuwait and steal. And he laughed. He taught the people how to steal. He made people forget Islam and the Al Koran. "So now inside of all Iraqis it is just to 'fight,'" Ahmed said. "And now we're fighting between us.

"I do my best, though," Ahmed said. "I do my best to protect my country and to give my country its security." And he does one more thing that doesn't earn medals in any army on earth: he continues to show up for work. And in the face of suicide bombings, targetings, and abductions and beatings, in Iraq, this is just the typical story common to all the 230,000-plus Iraqi Army Soldiers and police service officers choosing to serve their country. It's not a story of the courageous actions of Soldiers storming enemy machinegun positions. And there are no medals awarded for the simple act. But it's a typical story of valor in this country. And a standard that courage never met

Took alook at your home page and thought you might be able to educate me on something. I was listening to the Hugh Hewitt show the other day when he had this French reporter on who said that the nuclear reactor the French sold to Hussein (which the Israelis later blew up) could not have been used to produce the type of fissonable material necessary to make an abomb. I thought this was pretty incredible for someone to state given that a) Iraq already had plenty of oil resources - so why the need for a nuclear reactor and b) if Hussein wasn't trying to use the reactor to develop abombs, why did he first try to purchase a plutonium based reactor from the French before settling on a uranium based reactor after the French balked on the plutonium version.

Anyway, after doing some research on this subject, my questions are as follows:

1. My understanding is that the reactor at Osirak was a pressurized water reactor reactor that used uranium-235 in the fuel rods. Do you know if this is correct.

2. Is plutionium-239 a byproduct of the reactions that take place in a reactor that uses uranium-235. My understanding is that this is not the case?

3. If plutonium is not a byproduct of a reactor using uranium-235, is it possible to easily convert the reactor to one that uses uranium-238 so that you can get plutonium as a byproduct?

4. If you are running a reactor that uses uranium-235, would it be possible to use the spent fuel rods in a dirty bomb?

5. Is it true what the French guy said that the elements making up the spent fuel rods in a reactor using uranium-235 could not have been used to make an abomb?

You might look at this exerpt from another web site which is documented below. It appears that this information might help to answer your questions.

Theoretically speaking, there are a lot of ways of building power plants based on nuclear fission, and a lot of potential fuels which can be used. But right now, all civilian power plants use the same fuel, low-enriched uranium (LEU).
Naturally occurring uranium contains 0.72% of isotope 235 and negligible amounts of isotope 234. All the rest is isotope 238. U²³⁵ is fissionable, but U²³⁸ is not. Low-enriched uranium is uranium which has been processed to remove U²³⁸ so that the concentration of U²³⁵ is greater than 0.7% but less than 20%. Usually in fuel rods for power reactors it's between 3% and 5%.
You can't make a working atomic bomb out of low-enriched uranium. The threshold of 20% was adopted in the definition of LEU precisely because uranium consisting of 20% or less of U²³⁵ cannot form a critical mass. (A large mass of LEU would get extremely hot very rapidly, and would melt. If it was exposed to oxygen, it would also burn. The resulting mess would make Chernobyl look minor by comparison. However, it is physically impossible for it to detonate in a nuclear explosion.)
In a power reactor, energy is released because atoms of U²³⁵ undergo fission. Their nuclei break into pieces, and it's impossible to predict what the pieces will be, or how many there will be. Usually there are two big pieces, and nearly always one or more neutrons will also be released.
Some of those neutrons escape from the reactor core entirely and have to be absorbed by shielding. Some of those neutrons strike other U²³⁵ nuclei, and can cause them in their turn to fission almost immediately. But a lot of those neutrons strike other atoms in the reactor core. Some of them strike U²³⁸ nuclei and many of those are absorbed. If the fuel rods are based on LEU, it is impossible to prevent this from happening.
If U²³⁸ absorbs a neutron, it becomes U²³⁹. U²³⁹ β- decays with a half-life of 23.5 minutes, yielding Np²³⁹. That, in turn, also β- decays with a half-life of 2.35 days, yielding Pu²³⁹.
The fuel rods have to be replaced once a significant amount of the U²³⁵ in them has been used up. That usually takes many months, and sometimes takes years. By that point, a non-negligible amount of U²³⁸ will have been converted to Plutonium.
It won't all be Pu²³⁹. Plutonium is much better at capturing neutrons than U²³⁸, and it turns out that Pu²⁴⁰, Pu²⁴¹, and beyond will make up a considerable percentage.
But that doesn't matter. What does matter is this: plutonium is chemically different from any of the other components of the fuel rod, and if the spent fuel rods are dissolved with acid, plutonium salts can easily be separated out using chemical means. Purified plutonium salts can then easily be reduced to plutonium metal. (Understand that "easy" is a relative term. It's dreadfully difficult and hazardous to do any of this, but it's extremely easy by comparison to what you have to go through to produce highly-enriched "weapons grade" uranium.)
The reason that matters is that if you have enough plutonium metal, on the order of a few kilograms, it is possible to build an atomic bomb. It isn't necessary to isotopically purify the plutonium.
The Manhattan Project ran two parallel development efforts. One developed a bomb based on highly-enriched U²³⁵, and the other developed a bomb based on plutonium. For technical reasons not worth going into, the plutonium design was much more complicated and risky, and the powers that be decided they needed to test it before using it in war. So the first atomic explosion in history, a test code-named Trinity, was a plutonium weapon.
The atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima was based on U²³⁵. The atomic bomb which destroyed Nagasaki was based on plutonium.
Some reactors are deliberately designed to produce isotopes which can be used in weapons. Such "breeder" reactors produce little power (or none at all) but the yield of isotopes suitable for use in atomic weapons is much greater. Most of those are designed to optimize conversion of U²³⁸ into plutonium.
The Iraqi reactor complex which Israel bombed was not such a reactor. It was a conventional civilian power plant. It may be that this is what Le Sommier was trying to claim.
But let's be very clear about something: all existing civilian nuclear power plants produce plutonium when in operation, even though they don't produce as much as breeder reactors. The Iraqi reactor would have produced plutonium if Israel had not destroyed it. After a few years of normal operations, it would easily have produced enough plutonium for more than one atomic bomb.
There's little doubt that's exactly what Saddam had in mind. And that is why the Israelis decided they had to destroy it.
If Le Sommier claimed that the Iraqi reactor represented no risk to Israel, and therefore claimed that the Israel's attack was not justified, either he was lying or he doesn't know what he is talking about.

Source: USS CluelessStardate 20040728.1502

Hope this helps.

dvwjr

More from the USS Clueless website:

UPDATE: I have a long-time reader who is an expert in this area, and he sent me the following email:

Osirak was a 40MWth Materials Test Reactor (MTR) - not designed for the production of power. It was above the threshold at which the IAEA considers it possible for a small reactor to produce a significant quantity of Pu in a year (the threshold is 25MWth).

It was HEU fuelled (giving you a higher, harder neutron flux from a smaller core). The fuel was 93% enriched - well in the weapons grade range - but they would have really only had enough to produce one HEU weapon.

The programmatic justification for building an MTR is to do the basic research that lets you design and build other, larger reactors. For example, Australia has an MTR (10MWth) that was built in 1958 that was used for just such a purpose. When they realized that they weren't going nuclear they converted it for use in radioisotope production.

An MTR is designed for you to be able to introduce material into a neutron flux without shutting down the reactor - it is generally made so that you have fairly precise control of the integral flux and the rate of flux reaching your targets. This makes it ideal for producing Pu of a precisely known grade (not efficient, but effective and quite precise).

The Osirak reactor was clearly a part of the Iraqi weapons program - they did not need to do the basic research that an MTR is designed for because they clearly had no intention of building their own power reactors from scratch (apart from it being cheaper and safer to buy a proven design, the Iraqis did not have the scientific, technical or engineering resources necessary to start from scratch).

Any suggestion that this reactor was not suitable for use in a weapons program is sheer fantasy and an insult to the intelligence of a reader (Le Sommier's readers/listeners not yours).

I was not aware of that. It certainly makes the French decision to build it look bad, doesn't it?

When USS Clueless talked about "breeder" reactors in his previous post, he said that breeder reactors "are deliberately designed to produce isotopes which can be used in weapons." The term "breeder reactor" is generally understood to be a reactor that produces plutonium-239 from uranium-238 to be used as reactor fuel. There are breeder reactors in France, England, Japan, and probably elsewhere, maybe Germany. The US would have had the Clinch River Breeder Reactor back in the 70s, but Jimmy Carter killed the project due to fears of "proliferation." It's too bad, because there's only so much U-235 on the planet, and once it's used up there will be no more nuclear power.

By the way, once all the U-235 and other impurities have been removed from uranium, the remaining U-238 is known as depleted uranium. DU is good at penetrating armor on the battlefield, and it is only slightly radioactive.

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